Amazon.com on Thursday announced that it is buying book lovers social network Goodreads in a move that could give Kindle tablets an edge over rival electronic readers.

Goodreads is the leading website for sharing book recommendations and would complement reader reviews provided at Amazon.com's online shop for digital titles.

A videogame centered on a wordless walk across a picturesque desert walked away with top honors Thursday at the major Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

'Journey' created by Thatgamecompany and released last year as a download to Sony PlayStation 3 consoles claimed six Game Developers Choice Awards, including Game of the Year.

Apple is to face "strengthened supervision" from China's consumer watchdog, state media reported Friday, as the U.S. computer giant faces a barrage of negative publicity in China.

The country is Apple's second-biggest market, and its iPhones and other products -- many of them made in the country -- are highly popular, although it faces fierce competition from South Korea's Samsung.

U.S. smartphone owners tend to be connected from the instant they rise until they fall sleep and revel in every minute of it, a Facebook-sponsored study showed.

"Smartphones, coupled with rich applications and mobile data services, allow us to connect with our family, friends and community from the moment we wake up until the end of our day," IDC researchers said in the report released this week.

The Egyptian military has arrested three scuba divers accused of cutting an undersea Internet cable off the coast of the northern city of Alexandria, it said on Thursday.

The three had been spotted on board a small boat and attempted to flee ashore, but the navy gave chase and eventually caught up and arrested them, the military said on its Facebook page.

Beijing branded a new U.S. spending bill barring government purchases of Chinese-made technology "biased" on Thursday, after the two powers clashed over accusations of cyber-hacking.

The bill, signed Tuesday by President Barack Obama, blocked government buying of information technology equipment "produced, manufactured or assembled" by firms "owned, directed or subsidised by the People's Republic of China".

The United States is deliberately sparring with al-Qaida supporters and militants online aiming to shoot down extremist messages and win over hearts and minds, a U.S. official said Wednesday.

Seeking out the virtual spaces where "al-Qaida and its supporters lurk" is part of America's strategy to combat violent extremism, Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Tara Sonenshine told students at the University of Maryland.

A "bazooka" cyber attack described as the most powerful ever seen has slowed traffic on the Internet, security experts said Wednesday, raising fresh concerns over online security.

The attacks targeted Spamhaus, a Geneva-based volunteer group that publishes spam blacklists used by networks to filter out unwanted email, and led to cyberspace congestion that may have affected the Internet overall, according to Matthew Prince of the U.S. security firm CloudFlare.

Google on Thursday began offering the chance for people to wander virtually through an abandoned town deep within the exclusion zone around Japan's crippled nuclear plant.

Visitors to the Internet giant's mapping site can take a tour through the overgrown and deserted streets of Namie, where time appears to have stood still for two years.

Twitter is on pace to earn more than a half-billion dollars in ad revenue this year and close to $1 billion next year, industry tracker eMarketer estimated on Wednesday.

About 53 percent of the ad revenue at Twitter this year will come from use of the service on smartphones or tablets in a huge jump from 2011, when the San Francisco company took in no money from mobile ads, according to eMarketer.