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.