Internet scams have increased in Singapore as consumers in the tech-savvy city-state increasingly turn to online shopping, but the overall crime rate fell to a 20-year low, police said Tuesday.

The online scams mainly hit people who made purchases in response to advertisements offering discounts on services such as hotel accommodation, holiday packages and car rental, but did not receive what they paid for.

Microblog users in Beijing who do not register using their real names by mid-March will be banned from posting comments, a local official said Wednesday, as authorities tighten their grip on the web.

The Chinese capital recently ordered users of weibos -- popular microblogs similar to Twitter -- to register using their real names, making it easier for authorities to track them if they post sensitive material.

World-leading mobile phone maker Nokia intends to cut 4,000 jobs at its smartphone manufacturing facilities in Finland, Hungary and Mexico by the end of 2012, it said on Wednesday.

"The expected headcount impact by country is 2,300 in Komarom (Hungary), 700 in Reynosa (Mexico) and 1,000 in Salo (Finland)," company spokesman James Etheridge told Agence France Presse.

U.S. telecom giant Verizon is teaming up with Coinstar, which operates Redbox movie rental kiosks, to launch a video service to challenge market leader Netflix.

Verizon and Coinstar said Monday they had formed a joint venture that will add an online streaming option to the 35,400 Redbox self-service vending machines located in grocery stores, McDonald's restaurants and other sites.

An Italian computer science professor whose research helped inspire Google launched a new search engine and social media network on Monday that he hopes will challenge the U.S. technology giant.

The new site entitled "Volunia" allows users to view the components of particular websites to find the subject of interest more quickly and to interact with registered users who might be looking at the same web pages.

BTJunkie, a popular file-sharing indexing site, said Monday it was voluntarily shutting down, less than three weeks after the U.S. closure of Megaupload in a crackdown on piracy of music, films and other materials.

"This is the end of the line my friends," BTJunkie said in a brief message posted on the home page of the site along with the dates of its existence: "2005-2012."

Google Doodle, which highlights anniversaries on the Google search engine, Monday showcased Francois Truffaut, the late French "new wave" film-maker who would have turned 80 on Monday.

Truffaut, who died of cancer at age 52, notably directed the films "the 400 blows" (1959), "Jules and Jim" (1962), and "The last metro" (1980) which Google Doodle illustrators chose to remember on the search engine's homepage.

Online giants Google and Facebook said Monday they had removed allegedly offensive content on their Indian sites as part of a court case seen as a test for Internet control and censorship.

They have been named alongside another 19 Internet firms in private criminal and civil cases being heard in a New Delhi court which will determine whether they can be held responsible for obscene material generated online by users.

Twitter said users were firing off a record 10,000 tweets per second in the final three minutes of the Super Bowl.

Madonna's half-time performance during the New York Giants 21-17 victory over the New England Patriots also saw a surge in Twitter activity with users tapping out an average of 8,000 tweets per second for five minutes, the San Francisco-based short-messaging service said on its Twitter feed.

A group linked to the hacker network Anonymous on Saturday said it had attacked the Swedish government's website, bringing it down for periods of time by overloading it with traffic.

CyberForce used Twitter to claim responsibility, saying "We have succeeded in the attack against the government."