China has rejected allegations of involvement in a cyber-spying campaign targeting the Google e-mail accounts of top US officials, military personnel and journalists.
A foreign ministry spokesman said it was "unacceptable" to blame China.
Google has not blamed the Chinese government directly, but says the hacking campaign originated in Jinan.
The US company said its security was not breached but indicated individuals' passwords were obtained through fraud.
California police recovered a stolen laptop after a software program sent its owner the suspect's location and photograph taken on the Mac's camera.
Joshua Kaufman, an Oakland interaction designer, reported the theft in March.
But police only acted on Tuesday after Mr Kaufman's blog on the theft attracted news media attention.
Cab driver Muthanna Aldebashi, 27, was charged with felony possession of stolen property. A police spokesman said an initial reported was misfiled.
"I'm excited I was able to get it back," Mr Kaufman told the BBC, "very happy and relieved that I don't have to sit and watch someone else use my old computer."
On 21 March, during the day when Mr Kaufman was not at home in his Oakland flat, a thief broke into the apartment through a window.
'Hidden' software
Mr Kaufman immediately reported the crime to Oakland police and the officer who took the report noted he said he had tracking software installed, Officer Holly Joshi told the BBC.
The software, called Hidden, supplies to the owner the computer's location, photographs taken on the Mac's internal camera and shots of the Mac's screen display.
The program immediately began sending Mr Kaufman photographs of a bearded man with shaggy dark hair sleeping on a couch, sitting shirtless on a bed in front of the computer, and driving.
"It wasn't really that interesting," he said. "Most of the photos were pretty boring - just some guy staring into a screen or sleeping or watching Youtube videos on his bed."
The software also sent Mr Kaufman a screen shot showing the man logging into his own e-mail account - information investigators later used to lure him into an arrest.
Mr Kaufman says he handed the evidence to Oakland investigators but did not get a response. Meanwhile, he began blogging about the theft on a site called thisguyhasmymacbook.
Marketing campaign rumour
His ordeal - and Oakland police's apparent disinterest in the case, even though Mr Kaufman said he could provide clues - soon attracted attention from the US news media.
"People started saying it was a viral campaign from us," Hidden chief Toby De Havilland told the BBC.
On Tuesday, a producer with ABC television's Good Morning America news and entertainment programme contacted Officer Joshi to inquire about the case.
Ms Joshi contacted investigators and learned Mr Kaufman's initial report had been filed in error with theft reports for which no leads existed to aid the investigation.
About three hours after ABC's call, Oakland police arrested Mr Aldebashi, who made "admission statements" indicating he knew the laptop was stolen, Ms Joshi said.
Police have not charged Mr Aldebashi with the initial burglary, and Mr Kaufman said he believes Mr Aldebashi bought the stolen laptop on the street.
"Law enforcement is always looking at technology as a way to be smarter with capturing criminals and solving crimes," Officer Joshi told the BBC.
"And this does represent technology that could be useful for us."
Suspect lured
Mr Kaufman wrote on his blog that investigators used information he provided - an e-mail address linked to a car service for which Mr Aldebashi was a driver - to lure the suspect into an arrest by pretending to hire a cab.
Meanwhile, Mr De Havilland said the notoriety has driven interest in his product.
1 June 2011Last updated at 08:15 ETBy Maggie ShielsTechnology reporter, BBC News, Silicon Valley
The number of internet connected devices is set to explode in the next four years to over 15 billion - twice the world's population by 2015.
Technology giant Cisco predicts the proliferation of tablets, mobile phones, connected appliances and other smart machines will drive this growth.
The company said consumer video will continue to dominate internet traffic.
It predicts that by 2015, one million minutes of video will be watched online every second.
The predictions come from Cisco's fifth annual forecast of upcoming trends.
Cisco's Visual Networking Index also estimated that at the same time more than 40% of the world's projected population will be online, a total of nearly three billion people.
The networking giant forecast that by 2015 internet traffic will reach 966 exabytes a year.
An exabyte is equal to one quintillion bytes. In 2004, global monthly internet traffic passed one exabyte for the first time.
