IDG News Service, Jeremy Kirk, Marc Ferranti

Facebook is revitalizing its effort to create a smartphone, recruiting engineers who have experience with mobile devices, according to a story in the New York Times Sunday.

Facebook has kept its renewed effort to come up with a smartphone quiet, avoiding putting ads on public sites, according to the article, which cited unnamed sources inside the company, people briefed by the company and people who had been the target of recruitment initiatives.

The Facebook IPO may have been a fiasco, but don't put the nail in the coffin just yet for other tech offerings this year.

The success or failure of tech company IPOs will depend on market conditions, not fallout from Facebook, analysts say.

Chinese regulatory authorities have approved Google's acquisition of Motorola Mobility, paving the way for the deal to close within the week, company officials confirmed Saturday.

The companies announced last August that they had entered into an agreement for Google to acquire mobile phone and tablet maker Motorola Mobility for about US$12.5 billion.

In the latest move in a complex series of patent-related cases, Apple filed a motion in a U.S. district court late Friday to ban Samsung Electronics' Galaxy Tab 10.1 in the U.S.

The Apple filing came in the wake of an appeals court ruling earlier in the week that sided with Apple on the validity of an iPad design patent. Meanwhile, Apple and Samsung are scheduled to go into court-mandated settlement negotiations, set for May 21 and May 22, so the injunction is not likely to be granted over the next few days.

A range of tech vendors including Cisco Systems, Silicon Graphics International, BMC Software and CA Technologies this week reported quarterly earnings that had some solid numbers, but a cautious outlook for the rest of the year is spooking market watchers.

Shares of computer companies are still up for the year, and trading in IT companies ticked up Friday morning. As of Thursday's market close, computer companies on the Nasdaq were up 15 percent for the year. On Friday, Nasdaq computer companies were up by .79 percent in the morning session.

Two issues exposed financial data and Social Security numbers for 350,000 people, although it is thought the information has not been abused, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte said.

The university said in a statement earlier this week that it has fixed both problems, one of which lasted three months and the other more than a decade.

Megaupload filed a motion in federal court on Thursday asking to delay a civil suit filed against the file-sharing site while it prepares a defense for its criminal case.

Two companies, Microhits and Valcom, filed a civil suit against Megaupload on March 21, alleging the site induced and contributed to infringing copyright.

A security company specializing in the Domain Name System has released a Windows version of a tool that encrypts DNS requests, which could be spied on to reveal a user's browsing activity.

Last December OpenDNS released its tool, called DNSCrypt, for Apple's OS X operating system. The company has now released a technology preview of the same tool for Windows, wrote David Ulevitch, OpenDNS' founder and CEO.

Crediting a strategy that exploits users' move to cloud computing, Cisco Systems on Thursday reported record net sales of US$11.6 billion for the quarter ending April 28, up 6.6 percent from the year-earlier period.

It was the second quarter in a row of record quarterly revenue. Net income was $2.2 billion, or $0.40 per share, up from $1.81 billion in the same quarter last year.

Twitter is contesting a court order requiring it to turn over private data on a user charged with disorderly conduct during the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York last year.

On Monday, the company filed a memorandum in New York's Criminal Court, asserting that users own their content and that it may be unconstitutional to request it without a warrant.

Many of the Twitter logins and passwords leaked on the web this week are either inaccurate or belong to accounts already suspended for spamming, the company said late Tuesday.

The logins and passwords were published Monday on Pastebin, a website intended for programmers to share code but favored by hackers to release stolen data. The data was published on five separate posts on Pastebin, comprising a total of 58,978 login and password combinations.

Responding to a U.S. district court judge's order, Apple and Samsung Electronics have trimmed the number of claims they will assert in a broad intellectual-property lawsuit regarding smartphone and tablet products.

Judge Lucy Koh of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on May 2 asked Apple and Samsung to boil down the case, which involves patent infringement and other claims, so a jury can comprehend the issues in a streamlined trial scheduled to begin July 30. Koh wants to give each side 25 hours to present its case.