Google Inc may make an announcement next Monday about whether it will pull out from China, the China Business News reported on Friday, quoting an unnamed Google employee.

The report also said a local authorized agent had received unconfirmed information that Google would leave China on April 10.

Hackers have flooded the Internet with virus-tainted spam that targets Facebook’s estimated 400 million users in an effort to steal banking passwords and gather other sensitive information.

The emails tell recipients that the passwords on their Facebook accounts have been reset, urging them to click on an attachment to obtain new login credentials, according to anti-virus software maker McAfee Inc.

If the attachment is opened, it downloads several types of malicious software, including a program that steals passwords, McAfee said on Wednesday.

Google Inc is working with Intel Corp and Sony Corp to develop a new class of Internet-enabled televisions and set top boxes, according to a media report.

The effort, known as Google TV, has been under way for several months and is based on Google’s Android software.

According to the report, the partners hope to make it easy for consumers to use Web applications like Twitter on their TVs and to entice software developers to create new applications to run on Google TV.

Google has begun testing the set top box technology with Dish Network, the Times said.

Copyright holders have given up legal efforts to force Norwegian ISP Telenor to block filesharing site The Pirate Bay, one of the parties to the case said.

The copyright holders, led by Norway’s performing rights society TONO and by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry Norway (IFPI Norge) Norway have lost two rounds in the Norwegian court system, and have now decided against appealing the case to Norway’s supreme court, the organisations said.

The goal was to see if it under Norwegian law is possible to order an ISP to block access to The Pirate Bay, and two clear court decisions have now said that is not the case, according to TONO. Spending more resources on the case would at this point be a waste, according to IFPI.

MySpace has taken a bold step and allowed a large quantity of bulk user data to be put up for sale on startup data marketplace InfoChimps. Data offered includes user playlists, mood updates, mobile updates, photos, vents, reviews, blog posts, names and zipcodes. Friend lists are not included. Remember, Facebook and Twitter may be the name of the game these days in tech circles, but MySpace still sees 1 billion user status updates posted every month. Those updates will now be available for bulk analysis.

This user data is intended for crunching by everyone from academic researchers to music industry information scientists. Will people buy the data and make interesting use of it? Will MySpace users be ok with that?

Google Inc. has upgraded its Nexus One phone so it works on the same high-speed wireless network as Apple Inc.’s iPhone, putting the increasingly antagonistic rivals on an even more direct collision course in the mobile market.

The latest version of the Nexus One unveiled Tuesday could make the device a more serious challenger to the iPhone, which uses AT&T Inc.’s 3G network as its main communications channel in the United States.

The Nexus One had been running on AT&T’s slower networks since Google began selling the handset in early January. The switch to AT&T’s faster system represents another step in Google’s attempt to siphon sales from Apple’s iPhone with its own version of a sleek mobile phone that relies on touch-screen technology.

Potentially toughening the competitive landscape for its own Silverlight rich Internet application platform, Microsoft will expand support for the HTML5 specification in its Internet Explorer 9 browser, under a plan revealed Tuesday.

In an announcement at the Mix10 conference in Las Vegas, Microsoft unveiled the Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview, which features expanded support for the World Wide Web Consortium HTML5 specification as well as hardware-accelerated graphics and text and a new JavaScript engine, known as “chakra.” These efforts will enable developers to use the same markup and deliver graphically and functionally rich Web applications, Microsoft said. The preview is available at Microsoft’s IE test-drive Web site.

Maxi Sopo was having so much fun “living in paradise” in Mexico that he posted about it on Facebook so all his friends could follow his adventures. Others were watching, too: A federal prosecutor in Seattle, where Sopo was wanted on bank fraud charges.

Tracking Sopo through his public “friends” list, the prosecutor found his address and had Mexican authorities arrest him. Instead of sipping pina coladas, Sopo is awaiting extradition to the U.S.

Sopo learned the hard way: The Feds are on Facebook. And MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter, too.

Microsoft has released automated workarounds designed to immunize users against a critical vulnerability in earlier versions of Internet Explorer, which criminals are already exploiting online.

The “Fix It” updates were released over the weekend for people who still use IE versions 6 and 7. The fixes are by no means foolproof. One of them disables the so-called peer factory functionality the browser may need to carry out certain tasks, such as printing. The other turns on a measure known as DEP, or data execution prevention, on more recent operating systems.

The releases are meant to serve as temporary fixes until an update is offered that patches the hole. Microsoft disclosed the vulnerability last week and warned that crooks are already using it to remotely execute malicious code on customers’ computers.

According to AppleInsider, Apple will finally be bringing a “full-on solution” to multi-tasking with iPhone OS 4.0 which is set to debut this summer. Presumably that means that third-party apps will finally be allowed to run in the background on the phone. The sources were scant on details about how it would remedy performance, battery life, and security issues, but they did say that the multi-tasking would use an interface similar to that in the Mac versions of OS X.

Google has unveiled an extensions gallery for Google Wave, the crossbreeds email with IM and document sharing.

The new extensions gallery - announced today - appears as a link in the navigation panel that runs down the lefthand side of the Wave UI.

The gallery displays extensions as a list of “waves” - the multifaceted conversation threads that serve as the platform’s basic building blocks. These waves include installers that then add the extension as an option on the toolbar that appears when you open a wave. The gallery is pre-populated with about 15 extensions.

Netflix has canceled a contest designed to improve its movie recommendation system out of concern it might compromise the privacy of its customers.

The decision was announced in a blog post, published Friday, by Netflix chief product officer Neil Hunt. A previous competition that handed over anonymous user data to more than 50,000 contestants ended poorly after researchers showed it was possible to identify individuals’ viewing habits by connecting the dots.

“In the past few months, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) asked us how a Netflix Prize sequel might affect Netflix members’ privacy, and a lawsuit was filed by KamberLaw LLC pertaining to the sequel,” Hunt wrote. “In light of all this, we have decided to not pursue the Netflix Prize sequel that we announced on August 6, 2009.”