Social news website Reddit, Wikipedia and scores of other smaller websites that went dark in protest of anti-piracy bills SOPA and PIPA helped turn the inside-the-Beltway lobbying racket on its head, Reddit's co-founder Alexis Ohanian said. The outcry from Internet users proved "that Americans actually still can dictate policy and not just lobbyists," Ohanian said.

Workers in the digital era can feel at times as if they are playing a video game, battling the barrage of e-mails and instant messages, juggling documents, Web sites and online calendars. To cope, people have become swift with the mouse, toggling among dozens of overlapping windows on a single monitor. But there is a growing new tactic for countering the data assault: the addition of a second computer screen. Or a third.

The iPhone may be great for consumers, but takes a nasty toll on wireless carriers' bottom line.

Virgin Media has brought to an end nearly three decades of losses for the British cable TV industry by reporting its first ever annual profit in 2011.

Amazon continues to ramp up the amount of video content it offers for free to its Amazon Prime subscribers. It announced a deal with Viacom that will bring the number of titles available as part of its Prime Instant Videos service to more that 15,000, or three times the amount of content it launched the service with.

With so much attention focused on online censorship in highly restrictive countries such as China, Iran and Syria, the discussion of global Internet freedom often has tended to exclude the large class of more moderate nations with rapidly growing online populations with only a rudimentary set of laws and policies for the Web.

Dozens of former Open Range Communications subscribers say the defunct broadband Internet provider continues to assess service charges from their credit-card and bank accounts.

Even before Facebook goes public, Silicon Valley is experiencing a surge in jobs and per-capita income, in contrast to the weak economic situation dogging the rest of the nation.

Cryptographers have cracked the encryption schemes used in a variety of satellite phones, a feat that makes it possible for attackers to surreptitiously monitor data received by vulnerable devices.

The FCC has said we'll reach a spectrum deficit as soon as 2013 if nothing is done. It will mean slower speeds, dropped calls, higher prices and less mobile innovation. Among other things, the challenge demands freeing up underused capacity in the airwaves, such as the television "white space" used as a buffer between channels. But the FCC, Congress, industry players and consumer advocates are arguing about the appropriate approach.