Teens generally don’t think twice about including their first names and photos on their personal online profiles, but most refrain from using full names or making their profiles fully public, a new survey finds.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project reported Wednesday that two-thirds of teens with profiles on blogs or social-networking sites have restricted access to their profiles in some fashion, such as by requiring passwords or making them available only to friends on an approved list.

The study comes amid growing concerns about online predators and other dangers on popular online hangouts like News Corp.’s MySpace and Facebook, which encourage their youth-oriented visitors to expand their circles of friends through messaging tools and personal profile pages.

Microsoft Corp. agreed to pay up to $180 million to settle a class-action lawsuit, claiming the company has used its monopoly to overcharge citizens in the state of Iowa.

The judge presiding over the case in Polk County, Iowa, granted preliminary approval on Wednesday to the terms of the settlement. Microsoft announced it reached a settlement in the case in February, but did not disclose details at the time.

Some Oracle customers using the Windows operating system will have to wait another two weeks to receive a critical software update to their database software, thanks to a glitch that came up in testing the company’s latest patches.

On Tuesday, Oracle unveiled its quarterly release of software patches, fixing not only database flaws, but also bugs in a host of other applications. In total, the patches fix 36 vulnerabilities, 13 of which relate directly to the database.

However, the most serious database flaw discussed in April’s Critical Patch Update will not actually become available for users of the 9.2.0.8 version of Oracle’s database until April 30, due to an issue that was uncovered in testing, said Darius Wiles, a manager with Oracle Security Alerts. The bug affects only the Windows platform and is patched on all other supported versions of the database, he added.

North Americans have bought more than 100,000 HD DVD players, the next-gen optical disc format’s backers have claimed.

The figure doesn’t include HD DVD drives built into PCs. Nor does it factor in Microsoft’s external HD DVD drive for the Xbox 360 games console, leaving the 100,000 units almost entirely comprised of Toshiba’s three players.

Google will let webmasters remove sites it has indexed from search results more easily by using a long-demanded new tool.

It’s already very easy to avoid being indexed in the first place by Google, by editing the standard robots.txt file or by using meta tagging, but until now it was tricky for Joe Webmaster to have a listing pulled once it had entered the Google database.

The deindexing move follows Google’s defeat in court by Belgian newspaper owners, who were unhappy about it selling ads based on indexing their content. Google fought the case to the bitter end, and still plans to appeal.

A new form submission system, announced on Tuesday, makes it simpler for webmasters to contact the Googleplex to request deindexing of single pages, directories, whole sites, and cached content. Legally concerned webmasters will be able to alert Google if any of their smut turns up with SafeSearch enabled.

For years, computer makers have managed to wring a few extra bucks of profit out of each PC sale by bundling all sorts of third-party software.

While adding software, setting default search engines and including toolbars can all put money in PC makers pockets, the practice has also alienated some consumers who say all such “crapware” is clogging their hard drives and bogging down their systems.

For the moment, computer makers appear to be trying to walk a fine line, tweaking their approaches slightly but hoping not to have to slay a cash cow. Gateway, for example, offers only one program in each category, while Dell has added an option for some models that allow a user to configure a system with no trial software.

“We’ve seen the evolution,” said IDC analyst Richard Shim. “The desktop became kind of a billboard for internet service providers and software. Now the pendulum is swinging the other way.”

Web 2.0, a catchphrase for the latest generation of Web sites where users contribute their own text, pictures and video content, is far less participatory than commonly assumed, a study showed on Tuesday.

A tiny 0.16 percent of visits to Google’s top video-sharing site, YouTube, are by users seeking to upload video for others to watch, according to a study of online surfing data by Bill Tancer, an analyst with Web audience measurement firm Hitwise.

Similarly, only two-tenths of one percent of visits to Flickr, a popular photo-editing site owned by Yahoo Inc., are to upload new photos, the Hitwise study found.

The vast majority of visitors are the Internet equivalent of the television generation’s couch potatoes — voyeurs who like to watch rather than create, Tancer’s statistics show.

Two people have been arrested and cautioned for using someone else’s wireless Internet connection without permission, known as “piggy-backing”, British police said on Wednesday.

The practice, which sharply divides Internet users, has been fuelled by the rapid growth of fast wireless broadband in homes and people’s failure to secure their networks.

On Saturday, a man was arrested after neighbors spotted him sitting in a car outside a home in Redditch, Worcestershire, using a laptop computer to browse the Internet.

A 29-year-old woman was also arrested in a car in a similar incident in the same area last month.