Stories by Peter Sayer

Nokia reported flat sales for the second quarter, with a 40 percent year-on-year drop in earnings. The company is still seeing customers shun its high-end smartphones.

Disagreements between the European Union and the US over whether to release the current negotiating text of a secretive international copyright treaty became moot this week, with the publication on a French website of a leaked version of the latest draft of the treaty.

Motorola has found a buyer for its wireless network equipment unit: Nokia Siemens Networks will pay US$1.2 billion for most of that business, the companies announced Monday.

German privacy regulators have welcomed a proposal to extend laws protecting Germans' right to privacy to cover use of their own image and that of their homes in online street panoramas, the Hamburg privacy regulator said Monday.

Google Chrome is now the third-most-popular browser in the U.S., behind Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Mozilla's Firefox, but ahead of Apple's Safari for the first time, according to a study by Web analytics company StatCounter.

Pornography will have its own top-level domain, dot-XXX, the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers decided Friday.

Web site operators will be able to register domain names written entirely in Chinese characters, including the final characters to the right of the last dot, in a matter of months.

A French business school plans to trade Google Apps, used by around half its staff and students, for Microsoft's rival Live@edu service.

Toshiba has spent the last 25 years refining the basic laptop design of flat screen, x86 processor, full-size keyboard and removable storage. Its Portege R700 will continue that tradition when it goes on sale next quarter, but two other new portable computers Toshiba will release around the same time take the company in new directions.

French hosting company ViFiB thinks it can save on expensive data center space by placing its servers in homes and offices with broadband Internet access, putting it somewhere between cloud computing services such as Amazon Web Services and distributed computing projects such as SETI@home.

French server and services company Bull has just turned on a new supercomputer for the French Atomic Energy Authority (CEA) that it hopes will reach a peak performance of 1.25 petaflops later this year.

No change: That's the result of an 18-monthlong appeals process that the president of the European Patent Office hoped would clarify the rules on whether software may be patented.

ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, has approved the first four country-code domain names written in non-Latin script, it announced Tuesday.

Telecommunications carrier CenturyTel has agreed to buy Qwest Communications International for around US$10.6 billion in stock. The merged company will operate around 17 million phone lines and serve 5 million broadband customers across 37 U.S. states.

SAP plans to acquire TechniData, a German company that provides software to help businesses comply with environmental, health and safety regulations.