Apple is taking aim at the textbook market.

The California-based gadget-maker unveiled a free iBooks 2 application for the iPad on Thursday that brings interactive textbooks to the popular tablet computer.

Twitter has acquired Summify, a Vancouver-based social news aggregator.

"We're extremely excited to announce that Summify has been acquired by Twitter!" Summify announced on its website on Thursday.

If a day without Wikipedia was a bother, think bigger. In this plugged-in world, we would barely be able to cope if the entire Internet went down in a city, state or country for a day or a week.

Sure, we'd survive. People have done it. Countries have, as Egypt did last year during the anti-government protests. And most of civilization went along until the 1990s without the Internet. But now we're so intertwined socially, financially and industrially that suddenly going back to the 1980s would hit the world as hard as a natural disaster, experts say.

YouTube is launching a film festival that will play out online and ultimately send 10 finalists to the Venice Film Festival.

The Google Inc.-owned video site announced Thursday that Your Film Festival will take submissions of short films up to 15 minutes in length between Feb. 2 and March 31. Fifty semi-finalists will be selected by Scott Free Productions, Ridley and Tony Scott's production company.

Social media giant Facebook released dozens of new applications to let users catalogue every aspect of their lives, from movies to books to food to fashion, and share them with friends.

"Whatever you love, whatever story it is you want to tell, you can add that to your timeline," said Carl Sjogreen, director of platform products for Facebook.

A senior Chinese propaganda official has said real-name registration for the nation's hugely popular microblogs will be expanded, as authorities tighten their grip on the web amid fear of unrest.

Beijing, Shanghai and the southern province of Guangdong have recently ordered new users of weibos -- microblogs similar to Twitter -- to register using their real names, making it easier for authorities to track them.

Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang is leaving the struggling Internet company, as it tries to revive its revenue growth and win over disgruntled shareholders under a new leader.

The departure, announced Tuesday, punctuates the end of an era at Yahoo, a tarnished Internet icon that has spent much of the last decade scrambling to catch up to Internet search leader Google Inc. — a company that got early encouragement and advice from Yang. It comes just two weeks after Yahoo Inc. hired former PayPal executive Scott Thompson as its CEO.

The French version of the U.S. socialite blogger Arianna Huffington's news website, the Huffington Post, will go online Monday, hoping to repeat the success that made her an Internet multimillionaire.

The team behind the French language "HuffPo" will put the site on the web on Monday shortly before an 0830 GMT press conference, it said.

Wikipedia went dark, Google blotted out its logo and other popular websites planned protests on Wednesday to voice concern over legislation in the U.S. Congress intended to crack down on online piracy.

Wikipedia shut down the English version of its online encyclopedia for 24 hours to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) introduced in the House of Representatives and the Senate version, the Protect IP Act (PIPA).

Online security researchers claimed Tuesday to have identified the members of a Russian gang of cyber criminals behind the Koobface computer virus which has attacked Facebook and other sites.

Facebook said meanwhile that its security team had helped knock out a computer server which controlled a Koobface "botnet" of malware-infected personal computers.