Hackers claimed on Thursday to have stolen more than one million passwords, email addresses and other information fromSonyPictures.com in the latest cyberattack on the Japanese electronics giant.

The claim was made by a group of hackers calling themselves "Lulz Security" on their Twitter feed @LulzSec.

Global online traffic will quadruple by 2015 as the number of gadgets linked to the Internet climbs to 15 billion, according to a forecast by networking colossus Cisco.

Cisco's fifth annual Visual Networking Index Forecast, released Wednesday, predicted that nearly three billion people, more than 40 percent of the expected world population, will be using the Internet by the year 2015.

Microsoft gave a sneak preview on Wednesday of the successor to Windows 7, a next-generation operating system designed to work on both personal computers and touch screen tablets.

Steven Sinofsky, president of Microsoft's Windows Division, demonstrated some of the features of the operating system code-named "Windows 8" at the D9 technology conference here hosted by All Things Digital.

Twitter said Wednesday that it is adding a photo-sharing option for its users, a move that could deal a blow to existing services such as Twitpic and yfrog.

Twitter chief executive Dick Costolo also announced at the All Things Digital technology conference here that the San Francisco-based service was upgrading its search function.

Two young men and two women were found dead in a car Thursday in an apparent Internet-based group suicide, South Korean police said.

Police said the four, including a 25-year-old woman identified only as Park, left suicide notes in their bags in the car parked next to a river in Seongju, 210 kilometers (126 miles) southeast of Seoul.

Making online friends could play into the hands of the "enemy", according to China's People's Liberation Army, which has said its roughly 2.3 million soldiers will be banned from using social media.

The world's largest military force has notified servicemen and women that it will strictly enforce the ban to "safeguard military secrets and the purity and solidarity" of the PLA, state media said this week.

Twitter on Tuesday broadened its reach by letting websites add "Follow" buttons that visitors can click to begin tracking posts at the globally popular microblogging service.

Twitter billed the button as "a new way to follow Twitter accounts directly from the websites you visit every day."

Ailing chief executive Steve Jobs returns next week from sick leave to unveil Apple's latest generation of software, the firm announced Tuesday.

The 56-year-old cancer survivor will present Apple's new operating system, dubbed "Lion," at a developers' conference in San Francisco on June 6.

Activision knows it's more fun to blast on-screen enemies into oblivion with friends, so this fall it's launching an online service for its "Call of Duty" games that's part Facebook, part player matchmaker and part organized sports.

It's the logical next step for Activision Blizzard Inc., whose "Call of Duty" franchise has enjoyed unprecedented success. The latest title, "Black Ops," has sold 22 million copies worldwide since its November launch. More than 7 million people play every day online.

Samsung Electronics will depend on Google's Android mobile-device software to run future versions of its tablet computers, a senior Samsung official said in an interview published Tuesday.

"We'll continue to work with Android on future tablets," J.K. Shin, head of the South Korean giant's mobile division, told The Wall Street Journal.