Brussels has given Google an extension until the end of August to answer an anti-trust case alleging that it abuses its search engine's market dominance, a company spokesman said Thursday.

The two-week extension is the third given to the California tech giant. 

Samsung unveiled two new smartphones Thursday to ramp up its efforts to win over consumers seeking large-screen handsets, and announced launch dates for its mobile payment service.

The moves are aimed at keeping the South Korean giant atop the global smartphone market and countering U.S. rival Apple, which has made gains with its large-screen iPhone 6 and 6-Plus and its tap-to-pay feature.

Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC said Thursday it would cut more than 2,000 jobs, slashing its workforce by 15 percent, after posting its biggest ever quarterly loss.

The announcement came less than a week after the firm said it had swung to a deep loss of Tw$8.0 billion ($252.7 million) in the second quarter, from a net profit of $2.26 billion in the same period last year. 

An Australian artist and academic plans to connect an ear which he has been growing for years on his arm to the Internet so people can hear and track his movements.

The project by a professor from Curtin University in Western Australia, known as Stelarc, is his latest in a series of artworks exploring the boundaries of blending robotics, prosthetics and the human body.

India's high flyers have proudly welcomed the appointment as Google's new chief executive of Sundar Pichai, the latest home-grown engineer to rise to the top of the U.S. corporate world.

Pichai, named head of the Internet titan on Monday, was born to humble beginnings in the southern city of Chennai and studied engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Kharagpur before heading to America to further his studies and career.

An international team of computer hackers and stock traders was charged with pocketing more than $100 million in illicit profits based on stolen market-moving financial information, U.S. officials announced Tuesday.

The Department of Justice charged nine people in a criminal conspiracy with making more than $30 million in illegal trades on the pilfered information.

Major U.S. Internet firms have joined an effort to curb the spread of images of sex abuse of children, organizers said Monday.

The Internet Watch Foundation said Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter and Yahoo had agreed to adopt a system to identify and block images of child sex abuse.

Tech geeks in China looking to understand Google's newly unveiled corporate structure are out of luck: the website of the new parent company, dubbed Alphabet, was blocked less than 24 hours after going live.

Google unveiled a surprise corporate overhaul Tuesday forming Alphabet, a holding company that will include Internet search and a handful of independent companies, such as the research arm X Lab, investment unit Google Ventures and health and science operations.

Collecting obscene amounts of money, writing illegal contracts, handing out bribes -- all things you can do with a new Spanish mobile app inspired by headlines of corruption in Spain.

"Corrupt Mayor Clicker" is a free game created by three young developers who were seeking a way to "criticize the corruption in a satirical way."

The South Korean company behind popular mobile messenger app Kakao Talk named a 34-year-old startup investor as CEO who will be the country's youngest corporate boss.

Rim Ji Hoon was named CEO of Daum Kakao Corp. on Monday. He will turn 35 next month when the board and shareholders will vote on the decision.