The annual hajj pilgrimage that draws millions of Muslim faithful to Mecca has gone hi-tech this year, with the Saudi authorities calling in latest electronic aides to help control the vast crowds.

Coping with the world's largest annual human assembly poses a security headache for Saudi Arabia -- guardian of the two holiest Muslim shrines in the cities of Mecca and Medina, the birthplaces of Islam.

The heads of China's largest Internet and technology firms have vowed to stop the "spread of harmful information" on the web after attending a three-day government workshop, state media said Sunday.

Nearly 40 companies, including e-commerce giant Alibaba, online portal Sina and search engine Baidu attended the seminar hosted by the State Internet Information Office, an online watchdog, the official Xinhua news agency said.

The voice-activated Siri assistant on Apple's iPhone 4S is a direct challenge to Google's search engine, chairman Eric Schmidt said.

"Apple has launched an entirely new approach to search technology with Siri, its voice-activated search and task-completion service built into the iPhone 4S," Schmidt acknowledged in a written response to lawmakers released Friday by the Senate antitrust subcommittee.

Wireless earpiece maker Jawbone is once again blending fashion and technology to help people make healthier choices with a little help from their beloved Apple gadgets.

The company this week unveiled UP, a smartly engineered wristband that synchs with software for iPhones, iPads and iPod touch devices to steer users toward better habits when it comes to eating, sleeping, and being active.

Microsoft on Friday was advising companies how to defend against infection by a Stuxnet-like Duqu virus.

The U.S. technology colossus released the "workaround" along with detailed information it said would enable anti-virus software companies to detect Duqu, which takes advantage of a flaw in Windows computer operating systems.

India aims to launch fourth-generation (4G) mobile services next year that will allow users to watch high-definition video and download content at a much faster rate, a minister said.

4G technology holds the promise of Internet speeds up to 10 times faster than typical third-generation networks.

A major Yahoo shareholder believes the slumping Internet Company would be better off without Jerry Yang on its board as it mulls a possible sale.

In a Friday letter to Yahoo's board, hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb asserts Yang has too many conflicts of interest to keep the board seat he has held since starting the company more than 16 years ago.

A Japanese supercomputer has broken its own record as the world's fastest machine by performing 10 quadrillion calculations per second, its developers announced.

The "K Computer", which has more than 88,000 central processing units -- the computer's "brain" -- compared with the fewer than four in the average desktop, smashed its own record of just over 8 quadrillion calculations during an experiment in October. A quadrillion is a thousand trillion.

In an anonymous industrial park in Virginia, in an unassuming brick building, the CIA is following tweets — up to 5 million a day.

At the agency's Open Source Center, a team known affectionately as the "vengeful librarians" also pores over Facebook, newspapers, TV news channels, local radio stations, Internet chat rooms — anything overseas that anyone can access and contribute to openly.

A fan site for a French rugby union team is recovering after hackers mistook it for the website of the German stock exchange and launched an attack.

The allezdax.com website for second division Dax in rugby-loving south-west France was shut down for two weeks after its usual 700 daily page hits -- 1,200 on match days -- skyrocketed to 80,000 because of the attack.