A year after a nightmarish share offering, Facebook still has its ardent backers and detractors.

The world's biggest social network, which now has more than 1.1 billion users, has managed to boost its earnings since the initial public offering, including from its mobile platform, important in countering its critics.

Four members of the LulzSec international hacking group were sentenced to prison terms in Britain on Thursday for masterminding cyber attacks on major global institutions, including Sony Pictures and the CIA.

Ryan Cleary, 21, Jake Davis, 20, Mustafa Al-Bassam, 18, and Ryan Ackroyd, 26, saw themselves as "latter-day pirates" when they carried out the attacks on organisations which also included Rupert Murdoch's top-selling British newspaper The Sun.

A tiny new camera developed at a U.S. university is giving researchers a bug's eye view.

The camera is about the size of a small coin and mimics insects' bulging eyes. It features 180 micro-lenses, giving it a panoramic field of view and the ability to focus simultaneously on objects at different depths.

Google on Wednesday launched a subscription-based music service, allowing users of Android phones and tablets to listen to their favorite songs and artists for a monthly fee.

The streaming service, called All Access, is available in the U.S. for $9.99 per month after a 30-day free trial. It will be available in other countries later. For those who start the trial by June 30, the monthly fee is $7.99.

Google is expected to use its annual software developers' conference to showcase the latest mobile devices running on its Android software, while also unveiling other features in its evolving product line-up.

The gathering, scheduled to begin Wednesday morning in San Francisco, provides Google Inc. with an opportunity to flex its technological muscle in front of a sold-out audience of engineers and entrepreneurs who develop applications and other features that can make smartphones and tablets more appealing.

Vietnam's booming Internet scene is littered with failed startups that tried to take on Google and other entrenched U.S web companies. That's not deterring a newly launched Russian-Vietnamese outfit which believes it can unseat the American search engine in this fast-growing Asian market and also contend with a jittery, authoritarian government seeking to clamp down on freedom of expression online.

Like Google rivals elsewhere, Coc Coc, or "Knock Knock" in English, believes the ubiquitous search engine doesn't get the nuances of the local language. It says its algorithms make for a better, quicker search in Vietnamese, while its local knowledge means the information served will be more relevant — and hence more valuable.

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion says it will offer its once-popular BlackBerry Messenger service on competing devices.

CEO Thorsten Heins said Tuesday that the time is right to offer BBM on rival devices. He says iPhone and Android versions will be available for free.

Nokia Corp. on Tuesday unveiled its first Lumia smartphone with a metal cover, low-light camera features and new social network apps. But the new model failed to impress investors, who sent the company's stock down more than 5 percent.

The features on the Lumia 925 — slimmer and lighter that the flagship Lumia 920 — will be soon available in the full Lumia Windows 8 range, Nokia said. They include an 8.7 megapixel camera that can take photos in low light conditions and snaps 10 images at once. It enables sharing on various social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Tumblr, Flickr and Instagram.

Microsoft says a planned update to its Windows 8 operating system will be made available for free later this year.

The update is meant to address complaints and confusion that have been blamed for deepening a slump in personal computer sales. Microsoft isn't saying what kind of changes will be introduced with the release of the new system, though Microsoft plans to make a preview version available next month. The release of the final version is expected in time for the holiday season.

A German court ruled Tuesday against the country's version of search engine Google, finding that keywords thrown up by its 'auto-complete' function can be defamatory and ruling the company must remove offending words after complaints.

The case centered on a complaint by an unnamed entrepreneur who found that when he typed his name into the search box of the site www.google.de, the auto-complete function suggested results with the added words "Scientology" and "fraud".