Government regulators are trying to shut down a company they say secretly downloaded spyware onto the computers of unwitting internet users, rendering them helpless to a flood of pop-up ads, computer crashes and other annoyances. The Federal Trade Commission accused Walter Rines of Stratham, New Hampshire, and his company, Odysseus Marketing, of luring computer users with the promise of free software that would make peer-to-peer file sharing anonymous. The claim was bogus, the agency said, and the software was bundled with spyware that was secretly downloaded onto computers.

Video delivered over the Internet, which has been embraced by media and Internet giants like Viacom and Yahoo, is quickly shaping up as a way for smaller producers to reach an audience without having to cut deals with movie studios and the big networks that are the traditional gatekeepers of television.

Google Inc. is combining its popular online maps with its local search features, continuing a quest to increase its already rapidly rising advertising revenue. With the change, Google's local search tools for the United States and Canada are being taken out of the "beta," or testing, phase, said Bret Taylor, the product's manager. The company's local search engines for the United Kingdom, Japan and China remain in beta - a label that technology companies attach to products that don't have all the bugs worked out.

Google Inc. will promote Sun Microsystems Inc.'s word processing and office software products in an alliance announced on Tuesday that could mark a first step toward challenging Microsoft Corp's dominance of the computer users' desktops. Computer maker Sun and Web search company Google gave few details, saying they would jointly promote OpenOffice, Sun's free office productivity software that competes with Microsoft's Office suite of software, and Sun's Java software platform, which runs thousands of PC programs.

Malicious hackers could take down cellular networks in large cities by inundating their popular text-messaging services with the equivalent of spam, said computer security researchers, who will announce the findings of their research today. Such an attack is possible, the researchers say, because cellphone companies provide the text-messaging service to their networks in a way that could allow an attacker who jams the message system to disable the voice network as well.

Universal Music Group is the first company to make its catalog available on Motorola Inc.'s Motorola iRadio, the commercial-free music and talk mobile phone service expected to launch in January. The partners jointly made the announcement Tuesday. U2, Kanye West, Bon Jovi and Eminem are among the many hundreds of artists whose music therefore will be available via iRadio. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Yahoo Inc. has acquired Upcoming.org, an online event planning site that's expected to infuse the Internet powerhouse with more content about local communities. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company confirmed the deal late Tuesday without disclosing financial terms of the acquisition. Los Angeles-based Upcoming acts as a social calendar that depends on its users to post free listings about a wide range of upcoming events, from local rock concerts to picnics in the park.

The latest challenger to Explorer and Firefox aims to beat the big guys by emphasizing blogging, networking, and online communities.

Microsoft Corp. has broken off licensing talks with the four global music companies, raising questions about the software giant's plans to start a subscription-based music service, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday, citing unnamed sources.

As the internet makes greater inroads into everyday life, more people are finding they're leaving an accidental trail of digital bread crumbs on the web -- where Google's merciless crawlers vacuum them up and regurgitate them for anyone who cares to type in a name. Our growing Googleability has already changed the face of dating and hiring, and has become a real concern to spousal-abuse victims and others with life-and-death privacy needs.