But Cisco said alongside this quadrupling of traffic comes a number of very real concerns.
"What you are seeing is this massive growth in devices, the way devices are being used and are connected to the internet and what users expect them to do," said Suraj Shetty, Cisco vice president for global marketing.
We are running out of IPv4 addresses and the adoption of IPv6 is going to be front and centre of everything for the next several years"
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"All this is putting a lot of pressure on the internet and the next generation internet faces issues handling not just the proliferation of these devices but how they are going to grow and be intelligent enough to be connected to you.
"The most important question we face is how to manage all this traffic intelligently," Mr Shetty added.
'Consumer riot'
Cisco's report underlines a very real problem the internet as a whole faces as it runs out of what is known as internet protocol version 4 or IPv4 addresses.
Every device needs one of these IPv4 addresses to send and receive data online.
When IPv4 was created in 1977, it was thought that its pool of 4.3 billion addresses would be enough to go around.
The rise in the number of mobile devices, laptops and connected machines has helped exhaust that stock.
In February, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority handed out the last batch of these addresses. Industry experts believe they could be all used up as early as August.
The solution is an alternative addressing standard approved in 1998 called IPv6.
There are trillions of these addresses but persuading companies to move to IPv6 has been a slow process.
"We are running out of IPv4 addresses and the adoption of IPv6 is going to be front and centre of everything for the next several years," Mr Shetty told BBC News.
"The implication for vendors like Cisco is that we have to come up with a platform that can help scale the internet to handle a lot of the traffic and to do it smartly.
"If you want to keep adding billions and billions of devices, the only answer is IPv6."
On 8 June, on what has been dubbed World IPv6 Day, Cisco will be joined by telecom giant Verizon, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, TimeWarner, Comcast and many others in testing IPv6.
This will allow everyone to check out the compatibility of websites and associated networking technologies with IPv6.
"It is clear that the move to IPv6 will be critical in supporting the total number of devices on the global internet going forward and it will be crucial for service providers and enterprises to start migrating to IPv6," said Ed Horely, co-chair of the California IPv6 task force.
"They need to do this to be able to meet the needs and demands of all the existing devices like cell phones, iPads and PC's but also all the future devices that we will want connected to the internet.
"IPv6 will be critical in avoiding the potential consumer riot due to lack of internet addresses for their portable devices to gain access to the internet and many of the cloud services being deployed today," Mr Horely said.
The US is working on a plan to categorise cyber-attacks as acts of war, says the New York Times newspaper.
In future, a US president could consider economic sanctions, cyber-retaliation or a military strike if key US computer systems were attacked, officials have said recently.
The planning was given added urgency by a cyber-attack last month on the defence contractor, Lockheed Martin.
A new report from the Pentagon is due out in a matter of weeks.
"A response to a cyber-incident or attack on the US would not necessarily be a cyber-response. All appropriate options would be on the table," Pentagon spokesman Colonel Dave Lapan told reporters on Tuesday.
'All necessary means'
The Pentagon's planning follows an international strategy statement on cyber-security, issued by the White House on 16 May.
The US would "respond to hostile acts in cyberspace as we would to any other threat to our country", stated the White House in plain terms.
"We reserve the right to use all necessary means - diplomatic, informational, military, and economic - as appropriate and consistent with applicable international law, in order to defend our nation, our allies, our partners and our interests."
The strategy will classify major cyber-attacks as acts of war, paving the way for possible military retaliation, reported The Wall Street Journal after interviewing defence officials.
Sophistication of hackers
One of the difficulties strategists are grappling with is how to track down reliably the cyber-attackers who deliberately obscure the origin of their incursions.
And it is not clear how the Pentagon proposes to deal with cyber-attackers, such as terrorists, who are not acting for a nation state.
The sophistication of hackers and frequency of the attacks came back into focus after an attack on arms-maker Lockheed Martin on 21 May.
Lockheed said the "tenacious" cyber-attack on its network was part of a pattern of attacks on it from around the world.
The US defence department estimates that more than 100 foreign intelligence organizations have attempted to break into American networks.
