White iPhone causes furore in China

A fight broke out between an employee and a customer at an Apple store in China's capital amid a frenzy to buy the newly-unveiled white iPhone 4, a witness said, according to the Associated Press.

Thirty-year-old Wang Ming said Saturday's scuffle at the Apple store in Beijing's Sanlitun district was between a “foreign” Apple staffer and a Chinese customer.

An Apple spokeswoman in China, Carolyn Wu, said the store “was closed for several hours on Saturday, after a group outside the store became unruly”.

A week after a humiliating public apology for the insecurity of its PlayStation Network (PSN) and Qriocity service, Sony has been forced to delay the restart of its online games services, reports The Register.

Sony, whose officials had repeatedly bowed as part of their self-abasement for the service crisis, has taken a low-key approach to extending the PSN return-to-service delay, making the announcement on a company blog.

“We were unaware of the extent of the attack on Sony Online Entertainment servers, and we are taking this opportunity to conduct further testing of the incredibly complex system,” the blog post says.

Facebook is driving an increasing amount of traffic to news sites, but Google remains the top referring service, according to a study, states The Economic Times.

The study by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism looked at the behaviour of news consumers online during the first nine months of 2010, using audience statistics from the Nielsen Company.

The study examined the 25 most popular news Web sites in the US, looking at how users get to the sites, how long they stay there, how deep they explore a site and where they go when they leave.

Amid a wave of demonstrations across the Middle East, angry Iraqi mobile phone users are organising their own protest - a boycott of the Kuwaiti mobile phone operator Zain, writes AFP.

After persistently poor mobile phone coverage in Iraq, a small group of activists in e-mail chains and Facebook groups are looking to convince customers to switch off their phones for a day on 21 May.

“We are demanding to end this 1% of Iraqis' suffering,” Haidar Sabr, a civil servant and one of the boycott's organisers, said, alluding to Iraqis' daily struggles for electricity and clean water.