Google has taken down a blog that listed ways to harass Singapore's Filipino population, drawing praise from Internet users appalled by growing racial tensions in the city-state.

Police said Thursday that they are investigating the anonymous "Blood Stained Singapore" blog, which suggested Singaporeans should refuse to be served by Filipinos in restaurants, or "accidentally" shove them in crowded places.

Facebook, which recently bought Whatsap for $19billion (£11.4bn), went down Thursday frustrating users from across the world.

On logging in to Facebook.com, a message appears that reads: "Sorry, something went wrong. We are working on getting this fixed as soon as we can."

Canadian smartphone maker BlackBerry announced Wednesday a deal with Amazon giving its users access to more than 240,000 software applications from the online retailer's Appstore.

The deal triples the number of apps available on BlackBerry smartphones, including popular apps such as Groupon, Netflix, Pinterest, Candy Crush Saga and Minecraft.

A new instant messaging app that only allows users to send a single word to their friends is quickly becoming a hot commodity, raising $1 million in two months, U.S. media reported Wednesday.

The Yo app lets users say "Yo" to their friends, sending them a text notification accompanied by a recorded voice shouting the greeting. But co-founder Or Arbel insisted the deceptively simple app has a lot of potential.

Amazon unveiled its first smartphone ever on Wednesday, a device that assists shoppers by using six cameras that can make sense of its user's face and the world around it.

The phone's most significant feature, called "Firefly," employs audio and object recognition technology to identify products and present the user with ways to purchase the items through Amazon. Users can simply snap a photo of a book, for instance, and Firefly will offer up its title and author, give more information about it and provide ways to buy it.

Global automakers are locked in a showdown evoking the video format wars of the 1980s, as they bet on what eco-friendly vehicles will prevail in the battle for dominance of the burgeoning low-emissions sector. 

In a contest reminiscent of the scrap for pre-eminence in the home video market, which pitched Betamax against VHS, huge auto firms are going all out for very different technologies.

A Japanese robot-maker on Wednesday showed off suits that the wearer can control just by thinking, as it said it was linking up with an industrial city promoting innovation.

Cyberdyne founder Yoshiyuki Sankai said he was allying with Kawasaki, a city south of Tokyo, to explore ways to expand real-life applications for his robo-suits, which are often used for physical therapy.

Facebook released Tuesday a new instant messaging app that enables users to send photos or video to selected friends who can only see them if they send an image back.

Slingshot, available for Apple and Android devices, is the second product to come out of the social networking website's Creative Labs ideas laboratory.

Judges around the country are grappling with the ripple effects of a 2-year-old Supreme Court ruling on GPS tracking, reaching conflicting conclusions on the case's broader meaning and tackling unresolved questions that flare in a world where privacy and technology increasingly collide.

The January 2012 opinion in United States v. Jones set constitutional boundaries for law enforcement's use of GPS devices to track the whereabouts of criminal suspects. But the different legal rationales offered by the justices have left a muddled legal landscape for police and lower-court judges, who have struggled in the last two years with how and when to apply the decision — especially at a time when new technologies are developed at a faster rate than judicial opinions are issued.

Apple has reached an out of court settlement with plaintiffs that accused it of price-fixing on e-books, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.

Apple and the plaintiffs -- consumers and some U.S. states -- have reached an agreement in principle that must be approved by the U.S. District Court in New York, said Steve Berman, an attorney representing the plaintiffs, the Journal reported.