Britons who can defend the nation's networks armed only with a keyboard are being sought in a national competition.
Now in its second year, the Cyber Security Challenge aims to uncover the UK's future cyber warriors.
Via a series of online and face-to-face challenges entrants are asked to thwart hack attacks, defend networks and track down criminals.
Prizes for the winners include training courses and cash to help them pursue a career in computer security.
The competition was set up to address the looming shortfall in cyber security workers that the UK is facing.
From 1 June, anyone interested in entering the competition can register via the website in preparation for the series of challenges that will run over the next 12 months.
The challenge is arranged around three streams which test the skills established computer security experts call on in their day-to-day work.
Entrants can take challenges dealing with how to design secure networks, digital forensics and cyber defence. This year one-off quizzes are being offered alongside the on-going competitions so those in full-time employment have more of a chance to take part.
Each stream will have up to three competitions and the winners of these will go through to an elimination round. Those that triumph in the eliminators will compete for the chance to be grand champion.
The elimination rounds involve live challenges such as defending a network against incoming attacks.
Dan Summers, a postman from Wakefield, was the winner of the first UK Cyber Security Challenge and took home prizes worth �6,000.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs will announce a range of new products, including a widely anticipated cloud service, at its developer conference next week.
iCloud is likely to offer services rivaling that of Google and Amazon.
Attendees will also see Lion, the latest version of Apple's Macintosh operating system, and an upgraded version of mobile system iOS.
Mr Jobs, who is on medical leave, has not appeared in public since March.
Details of the products on show came via an Apple press release ahead of its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) - an unusual step for a company which is usually very secretive ahead of its flagship event.
Fierce competition
Rumours of the iCloud have been circulating since it was reported that Apple bought the "iCloud.com" domain name in April.
Two things stand out from Apple's announcement about next week's event.
First, the news that Steve Jobs will take to the stage. Apple's charismatic boss has been on sick leave for months, so this appears to be welcome evidence that he is in reasonable shape.
Then, as well as confirming that the conference will see the unveiling of the next generation of Mac OSX, there's the revelation that iCloud - "Apple's upcoming cloud services offering" - will also be on show.
While the music industry has been buzzing for months, even years, with speculation that Apple would launch a streaming music service, it is unusual for a company that guards its secrets so jealously to give us even this much detail in advance.
The eyes of Google, Amazon and Europe's Spotify will be on Steve Jobs' keynote on Monday.
They will all be wondering whether the company that has dominated the digital download market now has plans to take control of the cloud too.
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However, it is unclear whether the iCloud will be a purely music streaming tool or if it will be a wider cloud service for storage such as the one offered by, among others, Dropbox.
Amazon and Google have already launched streaming music services, but so far have not managed to get big record labels on board - meaning they can only offer streaming of tracks already owned by the user.
Unconfirmed reports have hinted that Apple have managed to seal deals with several labels.
If true, this would make it a fierce competitor to Spotify, an already well-established music service with over 10m members.
Spotify is not yet available in the United States.
Last year, Mr Jobs said Lion - the eighth version of its Mac OSX operating system - would bring "many of the best ideas from the iPad back to the Mac, plus some fresh new ones".
Also on show will be the fifth version of iOS, the software which powers the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch.
However, official details about the next iPhone have yet to be publicised.
'Cyber' soldiers will be put alongside conventional troops as the government puts cyber attacks on an equal footing with other conflicts.
The news comes as US defence firm Lockheed Martin admitted it came under a significant cyber attack last week.
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) said it will recruit hundreds of cyber experts to shore up UK defences.
It is part of a �650m fund set aside by the government for dealing with cyber security.
"Our forces depend on computer networks, both in the UK and in operations around the world. But our adversaries present an advance and rapidly developing threat to these networks," said the MoD in a statement.
"Future conflict will see cyber operations conducted in parallel with more conventional actions the sea, land and air operations," it added.
It will see a growing band of cyber experts deployed by the armed forces to protect vital networks.
"We expect to significantly grow the number of dedicated cyber experts in the MoD and the number will be in the hundreds but precise details are classified," said an MoD spokesman.
