Registration for .asia top-level Internet domain names began Tuesday for companies and other legal entities, giving corporations an opportunity to secure trademarked domain names without having to contend with cybersquatters.

About 90 authorized registrars worldwide began accepting applications for corporations in the Asia-Pacific region, which includes Australia and New Zealand, until Jan. 15, 2008. Companies and organizations are required to prove that they are conducting business in the region in order to complete registration. Public registration for .asia will begin in February 2008.

France’s Albert Fert and Germany’s Peter Gruenberg won the 2007 Nobel Prize for physics on Tuesday for a breakthrough in nanotechnology that lets huge amounts of data be squeezed into ever-smaller spaces.

Gadgets from powerful laptops to iPods owe their existence to the discovery.

The 10-million Swedish crown ($1.54 million) prize, awarded by The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, recognized the pair for revealing a physical effect called giant magnetoresistance.

“It is thanks to this technology that it has been possible to miniaturize hard disks so radically in recent years,” the academy said in a statement.

A critic of Jordan’s royal family was sentenced to two years in jail on Tuesday for sending e-mails abroad that the court ruled to be carrying “false news” and harmful to the dignity of the state.

The verdict against Ahmad Oweidi al-Abbadi, after a two-month trial, comes at a time that human rights groups are voicing concern about what they call an official clampdown on the media.

Judicial sources said Abbadi, a right wing former deputy, was found guilty on three charges of undermining state dignity, publishing “false news” on e-mails sent to foreign figures and illegally distributing leaflets.

Abbadi had pleaded not guilty to all charges.

Before his arrest, Abbadi had stepped up criticism of Jordan’s royal family and accused top officials of corruption on a Web site he ran. Supporters said he had sent an e-mail to U.S. Senate Majority leader Harry Reid decrying what he called a steep rise in official corruption.

Authorities announced this month that Web sites would be subject to a tough press law that is widely seen as censorship. The law bans articles seen as being in contempt of religion, damaging to national unity or offensive to public morals.

Google, the newly-christened $600-per-share company, unveiled on Tuesday evening the fifth generation of its Google Enterprise Search Appliance.

A combination of hardware preloaded with software, the latest version addresses a major enterprise pain point: Searching through multiple content repositories or ECM (Enterprise Content Management) systems.

The Google capability, called Universal Search, connects to four different content repositories — Documentum, FileNet, Livelink, and SharePoint — and can index content from all four.

Google is also unveiling an open framework so that partners like ECM companies Stellent and Hummingbird that are not part of the current announcement can build connectors to the Universal Search system, according to Nitin Mangtani, lead product manager for enterprise search at Google .

While every ECM company offers its own search capabilities, the Google appliance can index and search all four repositories simultaneously with a single keyword search.

In addition to searching ECMS, Universal Search will also connect to content stored in Google Apps and hosted by Google.

Nintendo Co Ltd said on Wednesday it would start selling its “Wii Fit” home fitness game in Japan in time for the year-end shopping season, sending its shares to a record high.

The game, which goes on sale on December 1 for 8,800 yen ($75), features a pressure-sensing mat called the “Wii Balance Board,” which looks like a set of bathroom scales and can sense when a person moves and leans, enabling players to “head” virtual soccer balls and experience ski jumping on a TV screen.

The board can also be used for such activities as yoga and aerobics.

BitTorrent Inc., which was co-founded by the developer of a software program widely used to share pirated music and video over the Web, plans to start helping media companies stream videos over the Internet.

The company unveiled the service on Tuesday, six years after its chief executive, Bram Cohen, created the BitTorrent peer-to-peer file-sharing technology.

While the BitTorrent software has been notorious as a tool for piracy, Cohen said he spent three years working to find ways to commercialize the technology

In February, the privately held company opened an online video store at www.bittorrent.com to sell videos licensed from Hollywood studios. Now it is offering that distribution technology to other companies.

BitTorrent announced the new service on Tuesday, dubbed BitTorrent DNA, saying its first customer, Brightcove, will use it to distribute streaming video programs over the Internet.

Brightcove currently distributes video programs over the Internet for companies including CBS Corp, News Corp’s Fox Entertainment Group, Viacom Inc’s MTV Networks and New York Times Co.

The two companies did not say which programs Brightcove will distribute over BitTorrent, which also allows files to be shared. As one user downloads a file, or watches a streaming video, BitTorrent DNA software sends data to another computer seeking the same files.

The Yellow Pages Group, Canada’s largest phone book publisher, said on Tuesday said it had a deal with Google Inc. to market its customer advertisements on-line through Google AdWords.

AdWords will allow Yellow Pages customers to be associated with certain keywords so that their adverts will appear beside search results for Google and Google Maps Internet searches.

Microsoft Corp. issued six security patches in a regular update Tuesday, among them fixes for flaws that could let hackers hijack computers using a Web browser.

The software maker gave four of the security updates its most urgent “critical” rating.

Within that group, Microsoft used a single update to fix several separate flaws found in different versions of the Internet Explorer Web browser, including the most recent, IE7.

That patch blocks any attempts by attackers to put fake content into the address bar of a Web browser - a technique used in phishing scams to convince Web surfers that a fake site is actually their bank, for example.

The patch is also meant to prevent hackers from breaking into Web surfers’ computers using specially crafted Web pages.