High-tech fluffy seals that respond to human touch are the latest weapon in the battle against depression for survivors of Japan's tsunami disaster.

"Paro" is being offered to people made homeless by the disaster and is offering a much-needed bit of affection with his burbling noises and the appreciative flapping of fins when he comes into contact with people.

Microsoft on Thursday launched an msnNOW website designed to deliver the "latest buzz" from Facebook, Twitter, Bing and BreakingNews.com.

The service at now.msn.com analyzes in real time Bing searches and updates at the popular online social networks to display hot topics and authoritative voices commenting about them.

Move over TV. Tablet computers are the new electronic babysitter.

A Nielsen survey published on Thursday broke down the ways tablet-owning parents of children under age 12 are using gadgets such as the iPad to keep the kids occupied.

Amazon's Kindle Fire, which went on sale in November, had a solid debut, leapfrogging Samsung tablets to become the top-selling device after Apple's iPad, a market research firm said Thursday.

The Seattle-based Amazon shipped 3.9 million Kindle Fires in the fourth quarter to grab 14.3 percent of the global tablet market, IHS iSuppli said.

Facebook on Thursday began testing a way for celebrities, journalists, athletes and others with massive followings to have their identities validated at the globally popular online social network.

"The new process enables people to verify their identities by submitting a government issued ID," Facebook said in an email response to an Agence France Presse inquiry.

Twitter announced it has finished rolling out overhauled pages crafted to boost the appeal of the message-sharing service to users around the world.

"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 startup's San Francisco headquarters in December.

Google and other online advertisers bypassed the privacy settings of an Apple web browser on iPhones and computers in order to survey millions of users, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday.

The Journal said the companies used a special code that tricks Apple's Safari software into letting them monitor the browsing habits of many users.

Researchers on Wednesday revealed a flaw in the way data is scrambled to protect the privacy of online banking, shopping and other kinds of sensitive exchanges.

A program used to generate random number sequences for encrypting digital information worked properly 99.8 percent of the time, meaning that two out of every thousand "keys" wouldn't thwart crooks or spies, the report warned.

U.S. telecom regulators have pulled the plug on an ambitious plan to build a high-speed wireless broadband network, citing potential interference with GPS navigation devices.

The Federal Communications Commission said late Tuesday that it was revoking permission for LightSquared to build a 4G-LTE network that the company had said would cover more than 90 percent of the United States by 2015.

Apple on Wednesday said application developers will have to get express permission from users before tapping into contact information stored in its popular gadgets, in a move to address privacy concerns.

The maker of iPhones, iPads, and iPods made its position clear after two U.S. lawmakers asked the California-based company whether "apps" running on the company's devices may be accessing private data without asking users.