"As with all personnel they will be expected to serve wherever necessary to do their jobs and this could be in the UK or in operational theatre," he added.
Cyber spies
MoD networks receive around 20,000 malicious e-mails each month, around 1,000 of which are deliberately targeting them.
There has also been a flurry of attacks aimed atother sensitive targets in recent months.
Defence firm Lockheed Martin, which makes weapon systems that are sold around the world, was the latest to be hit.
During a cyber attack last week, the firm said it took counter measures "almost immediately" and stressed that none of its programmes had been compromised.
The Pentagon is now investigating the incident.
The UK's National Cyber Security Programme was announced as part of the Strategic Defence and Security Review in October 2010.
It will see a number of government departments working with industry and universities in order to achieve the following:
Reduce vulnerability to cyber espionage
Improve ability to detect and defend against cyber attack
Incorporate cyber into mainstream Defence concepts and doctrine
Ensure the UK's critical infrastructure, vital government networks and service are resilient from attack.
The US is also taking a tougher line on cyber attacks and plans to issue detailed plans next month.
This week the Pentagon said that computer sabotage coming from another country can constitute an act of war, to which it may respond using traditional military force.
Security firm MacAfee recently found that eight out of 10 countries around the world had had critical networks targeted by hackers during 2010.
The Stuxnet worm has become the most high-profile piece of malware with the potential to harm key infrastructure.
Analysis of the malicious computer code suggests it was designed to take control of machinery in Iran's nuclear facilities.
Some have pointed the finger at the Israeli secret service as the source of the malware. Both Israel and the US have been highly critical of Iran's nuclear programme.
Google is using search patterns about dengue fever in an attempt to help health officials prepare for outbreaks.
It hopes to develop an early-warning system by monitoring dengue-related search terms by users in Bolivia, Brazil, India, Indonesia and Singapore.
Google said that its results are collected in real-time, whereas official data can take weeks to be analysed.
In 2009, Google used a similar approach to track the spread of flu.
"Using the dengue case count data provided by Ministries of Health and the World Health Organization, we're able to build a model that offers near real-time estimates of dengue activity based on the popularity of certain search terms," Google software engineer Vikram Sahai wrote in a blog post.
"Google Dengue Trends is automatically updated every day, thereby providing an early indicator of dengue activity."
The project was developed together with Boston's Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School.
The tool is part of Google Correlate, a new service which connects search analysis with data collected in real life.
Correlate was created following Google's success with Flu Trends in 2009, a tool which tracked searches for flu-related searches worldwide.
Public health officials were able to use the data to distribute vaccines and treatments more effectively.
Google published a report in Nature, the highly-respected journal, and soon received attention by other researchers hoping to use the service to monitor other issues.
Correlate, launched last week, allows experts to upload their own data sets to compare against Google searches.
The software highlights when the real world data and online searches share the same patterns, such as flu outbreaks occuring at the same time as a large number of searches for "treatment for flu".
Professor Peter Sever, an expert in disease prevention from Imperial College London, said the tool could prove very useful for researchers that currently collect data using slower methods.
"It will of course be highly selective because you'll be picking out the people who are using Google, but of course year on year that's an increasing proportion of the population anyway," he said.
US defence firm Lockheed Martin says it has come under a significant cyber-attack, which took place last week.
Few details were available, but Lockheed said its security team had detected the threat quickly and ensured that none of its programmes had been compromised.
The Pentagon said it is working to establish the extent of the breach.
Lockheed makes fighter jets, warships and multi-billion dollar weapons systems sold worldwide.
Lt Col April Cunningham, speaking for the US defence department, said the impact on the Pentagon was "minimal and we don't expect any adverse effect".
Lockheed Martin said in a statement that it detected the attack on 21 May "almost immediately" and took counter-measures.
As a result, the company said, "our systems remain secure; no customer, program or employee personal data has been compromised".
But they are still working to restore employee access several days after the attack took place.
Lockheed Martin is the world's biggest aerospace company and makes F-16, F-22 and F-35 fighter jets as well as warships.
