The chief executive of Research In Motion said he's disappointed the new BlackBerry won't be released in the United States until mid-March, but he said early data suggests sales in the U.K. are above expectations.

Thorsten Heins said in an interview Monday with The Associated Press that he was disappointed in the mid-March U.S. release date. But he said the U.S. and its phone carriers have a rigid testing system.

Ads pegged to Google search results can be racially biased because of how certain names are associated with blacks or whites, according to a new study.

Harvard University professor Latanya Sweeney found "statistically significant discrimination" when comparing ads served with results from online searches made using names associated with blacks and those with whites.

Somalia's al-Qaida linked Shebab insurgents have returned to Twitter with a new account, less than two weeks since they were suspended after posting photographs of a French commando they had killed.

"For what it’s worth, shooting the messenger and suppressing the truth by silencing your opponents isn’t quite the way to win the war of ideas," read one of the messages on the new account, which opened late Sunday.

A secret legal review has concluded that the U.S. president has the power to order preemptive cyber strikes if the United States discovers credible evidence of a major digital attack against it is in the offing, The New York Times reported Monday.

Citing unnamed officials involved in the review, the newspaper said the new policy will also govern how the intelligence agencies can carry out searches of overseas computer networks for signs of potential attacks on the United States and, if the president approves, attack adversaries with a destructive code -- even if there is no declared war.

Hackers attacked the official website of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki on Saturday, posting a message critical of the leader who has faced weeks of protests demanding he quit.

The message, posted by a group calling themselves "Team Kuwait Hackers", described Maliki as a "tyrant" and warned him that he would end up like Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who has been grappling with a 22-month uprising.

Though yet to be launched in North America, BlackBerry's new smartphones were already for sale online Friday, stirring bidding frenzies.

Sellers claimed they obtained the sleek new handsets at launch events in New York, Toronto, Dubai, London and Johannesburg. Journalists and analysts who attended the events were given a BlackBerry Z10, which retails for $599.

Wickr co-founder Nico Sell is working toward "geek utopia," a world where people hold the power when it comes to who sees what they share on the Internet or from their phones.

The startup's services -- giving users of Apple gadgets uncrackable communications that can self-destruct -- were beefed up this week, just in time for reports of cyber spies trying to snoop on Western journalists covering China.

A Dutch man was sentenced to 12 years in a U.S. prison on Friday for being an online "broker" for credit card numbers stolen in a computer hacking conspiracy.

David Schrooten struck a plea bargain in federal court in Seattle after being extradited from Romania for his role in a computer hacking and credit card fraud scheme, prosecutors said.

Twitter said Friday it was hammered by a "sophisticated" cyber attack similar to those that recently hit major Western news outlets, and that the passwords of about 250,000 users were stolen.

"This attack was not the work of amateurs, and we do not believe it was an isolated incident," Twitter information security director Bob Lord said in a blog post.

Google and France signed an agreement Friday resolving a dispute with French news websites that sees the U.S. Internet search giant setting up a 60 million euro fund to help old media adapt to the digital age.

"France is proud to have reached this agreement with Google, the first of its kind in the world," the French president's office said on Twitter after Francois Hollande and Google chief Eric Schmidt signed the accord.