Hewlett-Packard said Friday it is making the webOS operating system for mobile devices it acquired from Palm last year available to the open source community.

HP will continue to develop and support webOS, but the software platform will become open source, meaning that developers anywhere can tinker with it as they wish and it will be available for anyone to use free of charge.

Web security company Blue Coat Systems said Friday it is being acquired by a private investment group in a deal worth $1.3 billion.

The investor group led by private equity investment firm Thoma Bravo will pay $25.81 per share in cash to Blue Coat shareholders for each share of common stock they own, a 48 percent premium over Blue Coat's closing price Thursday.

Google is rolling out a feature that lets members of its online social network automatically find themselves in photos posted by friends.

The "Find My Face" feature being added to Google+ over the next several days is opt-in only, meaning people have to make a point to turn it on.

Yahoo! is adding a comedy channel to its online line-up, kicking it off with a "CrazyStupidPolitics" show starring Bill Maher live in Silicon Valley in February.

"Bill Maher's special is a groundbreaking event, not only for Yahoo! and Bill but for the Internet as the first ever, live, free broadcast online," said Erin McPherson, head of Yahoo! Video.

Twitter on Thursday began rolling out overhauled pages crafted to boost the appeal of the message-sharing service to worldwide users.

"At the very core there are fewer places you have to click and less you have to learn," Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey said as he and other executives unveiled the changes at the flourishing startup's new San Francisco offices.

A plan to expand the number of Internet domain names came under fire in the US Congress on Thursday, a day after the head of the Federal Trade Commission said it could potentially be a "disaster."

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the global body which manages the Domain Name System that forms the technical backbone of the Web, will begin taking applications in January for new generic top-level domains (gTLDs), the suffixes such as .com, .net or .org.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Thursday warned Internet firms to avoid offering the "tools of oppression" to authoritarian Middle East regimes trying to crush democracy protests.

Clinton urged private companies to "embrace (their) role in protecting Internet freedom" and ensure protection of ordinary people as well as political activists.

Apple has lost a long-running legal battle against a Taiwanese-owned company that it claimed was illegally using its iconic iPad trademark in China, court officials and state media said.

A court in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen ruled Tuesday that Apple lacked "supporting facts and evidence" for its claim that Proview Technology (Shenzhen) was infringing the US company's iconic tablet computer trademark.

South Korea has tightened monitoring of popular social networking sites to curb illicit content including an upsurge in North Korean propaganda, officials said Thursday.

The Korea Communications Standards Commission said an eight-member team was launched on Wednesday to examine Facebook and Twitter posts and smartphone applications.

The Kremlin reacted furiously on Wednesday after an obscene posting mocking liberal blogger Alexei Navalny, who was jailed in this week's protests, reappeared on President Dmitry Medvedev's Twitter feed.

"Last night an inappropriate retweet appeared on Dmitry Medvedev's Twitter account," the Kremlin said in a curt statement.