Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt will take center stage at a Senate hearing Wednesday into whether the Internet giant is abusing its dominant position in online search.

The Mountain View, California-based Google has drawn increasing scrutiny from U.S. and European regulators as it has grown over the years from a scrappy Silicon Valley startup into an Internet powerhouse.

Is it ever OK to tweet that a girl's a "slut"? How about slinging offensive names for homosexuals in a post to a friend on Facebook? Or texting a racial slur? Most young people think it's all right when friends are joking around with each other, according to a new poll.

Jaded by the Internet free-for-all, teens and 20-somethings shrug off offensive words and name-calling that would probably appall their parents, teachers and future bosses. And an Associated Press-MTV poll shows they don't worry much about whether the things they tap into their cellphones and laptops could reach a wider audience and get them into trouble.

Netflix's top executive acknowledged that he "messed up" the video giant's new pricing scheme and announced a rebranding of the DVD rental service which has been split from its online streaming unit.

Chief executive Reed Hastings made no change to the new pricing scheme, which resulted in a whopping price increase for many customers, but apologized for his handling of the move.

China's popular micoblogging site Weibo said it was tightening controls over its Twitter-like service, state press said Monday, amid concerns over growing government interference on the web.

Chief executive officer of Sina -- Weibo's parent company -- Charles Chao said Sunday the measures were to curb the spread of malicious rumors on the service, China News Service reported.

Online gamers have achieved a feat beyond the realm of Second Life or Dungeons and Dragons: they have deciphered the structure of an enzyme of an AIDS-like virus that had thwarted scientists for a decade.

The exploit is published on Sunday in the journal Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, where -- exceptionally in scientific publishing -- both gamers and researchers are honored as co-authors.

Joel Simkhai, the creator of Grindr, a wildly popular mobile dating application for gay men, has spent a lot of time recently thinking about women.

And two years after launching Grindr, which has been downloaded millions of times, the Israeli-born US citizen has come out with Blendr, a version of the app designed to appeal to both sexes and to heterosexuals.

The Frankfurt Motor Show, the biggest event in the auto industry calendar, opened its doors to the general public on Saturday to showcase the next generation of electric cars.

Around 800,000 people are expected to visit the event in the German financial capital before its wraps up next Sunday.

It slowly began to dawn on Esther and Bruce Huffman that perhaps they were being filmed.

"Warning," the gray-haired, bespectacled grandmother reads off the screen. "You must stop recording before trying to close cyber link."

In a Montreal parking lot, Jean-Francois Beauchamp unhooks a power cable from his loaner car and cheerfully drives away, an enthusiastic user of a new service that is finding fans in equal measure among commuters and environmentalists.

"It's very quiet, pleasant and and doesn't use gasoline," says Beauchamp, 44, a web designer and frequent user of the electric cars made available for hourly rental by the Communauto car-sharing enterprise.

Google expects India's Internet users to triple by 2014 as telecom carriers invest in high-speed wireless infrastructure and smartphones become cheaper, a report said Friday.

Google's country head in India, Rajan Anandan, told the Wall Street Journal that the company forecasts India will reach at least 300 million Internet users by 2014, up from about 100 million now.