Councillor Ahmed Khan claims his human rights have been breached
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An English council has taken Twitter to court in the US in a bid to discover the identity of a blogger behind allegedly libellous statements.
South Tyneside Council went to court in California after three councillors and an official complained they were libelled in a blog called "Mr Monkey".
Twitter said it could not comment on individual court requests.
But the councillor at the centre of the row said Twitter had already handed over his account details.
Media law experts suggest the case may prompt more UK citizens to take action in the US, where Twitter is based.
Independent South Shields councillor Ahmed Khan is suspected of being the author of the blog, which has made a series of unfounded allegations against council leaders.
Mr Khan, who denies being the author, said he was told by Twitter in May that his account details had been disclosed after a subpoena was lodged with the Californian court.
He said: "I don't fully understand it but it all relates to my Twitter account and it not only breaches my human rights, but it potentially breaches the human rights of anyone who has ever sent me a message on Twitter.
Is this a landmark moment for free speech online, with Twitter handing over confidential details of a user for the first time?
Probably not. Twitter - like other major American web firms - complies with US court orders and requests from law enforcement agencies.
We know, for instance, that the US government sought to obtain details from Twitter of people connected with Wikileaks.
That case is still under way, because the targets were notified by Twitter and chose to fight. The South Tyneside councillor decided not to go to court and details of his account were handed over back in April.
But it seems unlikely that this was a first, for Twitter or the wider web. Google, for instance, issues an annual transparency report which reveals that in just six months last year, it received more than 4,000 requests for user data from US agencies and more than 1,300 from Britain.
So what are the implications for the Ryan Giggs case? Again, it's not clear this makes a difference.
Whereas the South Tyneside case involved a defamation suit brought in a US court, the footballer's lawyers are trying to get a UK court order imposed on a US company. Which is, as someone close to the case put it, a very complex business.
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"This is Orwellian. It is like something out of 1984."
He admitted being a critic of some council policies, adding: "People who had the courage to come forward and expose possible wrongdoing within South Tyneside Council will not now do so.
"I also think that constituents who have used Twitter to engage with me, to air any problems or concerns that they have, will also think twice before doing that."
The Mr Monkey blog has made a number accusations against the council's Labour leader Iain Malcolm, as well as David Potts, the former Conservative leader who now serves as an Independent councillor, Labour councillor Anne Walsh and Rick O'Farrell, the council's head of enterprise and regeneration.
They are all named on papers delivered by the council's lawyers to the Superior Court of California.
A spokesman for South Tyneside Council said: "This legal action was initiated by the council's previous chief executive and has continued with the full support of the council's current chief executive.
"The council has a duty of care to protect its employees and as this blog contains damaging claims about council officers, legal action is being taken to identify those responsible."
He said he had no knowledge of councillors attending court hearings in the US or whether Twitter had as yet handed over any confidential information.
'Seedy little blog'
A spokesman for Twitter said: "We cannot comment on any specific order or request.
"As noted in our law enforcement guidelines, it is our policy to notify our users before disclosure of account information."
Lawyers challenged Twitter in the High Court in London to reveal the identities of its users who violated a super-injunction involving Manchester United footballer Ryan Giggs.
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Media lawyer Mark Stephens says he is unaware of anyone from the UK taking action like this before
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MP John Hemming named the star in Parliament as the footballer who had used a super-injunction to hide an alleged affair, after Mr Giggs' name had been widely aired on Twitter.
Media lawyer Mark Stephens, who represented Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, said: "I am unaware of any other occasion where somebody from this country has actually gone to America and launched proceedings in a Californian court to force Twitter to release the identities of individuals.
"The implications are that people who have had their name released can actually now go to California and begin proceedings.
"Local authorities cannot sue for libel and, if individual councillors have been defamed, they should take proceedings at their own cost."
Mr Potts said: "This is a deeply tawdry, perverted and seedy little blog that has been in existence for quite a while.
"It's no longer active, as I understand, but the information is still on the internet for all to see.
"This was a blog that didn't just affect councillors, it also affected council officers.
"We have a duty of care, as any employer does whether public or private, to defend not only our commercial interests, but also the interests of our employees."
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