Two consumer groups urged U.S. regulators on Monday to block Google from acquiring mobile advertising provider AdMob, citing potential harm the deal could cause to users, advertisers and application developers.

The Canadian developer that won a $290 million court judgment against Microsoft will be going over future Microsoft software "extremely carefully" to make sure its patent hasn't been infringed, the chairman of i4i said today.

While the computer industry in the 1990s thrived as corporations re-engineered business processes to incorporate IT, this decade has seen technology truly become part of mainstream culture and commerce via the Internet and ever-cheaper and smaller computing devices. Yes, the Internet revolution began in the '90s, but it was not until this decade that 14-year-olds raced ahead of professionals in figuring out how to tap social networks with hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of contacts. Here, in not-quite chronological order, are the top technology stories of the decade, selected by the IDG News Service for their singular impact on the industry as well as their emblematic status as examples of the trends that shaped the course of IT.

Netbook shipments worldwide are expected to have jumped by 103 percent this year compared to last year, although the fast growth rate could slow down in 2010 as prices for portable PCs fall, research firm DisplaySearch said on Tuesday.

A federal appeals court today ordered Microsoft to stop selling its popular Word software in less than three weeks, rejecting the company's appeal and confirming the ruling of a lower court.

U.S. authorities are investigating the theft of an estimated tens of millions of dollars from Citibank by hackers partly using Russian software tailored for the attack, according to a news report.

Google is in a really big hurry to make the Web experience faster.

LG Display has developed a prototype LCD panel for television sets that's less than a quarter the thickness of the company's current production panels. The new screen could enable TV set makers to produce even thinner flat-panel sets but there are no current plans for mass production.

Intel on Monday launched its next-generation Atom netbook processor, saying it will bring longer battery life and improved system performance to low-cost laptops.

An administrative law judge at the U.S. International Trade Commission ruled that Samsung has infringed two camera patents developed by Kodak.

Although Mac clone maker Psystar has turned off the lights at its Web site, the firm is not shutting down permanently, the company's lawyer said today.

Ten privacy and consumer groups, including the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), filed a complaint Thursday with the U.S.Federal Trade Commission, saying that Facebook's newly revamped privacy settings are deceptive and unfair.

Microblogging site Twitter went offline for a while Friday after hackers calling themselves the Iranian Cyber Army apparently managed to change DNS records, redirecting traffic to another Web page.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has filed an antitrust-related lawsuit against Intel, charging the world's largest computer chip maker with illegally using its dominant market position to stifle competition and strengthen its monopoly for a decade.

IBM on Wednesday said it has signed a deal to buy Lombardi, an Austin, Texas, BPM (business process management) vendor. Terms were not disclosed.

One day after warning of a new attack on its Reader and Acrobat software, Adobe issued a security advisory Tuesday offering users some advice on how to mitigate the problem.

Microsoft's Juku service in China did indeed steal code from Plurk, a popular Twitter rival in Asia, the software giant admitted on Tuesday.

Mobile operator TeliaSonera has launched the world's first commercial LTE (Long-Term Evolution) networks, in the central parts of Stockholm and Oslo, it said on Monday.

The creator of MySQL has launched a Web-based campaign to "save" the open-source database from the "clutches" of Oracle, which is attempting to purchase its current owner, Sun Microsystems.

A picture of an experimental Android handset given out to Google employees had blogs buzzing over the weekend amid signs that the company could offer a Google-branded smartphone next year.