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Facebook to Let Users Pre-Approve Photo Tags

Drunken revelers rejoice: Facebook will now let you decide whether your friends can attach your name to a photo before it is circulated.

Currently, your friends can add your name to a photo on Facebook without your consent or knowledge. You can remove it later, but only after lots of others may have seen the embarrassing shots. Now, you can insist on pre-approval.

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Jaded West Coast Chuckles over East Coast Quake

Soon after the lunch plates stopped rattling and books stopped thumping to the floor, shaken easterners could hear another sound from Tuesday's magnitude-5.8 quake: snickering emanating from the opposite side of the continent.

"Really all this excitement over a 5.8 quake??? Come on East Coast, we have those for breakfast out here!!!!" wrote Dennis Miller, 50, a lifelong California resident whose house in Pleasanton sits on an earthquake fault line.

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Nintendo Shares Leap on 3DS Optimism

Nintendo shares surged on Tuesday amid hopes that its struggling 3DS console would finally take off following a price cut and on expectations of new game titles for the upcoming Christmas season.

The jump came after the Japanese videogame giant announced its dedicated trade show for September, which is typically holds annually.

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Chinese Site Bans Web Tools Used to Evade Filters

A major Chinese online commerce site has banned sales of software used to bypass Internet censorship amid Beijing's efforts to block the development of a Middle East-style protest movement.

But Taobao.com, part of e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, said it took the action on its own and received no official order.

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Google to Include Amazon Forest on Street View

Google says it will soon make available images of the Amazon rain forest on its Street View mapping service.

Spokesman Fabio Sabba says Google began taking photographs of Amazon rivers and trails in a partnership with a local environmental group called Fundacao Amazonia Sustentavel.

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Facebook Plans to Expand New Headquarters

The first Facebook employees are just getting settled at the company's new Menlo Park, California headquarters, but the online social network is already talking about expanding. The San Jose Mercury News reported Monday (http://bit.ly/nOtBTW ) that Facebook has filed plans to build a second campus across the street from the complex it acquired from Sun Microsystems.

Menlo Park development services manager Justin Murphy tells the newspaper that the move suggests Facebook will quickly outgrow the 1 million square foot (0.09 million square meter) Sun campus, which can hold up to 3,600 workers. Facebook has had 1,500 people working at its old Palo Alto headquarters.

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Skype Buys Messaging Startup GroupMe

Skype, the Internet communications group set to be acquired by Microsoft, announced plans Sunday to buy the mobile messaging startup firm GroupMe for undisclosed terms.

GroupMe was founded in 2010 at the Techcrunch Disrupt Hackathon and is headquartered in New York.

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Osram Files New Patent Complaints in South Korea

German lighting manufacturer Osram is filing new patent infringement complaints against South Korean companies amid a global wave of intellectual property disputes in the technology sector.

Osram GmbH and unit Osram Opto Semiconductors GmbH said Monday in a statement that they have recently filed new complaints and legal actions against Samsung and LG units. They include LG Innotek's alleged infringement of LED, or light emitting diode, patents.

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Texting, Grand Theft Auto Style; Alarms Pose Risk

Texting and driving don't go well together — though not in the way you might think.

Computer hackers can force some cars to unlock their doors and start their engines without a key by sending specially crafted messages to a car's anti-theft system. They can also snoop at where you've been by tapping the car's GPS system.

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German Privacy Watchdog Dislikes Facebook's "Like"

A German data protection authority is "unliking" Facebook's "Like" button.

The state of Schleswig-Holstein's data protection commissioner, Thilo Weichert, on Friday ordered state institutions to shut down the fan pages on the social networking site and remove the "Like" button from their websites, saying it leads to profiling that violates German and European law.

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