Users of Google’s Android phones, such as Samsung’s Galaxy S, use more data services than those with other smartphones, threatening to choke wireless network capacity, an industry study showed.

The growing popularity of Android-operated phones — made by companies including Asian vendors HTC Corp and Samsung Electronics — comes as handsets look set to overtake computers as the most used device for browsing the Web.

Wireless operators are keen on raising revenue from Internet browsing and the social networking boom as revenue from traditional voice calls decline, but they are facing increasingly congested networks.

Fearful of losing customers, only a few operators have publicly admitted to the problem of keeping pace with data traffic, but the majority is experiencing difficulties.

Internet activists defied efforts to end their online assaults against institutions seen as enemies of WikiLeaks on Thursday, promising more cyber attacks on targets starting with PayPal.

The campaign to avenge WikiLeaks against those who have obstructed its operations, calling itself Operation Payback, has already temporarily brought down the websites of credit-card giants Visa and MasterCard, and of the Swedish government.

A succession of U.S. institutions has withdrawn services from WikiLeaks after the website published thousands of sometimes embarrassing secret U.S. diplomatic reports that have caused strains between Washington and several allies.

Online retail and web-hosting powerhouse Amazon last week stopped hosting WikiLeaks’ website, and on Thursday it briefly became the main target of the pro-WikiLeaks campaigners — before they admitted it was too big for them, for the moment.

“We cannot attack Amazon, currently. The previous schedule was to do so, but we don’t have enough forces,” read one message on Twitter.

The activists said they would instead attack PayPal, which has suspended the WikiLeaks account that the organization had used to collect donations. MasterCard and Visa had also become targets after stopping processing donations.

At 1:10 pm EST, the websites of PayPal, Amazon — a key Christmas shopping destination — MasterCard and Visa all appeared to be functioning normally.

Source: Reuters

Facebook said it had removed the activists’ Operation Payback page on Thursday because it was promoting a distributed denial of service attack — a form of freezing websites by bombarding them with requests that is illegal in many countries.

The campaign also disappeared briefly from Twitter before reappearing in a different guise. Twitter declined to comment.

A group of “crush fetishists” has caused an online storm in China after uploading graphic videos showing attractive young Chinese women crushing small rabbits.

In the widely circulated videos, several smiling women are seen in turn cuddling and playing with small bunnies just before crushing them as other giggling girls look on.

In one scene, a young woman places a bunny on a table before covering it with a plate of glass and sitting on it for about a minute. She then lifts the glass up to reveal the lifeless bunny, blood oozing from its snout.

Another of the girls dispatches one of the rodents by crushing it under her high heels.

The videos have sparked a heated response from web-users, who launched what is known in China as a “flesh search” — an effort to reveal the girls’ true identities.

Facebook users are inadvertently providing access to their names and in some cases even their friend’s names to advertising and Internet tracking companies, through some popular applications, the Wall Street Journal said.

According to the Journal’s investigation, the issue affects tens of millions of Facebook app users, including people who set their profiles to Facebook’s strictest privacy settings, the paper said.

The practice violates Facebook’s rules and raises questions about its ability to keep identifiable information about its users’ activities secure, the paper said.

On Sunday, a Facebook spokesman told the Journal that it is taking steps to “dramatically limit” the exposure of users’ personal information.

Most of the time, if you get a speeding ticket you just grumble about it and pay the fine. However, after receiving a $90 speeding ticket in Bluff City, Tennessee, Brian McCrary discovered a third option. The Bluff City Police Department had forgotten to renew their domain name, BluffCityPD.com, and let it expire. McCrary bought the domain name for $80 and posted his side of the story with information about speed traps in Bluff City and the $250,000 per month they cost the town’s 1,500 residents.

Facebook is trying to make it easier for people to share their updates selectively and draw distinctions between friends, family members and co-workers on the Web’s biggest social hub.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO, unveiled the latest changes Wednesday at a press conference that marked his first public appearance since last Friday’s debut of “The Social Network,” a movie tracing Facebook’s origins and evolution.

Google is introducing a new format for images: WebP.

Images on the web in this format — which CNET reports will be officially announced later today — will have smaller file sizes, load faster and relieve a lot of overclocked networks. They won’t necessarily look better — WebP images are as “glossy” as JPEGs — but the files might be around 40% smaller than JPEG files.

And since Google (Google) estimates 65% of the bytes on the web are images, that represents a quarter of the total amount of data we access and transmit online. Who wouldn’t change formats for a web that could be 26% faster?

Advertisers will be allowed to purchase placement in lists of “who to follow” recommendations targeted to users with particular interests on Twitter, according to the latest report by Peter Kafka on the Wall St. Journal’s AllThingsD. Kafka reports that the new ad model will be unveiled at the IAB conference in New York City tomorrow.

It’s against Twitter’s Terms of Service for outside parties to sell followers on the popular messaging service, but that’s not just because Twitter wants all the revenues for themselves. Most “buy followers” services are completely untargeted and negatively impact the user experience on the network. This new feature may work out very well for all parties involved, including Twitter users. Early reaction on Twitter, however, is not positive.

Internet domain name registry GoDaddy.com has put itself up for sale, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.

The privately held company could fetch more than $1 billion in an auction, the report said, citing people familiar with the matter.

GoDaddy has hired investment bank Qatalyst Partners, the Journal reported. Private equity firms are expected to bid.

The company declined to comment.

GoDaddy is the world’s largest domain name registrar. The company was founded by Bob Parsons in 1997, and says it has more than 43 million domains under management.

Ask.com, the Internet search engine owned by IAC/InterActive Corp, is seeking some human help answering web surfers’ questions.

The company has begun testing a new service that lets users of its search engine submit questions to other Ask.com visitors, tapping into the powerful social networking trends that are increasingly gaining popularity on the Web.

The new service represents a striking shift for the company, which like most Internet search engines has long sought to distinguish itself based on the brawn of its computer algorithms.

But with only 3.6 percent share of the U.S. search market in June according to analytics firm comScore, Ask.com is looking for ways to differentiate itself from rivals Google Inc, Yahoo Inc and Microsoft Corp.

Online video site Hulu, under pressure from its media company parents to generate a bigger profit, launched a subscription service Tuesday with complete access to back episodes of popular television shows.

For $9.99 a month, subscribers can get the entire current season of “Glee,” “The Office,” “House” and other shows from broadcasters ABC, Fox and NBC, as well as all the past seasons of several series. The popular, ad-supported website will continue to have a few recent episodes for free online.

In a surprise move, however, paying subscribers will get the same number of ads as users of the free website.

Hulu Chief Executive Jason Kilar said keeping ads was necessary to help keep the subscription price low.

After shelling out a reported $90 million to buy PlanetAll in 1998, Amazon shuttered the site in 2000, explaining that ‘it seemed really superfluous to have it running beside Friends and Favorites.’ But years later in a 2008 patent filing, Amazon described the acquired PlanetAll technology to the USPTO in very Facebook-like terms. And on Tuesday, the USPTO issued US Patent No. 7,739,139 to Amazon for its invention, the Social Networking System, which Amazon describes thusly: ‘A networked computer system provides various services for assisting users in locating, and establishing contact relationships with, other users.