Online "hacktivist" group Anonymous has released a trove of email addresses and credit card numbers stolen from the website of intelligence analysis firm Stratfor and promised further attacks.

In a statement on Pastebin.com late Thursday, members of Anonymous calling themselves "AntiSec" posted links to what the group said were 75,000 names, addresses, credit card numbers and passwords for Stratfor customers.

Leading U.S. wireless carrier Verizon Wireless backed down Friday on instituting a $2 charge for people paying their bills by credit card after a sweeping popular backlash over the plan.

The reversal just one day after announcing the fee came also after the industry regulator, the Federal Communications Commission, told The New York Times it would investigate the matter "on behalf of American consumers."

A federal grand jury indicted six foreign nationals on charges that they defrauded hundreds of customers out of more than $4 million in bogus Internet car sales, federal prosecutors said Thursday

The 24-count indictment returned Wednesday alleges a scheme in which vehicles were offered for sale on legitimate websites that deal in auto trading, according to a statement from the U.S. attorney's office.

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion's share of the U.S. smartphone market declined during the three months ending in November, while Apple and Google's Android platform both made gains, industry tracker comScore said Thursday.

The Waterloo, Ontario-based RIM saw its share of U.S. smartphone subscribers fall to 16.6 percent at the end of November from 19.7 percent at the end of August, according to comScore.

Google was the most-visited Web destination in the United States in 2011, followed by Facebook and Yahoo!, industry tracker Nielsen said Thursday.

Google received an average of 153.4 million unique U.S. visitors a month from home and work computers, according to Nielsen.

Amazon said Thursday that it sold more than one million Kindles a week in December with the new Kindle Fire tablet computer its top-selling item.

This year saw "the best holiday ever for the Kindle family as customers purchased millions of Kindle Fires and millions of Kindle e-readers," the Seattle-based online retail giant said in a statement.

Here's one way to sum up 2011: I added 71 people as Facebook friends, shared 26 links and commented on 98 of my friends' status updates. I was tagged in 33 photos and added 18 of my own to the site.

I also attempted to keep up with Facebook's endless redesigns, most recently with the introduction of Timeline. With it, your Facebook profile offers highlights from your past, not just your recent happenings. Last week, I urged all of you to carefully curate your Timelines to avoid coming across as vain or revealing forgotten skeletons.

This tiny village of 37 gray homes and farm buildings clustered along the main road in a wind-swept corner of rural eastern Germany seems an unlikely place for a revolution.

Yet environmentalists, experts and politicians from El Salvador to Japan to South Africa have flocked here in the past year to learn how Feldheim, a village of just 145 people, is already putting into practice Germany's vision of a future powered entirely by renewable energy.

In the interview, Steve Wozniak and the late Steve Jobs recall a seminal moment in Silicon Valley history — how they named their upstart computer company some 35 years ago.

"I remember driving down Highway 85," Wozniak says. "We're on the freeway, and Steve mentions, 'I've got a name: Apple Computer.' We kept thinking of other alternatives to that name, and we couldn't think of anything better."

Tablet computers and electronic readers promise to close the book on the ink-and-paper era as they transform the way people browse magazines, check news or lose themselves in novels.

"It is only a matter of time before we stop killing trees and all publications become digital," Creative Strategies president and principal analyst Tim Bajarin told Agence France Presse.