Switzerland

It was a technical paper with the simple title "Information Management: A Proposal," written by a researcher at a European physics laboratory and filled with esoteric terms like hypertext and browser.

It was also the birth certificate of the World Wide Web, a technology that's generated immense new wealth and transformed the ways we work, learn, and amuse ourselves.

One of the biggest complaints about Apple's groundbreaking iPhone has been that it doesn't support Adobe's Flash for interactive animation and video. But late last week Adobe Systems CEO Shantanu Narayen said his company is working with Apple to make it happen.

"It's a hard technical challenge, and that's part of the reason that Adobe and Apple are collaborating," he told the Bloomberg News Service in an interview from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. "The onus is on us to deliver."

Good News, Bad News

Following a recent report that an algorithm for creating secure Web-site certificates could be vulnerable, VeriSign has announced it will no longer use the algorithm.

On Wednesday, the provider of Internet trust assurances said it was transitioning from MD5 to the SHA-1 algorithm for its new RapidSSL brand certificates. It also pledged to reissue any RapidSSL certificates created with MD5, using SHA-1.

Fake Certificates in Three Days

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.