Google Inc

Internet search provider Google Inc. announced it would expand the workforce at its European headquarters by 600, or 75%, over the next two to three years. The company's Dublin, Ireland, office, established in 2003, supports its European, Middle Eastern and African activities and is Google's largest base outside the United States. The Mountain View, Calif.

Now it's Facebook's turn to share. The social networking giant that coaxes 845 million people to divulge the most intimate details about their lives is one step closer to cashing in on its meteoric rise in what could be the largest initial public offering to come out of Silicon Valley. Facebook Inc. filed papers Wednesday with the goal of raising $5 billion in a public stock sale that could come in May. The offering would be the largest among Internet companies, eclipsing Google Inc. in 2004 and Netscape Communications in 1995.

Google Inc.'s plan to launch its own computer operating system is a direct assault at the heart of Microsoft Corp., and its bold move could fundamentally change the way personal computers are used. Under Google's new operating system, dubbed Chrome OS, people would play games, store photos and work on spreadsheets free of charge via the Internet, reducing the need for powerful software and massive hard drives on their personal computers.

Wael Ghonim stood on a tiny stage in a corner of Cairo's Tahrir Square, a spindly figure in a sea of tens of thousands of anti-government protesters, his shouts of "Long live Egypt!" rippling out before evaporating in the noisy squall. As the head of Google marketing operations in the Middle East, the gaunt 30-year-old seemed an unlikely figure to command special attention Tuesday, a day when the movement to topple President Hosni Mubarak drew one of its biggest crowds yet. But his role in organizing online opposition to Mubarak, and his highly publicized release after 12 days in the custody of Egypt's security services, had turned Ghonim, temporarily at least, into an icon of Egyptian resistance.

Want to fool merchants with a fake ID? Hack someone's text messages? Or how about tracking where your co-workers are, without their knowing it? There's an app for that. The explosion in smartphone and tablet applications that enable people to check the weather, follow their stocks and play Words With Friends has a dark side: apps that facilitate questionable if not outright illegal behavior. Apple's App Store, for example, offers Drivers License software that promises "unlimited access to realistic-looking licenses" for all 50 states.

"On or about December, 1910," Virginia Woolf once wrote, "the world changed." Sometime during the early aughts of this century, it changed again. The Internet leveled our cultural landscape. There was an epistemological free-for-all, a paradigm shift. The pyramid of media hierarchy flipped -- top down became bottom up -- and people-powered content started to change the way we think. In 2002, I owned a small independent publisher, Context Books.

Found: geeks on the beach. Google Inc. has spread out like a beach towel in Santa Monica. What started in 2003 with a few dozen employees has grown into the company's fourth-largest office and fourth-largest engineering center in the U.S., with 300-plus employees in three buildings. "We have the best weather of any office in Google," said Thomas Williams, the engineering director who heads the office.

The scale and sophistication of the cyber attacks on Google Inc. and other large U.S. corporations by hackers in China is raising national security concerns that the Asian superpower is escalating its industrial espionage efforts on the Internet. While the U.S. focus has been primarily on protecting military and state secrets from cyber spying, a new battle is being waged in which corporate computers and the valuable intellectual property they hold have become as much a target of foreign governments as those run by the Pentagon and the CIA. "This is a watershed moment in the cyber war," James Mulvenon, director of the Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis at Defense Group Inc., a national-security firm, said Thursday.

Google Inc. bought Boston-based Zingku, a service that lets young people share pictures and information over mobile phones.

In a city famous for its views, the one from the observation tower of the year-old De Young Museum is among the best, stretching from the Pacific Ocean to the distant Berkeley hills.

With negotiations over censorship at an impasse, Google Inc. shut down its search engine operation in China on Monday and redirected users to uncensored results -- a move certain to anger the Chinese government and jeopardize Google's future in the world's most populous country. In taking the extraordinary action, Google said it was making good on a promise it made two months ago, when it said it would not self-censor the site as demanded by Chinese officials. At the time, Google also complained that it had been a victim of a sophisticated cyber attack originating from China.

WASHINGTON -- Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton Thursday urged China to investigate cyber intrusions that led Google to threaten to pull out of that country -- and challenged Beijing to openly publish its findings. "Countries that restrict free access to information or violate the basic rights of Internet users risk walling themselves off from the progress of the next century," she said. Clinton said the U.S. and China "have different views on this issue, and we intend to address those differences candidly and consistently" as part of a cooperative relationship.

Google Inc.'s new cellphone has gotten a winning endorsement from Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Wozniak. Wozniak, a self-proclaimed "gadget freak" who left Apple in 1987, remains one of the biggest fans of its products. He stood in line in 2007 to buy the first iPhone because he couldn't wait for Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs to send him one. He didn't have to wait for the Nexus One. Google Inc. executive Andy Rubin gave one to him. Wozniak first praised the phone this month at an NBC station in the Bay Area.

Google Inc. said Tuesday that the launch of two new mobile phones in China has been delayed, a move that showed the company's clash with Beijing is crimping more than just its search business. Google-powered handsets from Motorola Corp. and Samsung were scheduled to be unveiled today from China Unicom, one of the Asian nation's largest telecommunications providers. Google said last week that it might shut down its search engine in China in the wake of a sophisticated cyber attack originating in China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from the company's servers, as well as the targeting of human rights activists' e-mail accounts.

The decision by Google Inc. to stand up to censorship in China is a marked turnaround from just a few years ago, when the Internet giant agreed to gag parts of its search engine to enter the lucrative China market. Google's threat to bolt from the Asian nation has brought praise from politicians and Silicon Valley business leaders, along with many of the human-rights activists who had condemned the company for going along with China's restrictions on Internet access. Whether Google's reversal sprang from political idealism or corporate realism, the Mountain View, Calif.

The scale and sophistication of the cyber attacks on Google Inc. and other large U.S. corporations by hackers in China is raising national security concerns that the Asian superpower is escalating its industrial espionage efforts on the Internet. While the U.S. focus has been primarily on protecting military and state secrets from cyber spying, a new battle is being waged in which corporate computers and the valuable intellectual property they hold have become as much a target of foreign governments as those run by the Pentagon and the CIA. "This is a watershed moment in the cyber war," James Mulvenon, director of the Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis at Defense Group Inc., a national-security firm, said Thursday.

* Internet search engine company Google Inc. named Chairman Eric Schmidt chief executive, replacing co-founder Larry Page. Page will take over as president of the company's products division.

Walt Disney Co. said it chose Google Inc.'s Web search technology for several of its Internet sites, giving closely held Google a win against rival Overture Services Inc.

Bouquets were laid in front of Google Inc.'s headquarters in China on Wednesday, a show of support for a company whose threat to exit the country rather than be party to more censorship is a dramatic shot across the bow of the Chinese Communist Party. But while Chinese cyberspace was awash with chatter about Google's gambit, state-controlled media downplayed the story, reporting that Google had been a victim of cyber attacks in China but making no mention of the company's allegations that human rights activists' e-mail accounts had been hacked.

In a rare corporate rebuke of Asia's economic superpower, Google Inc. on Tuesday said it might leave China and the country's 350 million Internet users after it was the victim of a series of cyber attacks that originated from that nation. According to Google, a "highly sophisticated" December attack on its main corporate computers resulted in "the theft of intellectual property." The company said it believed that a key goal of the attackers was to access the e-mail accounts of Chinese human rights activists, raising the possibility that China's government not only may have hacked in to Google but also may have been using the company's network to conduct political espionage.