The popular New York Times website returned to service Wednesday after hackers forced it down for nearly a day, with a group backing Syria's government claiming responsibility.

The website nytimes.com, one of the most influential sources of news in the United States, had come up blank for many readers since Tuesday afternoon, though some were still able to access it earlier Wednesday.

Motorists could go hands-free, leaving their cars' computer brains fully in charge, as early as 2020, when Nissan says it plans to have a self-driving vehicle ready for the market.

The Japanese automaker said Tuesday that its "revolutionary" self-drive technology could be ready by then, and that it is already building a synthetic cityscape of real roads and buildings for testing the vehicles.

If David Huang had left his native Taiwan for Sweden a generation ago, he would have taken a giant leap into the unknown.

Now, with the help of Skype, the 35-year-old businessman is able to reach relatives from his Stockholm home as easily as if they lived around the corner, and not half a world away.

Two leading Taiwanese electronics firms that assemble products for Apple have received orders to make the highly anticipated "iWatch", an analyst and reports said Wednesday.

"Apple is likely to introduce 'iWatch' in 2014. From our channel checks, Inventec is the major assembly source for 'iWatch', with about 60 percent of order allocation," said CIMB Securities analyst Wanli Wang in a report.

Twitter and The New York Times were hit with cyber attacks, with credit quickly claimed by a group backing embattled Syrian strongman Bashar Assad.

The Times site remained out of service early Wednesday following the attacks that began Tuesday.

Revelations about vast U.S. data collection programs are starting to hit American tech companies, which are ramping up pressure for increased transparency to try to mitigate the damage.

An industry group, the Cloud Security Alliance said last month that 10 percent of its non-U.S. members have cancelled a contract with a U.S.-based cloud provider, and 56 percent said they were less likely to use an American company.

Facebook on Monday began letting members collaborate on shared online photo albums at the leading social network.

The Shared Album feature was to be introduced slowly, first becoming available to a small group of English-language users before gradually spreading across the social network.

A U.S. judge on Monday approved a deal in which Facebook will pay $20 million for using members "likes" as endorsements for ads.

The pot of money is to be divvied up among attorneys, Internet privacy rights groups, and Facebook users who filed claims in the class-action lawsuit.

China has been hit by the "largest ever" attack on its Internet structure, crashing the country's .cn servers, according to a government-linked agency.

The national domain name resolution service came under a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack for around two hours early on Sunday, the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) said in a statement.

Finnish telecom giant Nokia said Saturday it is in talks with India's government about how to create a better business climate and remains "committed" to its manufacturing plant in the country.

The statement followed an Indian Express newspaper report Friday that said the mobile maker had told New Delhi the country is now its "least favorable market" in which to operate and it made better sense to export its products from China.