Japan's military has released a smartphone game featuring cutesy characters who dodge household objects, marking the latest effort to polish the force's image and lure new recruits.

The game, launched last week, calls on cartoonish figures in military uniforms to protect a home while the owners are away, including crawling on the floor and piloting a jet fighter to avoid flying objects including apples.

Google has lured away Morgan Stanley's chief financial officer, Ruth Porat, to be its CFO at a time when the Internet search leader and its Silicon Valley peers are under fire for hiring and promoting too few women.

The appointment announced Tuesday fills a void that opened earlier this month after Google's CFO of the past seven years, Patrick Pichette, announced his plans to retire.

The maker of hit game Clash of Clans said Tuesday its revenues shot up to 1.55 billion euros ($1.6 billion) in 2014, a 130 percent bound over the prior year.   

Finnish mobile game studio Supercell, in announcing its results from last year, reported making 515 million euros in operating profit as defined by earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation.

China's cyberspace administration is "complicit" in attacks on major Internet companies including Google, an anti-censorship group said Wednesday, calling on firms worldwide to strengthen their defenses.

Beijing dismissed the accusation and called for all sides to "abandon accusing each other without proof".

Would you pay to see some of the Internet's best video clips first? Vessel, a new service trying to change the way that short video pieces make money on the Internet and mobile devices, is betting on it.

Instead of free-for-all distribution supported solely by advertising, Vessel will charge $3 per month for exclusive early access to clips of musicians, sporting events, comedians and many other forms of entertainment not available on YouTube or any other digital video service for at least three days. CEO Jason Kilar, formerly head of Hulu Plus, believes Vessel's model will be able to pay video producers about $50 per 1,000 views of their clips on the site. That compares with just $2.20 per 1,000 views of ad-supported video at sites such as YouTube, Kilar says.

Instagram's latest stand-alone app, released Monday, lets users combine multiple photos and post them as a single image.

Called Layout, it is the second app that Facebook-owned Instagram has released. Last August, it came out with Hyperlapse, which lets users create time-lapse videos to share on Instagram.

YouTube on Monday premiered videos from 14 musicians as it tried a new, virtual-only format for the second edition of its music awards.

The giant video-sharing site had searched for a new approach after a mixed reaction to its inaugural event in 2013, which featured a livestreamed show from New York that appeared aimed at creating a new-media rival to the MTV Video Music Awards.

For Shayaan Tahir, it all began when an order he placed on Amazon for a new iPod was rejected because the online giant would not deliver electronics to Pakistan.

Frustrated, he decided to take matters into his own hands and founded one of Pakistan's first e-commerce ventures -- a sector that today is booming.

When a pair of filmmakers first approached video game publisher Capcom about crafting a live-action movie based on their popular zombie series "Dead Rising," they were asked to prove themselves in a very specific way: The creators behind such video game franchises as "Street Fighter" and "Resident Evil" handed the movie producers a game controller.

"They told me, 'Show me you love the game,'" said Tomas Harlan, who along with business partner Tim Carter, is the brains behind Contradiction Films. The independent production company last brought supernatural martial-arts fighters to life with "Mortal Kombat: Legacy," a series of web shorts set in the world of Midway's long-running punch-out series.

Tired of trying to remember a different password for each of your online accounts? Or worried about re-using the same password too many times? You're not alone. Tech experts agree that traditional passwords are annoying, outmoded and too easily hacked.

This week, Yahoo and Microsoft offered up some alternatives: Yahoo says it can text temporary passwords to users' phones each time they want to sign into their Yahoo accounts. Microsoft says it is building facial-recognition and fingerprint-identification technology into Windows 10, the new computer operating system coming this summer, so users can log on with their fingertip or face. The two approaches drew different reviews.