Google is focusing on the importance of protecting personal information in an unusual marketing campaign for a company that has been blasted for its own online privacy lapses and practices.

The educational ads will start appearing Tuesday in dozens of U.S. newspapers, including The New York Times, USA Today, and The Wall Street Journal, and magazines, including Time and the New Yorker. Google Inc. also will splash its message across billboards within the subways of New York and Washington, as well as various websites.

Put your fingerprint scanners away. Stand aside iris measurers. Buttocks are the new way to prove who you are.

A team of Japanese scientists claim their pressure sensor sheet can accurately identify an individual's backside and when placed on a driver's seat could be used as a last line of defence to stop someone else driving away your motor.

Free online knowledge site Wikipedia will shut down for 24 hours later this week in protest at draft anti-online piracy legislation before the U.S. Congress, founder Jimmy Wales said on Twitter.

"Student warning! Do your homework early. Wikipedia protesting bad law on Wednesday!" Wales said on the microblogging site.

Hackers have disrupted the websites of Israel's stock exchange and national air carrier in a deepening cyber war allegedly launched this month by Saudi cyber attackers.

A person familiar with the situation at El Al Israel Airlines says the carrier took down its website Monday after the alleged Saudi hacker network behind previous attacks warned that both sites would be targeted.The person spoke on condition of anonymity to reveal confidential information.

The number of Internet users in China rose last year by nearly 56 million to more than half a billion, nearly half of whom used weibos, or microblogs, according to latest official figures.

China's online population -- the world's largest -- hit 513 million in 2011, a 12.2 percent increase on the previous year, the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) said in a statement on Monday.

Hailed as the French Steve Jobs, entrepreneur Xavier Niel is shaking up the country's mobile phone market with a maverick style far removed from France's traditionally conservative business practices.

A rare business heavyweight not to emerge from the country's elite universities, Niel started his career in the 1980s operating adult chat services on a French forerunner to the Internet called Minitel.

France Telecom and its partner Mid Europa are selling their Austrian mobile unit Orange to Hong Kong-based Hutchison in a $1.3-billion deal, a press report said Saturday.

Final details are being worked out but the long-awaited deal should be signed in the coming days, Austrian daily Die Presse reported, without citing sources. Orange head Michael Krammer declined to comment, the paper said.

Apple has agreed to throw open its doors to labor monitors after a spate of suicides at the firm's Chinese plants, a rights group said Friday.

The Fair Labor Association said Apple will let it "independently assess facilities in Apple's supply chain and report detailed findings," which will be posted on the association's website.

The annual Consumer Electronics Show ended Friday, leaving gadget lovers with visions of a "Matrix"-like world in which the Internet surrounds them no matter where they go.

Makers of everything from cars and refrigerators to televisions, smartphones and software pitched innovations heralding the arrival of connected lifestyles made possible by "smart" devices.

For the first time, Indian prosecutors are taking Google, Yahoo, Facebook and other networking sites to court for refusing to remove material considered insulting to Indian leaders and major religious figures.

Government officials are upset about material insulting to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, ruling Congress party leader Sonia Gandhi and major religious figures. Some illustrations have shown Singh and Gandhi in compromising positions and pigs running through Mecca, Islam's holiest city.