Shammo Khan walks into a dusty courtyard that reeks of garbage, searching for the fingerprint of a man exhausted by HIV, drug withdrawal and the tuberculosis lesions hijacking his lungs.

She opens her laptop on his rope bed, prods the emaciated man to log in on a fingerprint reader and watches him slowly and painfully swallow a handful of TB drugs in an experimental program harnessing new technology to combat an ancient killer still ravaging India.

Google says its search engine and other Internet services have been cut off from much of China just as the country's ruling party picks new leaders.

Data posted on Google's website shows its services in China became largely inaccessible beginning around 1 a.m. PST Friday. That would be about 5 p.m. Friday in Beijing.

A research firm says U.S. retail sales of new video game hardware, software and accessories fell 25 percent in October.

The drop marks the 11th straight month of declining sales for physical game products. Many gamers are waiting for big holiday releases such as Activision Blizzard Inc.'s "Call of Duty: Black Ops II."

Australia on Friday scrapped a controversial plan to filter the Internet, saying it will instead block hundreds of websites identified by Interpol as among the worst child abuse sites.

The center-left Labor government had pushed since 2007 for a mandatory Internet filter to protect children, to be administered by service providers, despite criticism it was impractical and set a precedent for censorship.

Oil giant Chevron was struck by the Stuxnet virus, a sophisticated cyber attack that tore through Iran's nuclear facilities and is believed to have been launched by the United States and Israel.

A Chevron spokesman told Agence France Presse Thursday that the virus had struck the oil giant in 2010 without causing any damage, confirming a report in the Wall Street Journal.

The amount of data sent online in North America has more than doubled over the past year, with Netflix shows accounting for a big chunk of Internet traffic, a report found Wednesday.

Online data use in North America was up 120 percent this year, with video streaming service Netflix accounting for 33 percent of the traffic streamed on "fixed networks," according to Sandvine's Global Internet Phenomena Report.

The world's first flight powered entirely by bio jet fuel has raised hopes for cleaner air travel and upped the prospects of a boon for farmers whose oilseed crops could supplant kerosene.

A Dassault Falcon 20 twin engine jet took off from the Canadian capital Ottawa last month to test the new jet fuel, made from 100 percent oilseed, for engine performance and emissions, aiming to make sky journeys less polluting.

Sony said Thursday that music by its Japanese artists was now available on Apple's iTunes store, in an apparent strategy shift by the Japanese firm to cash in on soaring demand for online music.

Sony, which competes with Apple's iPod and iPhone in the portable music player market, said its copyrighted Japanese-language songs had been made available for sale on iTunes from this week.

Google began Tuesday serving up revamped search pages that give results more room by shifting the tools menu to the top of the screen.

The California-based Internet titan said the change was intended to streamline search pages and make the layout on desktop computers consistent with those on smartphones and tablets.

Election day in the United States became the most tweeted about event in U.S. political history Tuesday with enthusiastic netizens firing off 20 million poll-related tweets, the social network said.

Americans flocked to Twitter and other platforms all day in a massive social media burst, posting photographic proof they had cast their ballots, cheering their favorite candidates along and analyzing the latest polls.