Life in authoritarian states is likely to get tougher before it gets better as their citizens gain more access to the Internet, Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt said Friday.

Speaking at a seminar in Washington, Schmidt said hundreds of millions of people in non-democratic nations will be trading in their basic cellphones for Internet-connected smartphones as prices fall over the next few years.

Hackers broke into a daily deals website backed by online retail titan Amazon.com and breached the accounts of 50 million members, according to a report Friday by All Things Digital.

Names, birth dates and encrypted password information was swiped in a cyber-attack at LivingSocial, according to a report at AllThingsD.com.

EU anti-trust authorities are from Thursday testing for a month changes to Google's search results meant to respond to competitors' complaints that the U.S. online giant was giving unfair prominence to its own links and ads.

The 'market test' trial stems from a 2010 inquiry opened after several complaints from companies including the portal Ciao, owned by Microsoft, that Google was abusing its dominant market position to promote its own businesses.

Facebook said Thursday it was buying a startup specializing in powering mobile applications as part of its drive to make the social network friendlier to smartphones and tablet computers.

Facebook did not disclose how much it paid for San Francisco-based Parse, but online reports valued the deal at $85 million.

Samsung on Friday released the latest version of its flagship Galaxy smartphone, as it announced record first quarter profits driven by surging sales growth in its mobile division.

The Galaxy S4, armed with eye motion control technology that will pause a video when the user looks away, comes with a faster chip and is thinner and lighter than the previous S3 model.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics revealed Friday it has been targeted by hackers many times, as they reportedly look to access market-sensitive information before public release.

According to newly declassified documents and internal incident reports obtained by The Australian Financial Review, the ABS has been the subject of numerous attacks over the past four years.

Google on Thursday released data showing that requests by governments to censor the Internet giant's content have hit new heights, with Brazil and the United States leading the way.

Google received 2,285 government requests to remove content from it properties, including YouTube and search pages, in the second half of last year as compared to 1,811 requests in the first six months, according to its latest Transparency Report.

Microsoft is inviting journalists to an Xbox event at its Redmond, Washington, headquarters that will likely shed light on its next video game console.

Microsoft Corp. said Wednesday that the May 21 event will reveal a new generation of games, TV and entertainment. Nineteen days later Microsoft plans to reveal more details about its games at the E3 video game expo in Los Angeles.

For a few surreal minutes, a mere 12 words on Twitter caused the world's mightiest stock market to tremble.

No sooner did hackers send a false Associated Press tweet reporting explosions at the White House on Tuesday than investors started dumping stocks — eventually unloading $134 billion worth.

The U.S. army is working to limit its dependence on GPS by developing the next generation of navigation technology, including a tiny autonomous chip, the director of the Pentagon's research agency said Wednesday.

DARPA, the research group behind a range of spy tech and which helped invent the Internet, was also the driving force behind the creation of the Global Positioning System, director Arati Prabhakar said at a press conference.