French wireless operator Orange said Friday it has signed a deal with Apple Inc. to sell its iPhone in the Middle East, Africa and several European countries.

France Telecom’s Orange said in a one-sentence statement that it will sell the handset in Austria, Belgium, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, Jordan, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Switzerland and African markets later this year.

France Telecom spokesman Bertrand Deronchaine said Orange will be the exclusive iPhone provider in Belgium and Romania, with co-exclusive or non-exclusive deals in other countries. He declined to offer more details about the arrangement.

Yahoo Inc has introduced a software development tool that lets outside parties create customized views of Yahoo Web search results, the company said on Thursday.

Making good on one piece of a strategy to open up its core network services, Yahoo said it was offering SearchMonkey, a technology that lets website owners display selected Yahoo search results on their sites.

Instead of offering a one-size-fits-all approach to search, Yahoo is allowing website owners and users to have more choice about what information they want to show and see when they use Yahoo search.

Disney is bridging the gap between gaming and virtual worlds.

Disney Interactive Studios on Thursday formally launched DGamer, a free avatar-based community for U.S. buyers of games the company developed for the handheld Nintendo DS.

Beginning with Friday’s release of “The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian” in tandem with the theatrical release of the fantasy sequel, all Disney Interactive DS games will come with DGamer-added content like customizable avatars. DGamer members also will be able to use the WiFi connectivity of the DS to communicate with other members with either a DS or a PC.

Although it features avatars and text chat, DGamer can’t really be described as a true virtual world such as Disney Online’s Club Penguin or Fairies.com — at least not yet.

But as Paul Yanover, executive vp and managing director of Disney Online, noted, “DGamer is our opportunity to work with Disney Interactive to make sure we have this connected environment and to make sure we reach our guests wherever they are, including a player on a Disney Interactive DS title talking to a player in ‘Pirates of the Caribbean Online.’”

CBS Corp. is acquiring a big online reach with its acquisition of CNet Networks Inc. but also a company that’s faced heavy criticism from investors. Those concerns as well as the hefty $1.8 billion price tag helped send CBS’s shares down after the deal was announced Thursday.

CNet was an early player in the dot-com boom and survived the subsequent crash with a steady focus on technology news, reviews and entertainment. But its stock, which once traded as high as $79 during the bubble, has slumped over the last two years, leading to an investor rebellion that was gathering steam just as the CBS deal was announced.

Comcast Corp.’s interference with Internet traffic has prompted a federal investigation and is at the center of calls for “Net Neutrality” laws, but another U.S. cable company appears to be doing the same thing without drawing scrutiny.

A study released Thursday found conclusive signs that file-sharing attempts by subscribers of Cox Communications were blocked, along with customers at Comcast and Singapore’s StarHub.

Of the 788 Comcast subscribers who participated in the study, 62 percent had their connections blocked. At Cox, 54 percent of subscribers examined were blocked, according to Krishna Gummadi at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Saarbruecken, Germany. The institute examined the network connections of 8,175 Internet subscribers around the world.

Microsoft Corp said on Wednesday its Xbox 360 game machine beat Nintendo Co Ltd’s Wii and Sony Corp’s PlayStation 3 to reach 10 million units in U.S. sales.

“History has shown us that the first company to reach 10 million in console sales wins the generation battle,” Don Mattrick, a Microsoft senior vice president who heads the company’s Xbox business, said in a statement.

The Xbox 360 was the first of this latest generation of game machines to launch in the United States when it was released in November 2005. The PS3 and Wii were launched in the United States a year later.

The Wii is closing in on the Xbox 360, with 8.8 million units sold as of the end of March, while Sony has totaled 4.1 million PS3 units sold, according to market research firm NPD.

Ask.com has bought a stable of Internet reference sites that includes Dictionary.com in its latest effort to distinguish itself from online search leader Google Inc. and other much larger rivals.

Besides Dictionary.com, Ask is picking up Thesaurus.com and Reference.com in its acquisition of Lexico Publishing Group LLC. Terms of the deal, set to be announced Thursday, aren’t being disclosed.

With the addition of the widely used reference tools, Ask hopes to make more money showing ads to people looking for answers to basic questions. “We want to ’super serve’ those people,” said Jim Safka, who runs Ask for its corporate parent, IAC/InterActiveCorp.

Hackers often harness the combined power of thousands of virus-infected personal computers to pump out spam e-mail or disable targeted servers by overwhelming them with Internet traffic.

Now an Air Force colonel is suggesting the U.S. military build its own “botnet,” or network of remotely controlled computers, to be ready to attack the computer networks of foreign enemies.

The proposal Col. Charles Williamson III outlined in the May edition of the Armed Forces Journal highlights the creative cyberwarfare strategies being hashed out by the military as hackers abroad step up their attacks on U.S. government computer networks and others around the world.

“The days of the fortress are gone, even in cyberspace,” wrote Williamson, staff judge advocate for Air Force Intelligence in the Surveillance and Reconnaissance Agency at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas. “While America must harden itself in cyberspace, we cannot afford to let adversaries maneuver in that domain uncontested.”

Google has surpassed Yahoo to become the most popular Web site in the United States, according to comScore Inc.’s rankings by the number of unique monthly visitors.

Google Inc. has long been the Internet’s leader in search, but its audience has trailed Yahoo Inc.’s when counting other services such as e-mail and photo sharing.

April’s numbers, which Internet tracking firm comScore plans to formally release Thursday, show Google on top for the first time.

Quantum cryptography – commonly lauded as an absolutely secure avenue of data transfer – has been broken.

The advanced technology was thought to be unbreakable due to laws of quantum mechanics that state that quantum mechanical objects cannot be observed or manipulated without being disturbed.

In quantum cryptography, regular information is encrypted and decrypted with a quantum key. Any attempts to copy a quantum cryptographic key in transit will be noticeable as extra noise, and cause the communication to be aborted.

But a research team at Linköping University in Sweden claim that it is possible for an eavesdropper to extract the quantum cryptographic key without being discovered.

In a research paper, published in the International engineering journal IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Larsson has proposed a change in the quantum cryptography process that he expects will restore the security of the technology.

Hackers attacked the website of Zimbabwe’s state-owned Herald newspaper and shut it down for three days, the newspaper said on Monday.

The Herald is widely seen as the official mouthpiece of President Robert Mugabe’s ruling ZANU-PF party and has been critical of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) which won the country’s disputed March 29 elections.

The website www.herald.co.za has been unavailable since Saturday after it was hacked by someone calling himself “r4b00f”. Visitors were redirected to the website of a state-owned Sunday newspaper.

Users who thought the Windows XP operating system would be more reliable than its younger sibling Vista are being buffeted by reports that the latest update for XP, Service Pack 3, has its own problems.

A variety of complaints about SP3 are being posted on the Web, with users complaining about system crashes, spontaneous reboots, and other issues. On the Windows XP forum at Microsoft.com, for instance, a poster named Doug W. said that, after installing SP3, he had to use system restore “after three attempts, with different configurations each time.” He mentioned that his system has an Athlon chip from Advanced Micro Devices, and other users have reported similar problems with SP3 on AMD machines.