Germany

When Google began hiring in Zurich for its new engineering center in 2004, local officials welcomed the U.S. company with open arms. Google's arrival is still bearing fruit for Zurich: 450 employees, about 300 of them engineers, work in Google's seven-story complex in a converted brewery on the outskirts of the placid mountain metropolis.

Microsoft on Friday opened an online store for U.S. customers. The company already has online marketplaces in the United Kingdom, Germany and Korea.

The home page for the Microsoft Store features the Microsoft Xbox 360 hit Gears of War 2, but also offers various flavors of the Microsoft Office productivity suite. Microsoft also features the Zune and a small ad for Vista Ultimate.

Hackers are always refining their methods of sniffing out other people's passwords. That's why experts advise that you always select tough-to-crack passwords. That means using different passwords for different web sites. Luckily, special programs are available to help you remember them all.

"There are two prime ways to steal users' passwords," explains Ruben Wolf from the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology (SIT) in Darmstadt, Germany.

Next time you're stuck in traffic and antsy to get to your destination, think of this new mantra: What Would Ants Do?

Two researchers have opened a new can of worms that could let hackers wreak havoc on network managers.

Erik Tews and Martin Beck say they have found a way to crack the widely used Wireless Protection Access (WPA), a standard supported by the Wi-Fi Alliance and currently used to secure wireless computer networks. The researchers say they have specifically cracked the Temporal Key Integrated Protocol (a set of algorithms used by WPA), a feat that had been considered nearly impossible.

Industrial conglomerate Siemens AG is poised to sell its 50-percent stake in the joint venture Fujitsu Siemens Computers to Japan's Fujitsu Group, two people familiar with the deal told The Associated Press on Monday.

Siemens has been contemplating a sale of its half in the joint venture at least since August. Chief Executive Peter Loescher said then that the company was in talks with Fujitsu about the fate of the unit, which makes personal computers and laptops and posted sales of 6.6 billion euros but a pretax profit of just 105 million euros last year.

Music enthusiasts will have another way to search for their favorite tunes in coming months. Mufin, a Berlin, Germany-based company, has launched the beta version of its music-discovery platform, mufin.com.

Mufin's free technology recognizes and identifies music titles for users and provides music recommendations. Mufin automatically searches out and plays music suitable to an individual's tastes and mood, according to the company.

Advanced Micro Devices, which has been struggling to regain its footing in competition with rival Intel, announced Tuesday that it will split into two companies. One of the companies will be a global enterprise focused on semiconductor manufacturing, temporarily called The Foundry Company. AMD itself will focus on designing microprocessors.

Abu Dhabi Investment

Microsoft said Thursday that it would set up research centers in France, Germany and Britain to improve its Internet search technology, describing the move as a vote of confidence in the European economy and in the company's ability to close the gap with Google.

Steven Ballmer, the Microsoft chief executive, said at a news conference here that the three "centers of excellence," to be based near Paris, in London and in Munich, would employ several hundred people all together.

Employees could be to blame for one of the most prominent security concerns facing businesses today: Loss of corporate information.

So say findings from a new Cisco global security study. The report offers insight into the risks employees take that could cause data leakage. The reason is clear: With the move toward distributed business models and remote workforces, lines are blurring between work and home lives. That's leading to more collaborative devices and applications, including mobile phones, laptops, Web 2.0 applications, video and other social media.