U.S. telecom giant Verizon is teaming up with Coinstar, which operates Redbox movie rental kiosks, to launch a video service to challenge market leader Netflix.

Verizon and Coinstar said Monday they had formed a joint venture that will add an online streaming option to the 35,400 Redbox self-service vending machines located in grocery stores, McDonald's restaurants and other sites.

An Italian computer science professor whose research helped inspire Google launched a new search engine and social media network on Monday that he hopes will challenge the U.S. technology giant.

The new site entitled "Volunia" allows users to view the components of particular websites to find the subject of interest more quickly and to interact with registered users who might be looking at the same web pages.

BTJunkie, a popular file-sharing indexing site, said Monday it was voluntarily shutting down, less than three weeks after the U.S. closure of Megaupload in a crackdown on piracy of music, films and other materials.

"This is the end of the line my friends," BTJunkie said in a brief message posted on the home page of the site along with the dates of its existence: "2005-2012."

Google Doodle, which highlights anniversaries on the Google search engine, Monday showcased Francois Truffaut, the late French "new wave" film-maker who would have turned 80 on Monday.

Truffaut, who died of cancer at age 52, notably directed the films "the 400 blows" (1959), "Jules and Jim" (1962), and "The last metro" (1980) which Google Doodle illustrators chose to remember on the search engine's homepage.

Online giants Google and Facebook said Monday they had removed allegedly offensive content on their Indian sites as part of a court case seen as a test for Internet control and censorship.

They have been named alongside another 19 Internet firms in private criminal and civil cases being heard in a New Delhi court which will determine whether they can be held responsible for obscene material generated online by users.

Twitter said users were firing off a record 10,000 tweets per second in the final three minutes of the Super Bowl.

Madonna's half-time performance during the New York Giants 21-17 victory over the New England Patriots also saw a surge in Twitter activity with users tapping out an average of 8,000 tweets per second for five minutes, the San Francisco-based short-messaging service said on its Twitter feed.

A group linked to the hacker network Anonymous on Saturday said it had attacked the Swedish government's website, bringing it down for periods of time by overloading it with traffic.

CyberForce used Twitter to claim responsibility, saying "We have succeeded in the attack against the government."

Facebook's billionaire CEO Mark Zuckerberg calls himself a hacker.

For most people, that word means something malicious — shady criminals who listen in on private voicemails, or anonymous villains who cripple websites and break into email accounts.

A new not-for-profit media group was launched in Australia Monday entirely funded by a philanthropist who has pumped Aus$15 million into a start-up that promises "fearless, independent" journalism.

The online Global Mail will be operating in an environment dominated by Fairfax and Rupert Murdoch's News Limited but is confident it can carve a niche.

Controversial tweets by a Khmer Rouge tribunal judge have inflamed a damaging public spat between the U.N. and Cambodia and raised questions over how Twitter is used in the courts.

Laurent Kasper-Ansermet has angered Phnom Penh by using the micro-blogging site to draw attention to the court's much-criticized handling of two possible new Khmer Rouge crimes against humanity cases.