Web giant Google and other Internet companies say they oppose creating Brazil-based databases of local customer information, proposed by a Brazilian government determined to crack down on espionage.

Google says in principle it supports proposed legislation enshrining an Internet civil rights framework, dubbed Marco Civil de Internet in Brazil, the company told Agence France Presse.

The National Security Agency's website went down for several hours Friday, but the U.S. spy service known for hacking into computer networks blamed the outage on a technical mistake.

The website, NSA.gov, went down in the afternoon, setting off speculation on Twitter that the site may have suffered a denial of service attack by hackers.

British police say they have seized components of a gun made from plastic on a 3-D printer.

The Greater Manchester Police force says a plastic magazine and trigger were seized along with a 3-D printer in a raid against suspected gang members.

A patent filing shows Samsung Electronics Co. is working on a device it calls sports glasses that are likely its response to Google's Internet-connected eyewear.

A design patent filing at Korean Intellectual Property Office shows Samsung has designed smartphone-connected glasses that can display information from the handset. It said the glasses can play music, receive phone calls and give hands-free control over the smartphone.

Microsoft on Wednesday brushed off Apple's move to give away its software, claiming the iWork productivity suite from its rival was "lightweight" and "has never gotten much traction."

The reaction came a day after Apple unveiled its new line of iPads and announced much of its software and upgrades would be free, including iWork, which competes with Microsoft's top-selling Office suite.

Yahoo on Wednesday said that it is closing its Egypt office as part of an effort to restore the faded Internet star to former glory.

"Today, Yahoo announced to employees that we plan to close our Cairo office at the end of this year," spokeswoman Sara Gorman told Agence France Presse in an email.

South Korean electronics giant Samsung has apologized to Chinese consumers after a lengthy report by China's state-run television broadcaster detailed design flaws in the company's smartphones.

The company, the most popular smartphone brand in the hugely valuable Chinese market, said in a statement that it "welcomed" Monday's half-hour-long report by China Central Television and acknowledged that firmware problems have caused some of its Galaxy S3 and Note2 models to crash.

Google on Wednesday confirmed that it is dabbling with putting large ads atop search results for brand names in a move seen by some as breaking an old promise.

The Internet titan reasoned that the small experiment is part of an ongoing evolution that has seen maps, pictures, telephone numbers and other "extensions" woven into advertising on search results pages.

A South Korean court says studies conducted to evaluate safety at Samsung chip factories failed to fully examine workplace health hazards.

The finding by the Seoul Administrative Court is part of a ruling on the case of a Samsung worker who died of leukemia in 2009 aged 29.

Sony is hoping that providing sharable movie clips and extras like deleted scenes will prompt more people to buy digital movies. At least that's the intention behind a new initiative it's calling Vudu Extras+.

The initiative gives people who buy movies on Wal-Mart Stores Inc.'s online video service Vudu the ability to share dozens of clips or pieces of behind-the-scenes footage on Facebook and Twitter. In each case, a link takes users to a website with the clip embedded.