Microsoft handed gamers a victory Wednesday by backing off plans for new-generation Xbox One consoles to require Internet connections and put restrictions on playing second-hand game disks.

Microsoft interactive entertainment business president Don Mattrick announced in a blog post that the U.S. technology titan was surrendering in the face of outrage by gamers in the wake of last week's premier E3 videogame expo.

In a rural classroom in the Thai highlands, hill tribe children energetically slide their fingertips over tablet computer screens practicing everything from English to mathematics and music.

The disadvantaged students are part of an ambitious scheme by the kingdom to distribute millions of the handheld devices in its schools in a move supporters hope will boost national education standards.

Facebook said Tuesday that more than a million businesses now advertise at the leading social network.

"I know business owners like these invest their hard-earned money and time into running their companies," Facebook's Dan Levy said in a blog post that referred to advertisers such as Singapore's Retail Ministry and retailer Springwools in Ireland.

When Google chose New Zealand to unveil secret plans for a balloon-driven wi-fi network last weekend, it cemented the country's reputation as a test bed for global tech companies looking to trial their latest innovations, industry experts say.

They said New Zealand, tucked away deep in the southern hemisphere, offers a tech-savvy, English-speaking population where firms such as Google and Facebook can quietly test new products without risking major fallout if anything goes wrong.

A top Apple executive downplayed the theory of an e-book price-fixing conspiracy at an antitrust trial Monday, saying publishers were already moving away from Amazon's model when Apple launched its iPad.

Eddy Cue, an Apple senior vice president, said in his second day of testimony that Apple introduced e-books for the iPad that were not available on Amazon, which was selling many popular e-book titles for $9.99.

The late Steve Jobs took center stage Monday in the latest twist in the Apple antitrust trial on ebooks.

A federal court attempted to plumb the meaning of a series of unsent emails Jobs addressed to Eddy Cue, an Apple senior vice president assigned with negotiating ebook contracts with major publishers in late 2009 and early 2010 before the launch of the iPad.

Chinese telecoms giant Huawei will launch a new smartphone on Tuesday to better compete with high-end rivals like Apple and Samsung overseas, a company official said.

Huawei will unveil the Ascend P6 in London in one of its major smartphone launches of the year, Huawei spokesman Roland Sladek told Agence France Presse.

A mysterious Facebook event set for Thursday has sparked buzz that the leading social network could be adding video to Instagram smartphone picture-sharing service.

The leading social network invited the media to its headquarters in the Silicon Valley city of Menlo Park where "a small team has been working on a big idea," but remained hush about what will be unveiled.

A Chinese supercomputer is the fastest in the world, according to survey results announced Monday, comfortably overtaking a U.S. machine which now ranks second.

Tianhe-2, a supercomputer developed by China's National University of Defense Technology, achieved processing speeds of 33.86 petaflops (1000 trillion calculations) per second on a benchmarking test, earning it the number one spot in the Top 500 survey of supercomputers.

U.S. tech giant Apple revealed on Monday it received between 4,000 and 5,000 data requests in six months from U.S. authorities, days after Facebook and Microsoft released similar information.

Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and several other top Internet and technology companies have come under heightened scrutiny since word leaked of a vast, covert Internet surveillance program U.S. authorities insist targets only foreign terror suspects and has helped thwart attacks.