A court in Norway on Friday rejected calls from the entertainment industry to force communications giant Telenor to block its customers from accessing popular file sharing website The Pirate Bay.

Experts from 50 nations meeting in Madrid have reached a draft agreement on international standards for the protection of privacy and personal data, participants said Friday.

Solar Impulse, the Swiss bid to make the first solar-powered flight around the world, rolled out its prototype on Friday at an airbase near Zurich and powered up the engines.

Microsoft has reached its long anticipated search and advertising deal with Yahoo, according to reports.Under the terms of a deal expected to be announced shortly, Bing will become the default search engine for Yahoo. For its part, Yahoo will become the exclusive sales agency for Bing advertising inventory using Microsoft's AdCenter as the sales technology platform, but it will not receive an upfront payment, according to reports in AdAge and AllThingsD quoting sources familiar with the situation.

BURLINGAME - If it's September, it must be time for new iPods. You don't have to be Jim Rockford--or former Forbes employee Peter Kafka--to sniff that one out. Just check the calendar. Apple has said it likes to introduce new iPods every September, and lo, the rumor machine has spit out a date: Sept. 9. Of course, it's not official until Apple sends out invitations for the event. When Apple does put on its show, Chief Executive SteveJobsSteve Jobs may make his first public appearance since last year. Apple's new tablet computer probably won't. Oh, and there will be new iPods. That last part, however, won't matter as much as it did before the iPhone era.

BEIJING - Rebecca Fannin has always been bullish on China's brainpower. In early 2008, she published Silicon Dragon: How China is Winning the Tech Race, a sort of manifesto and reference guide for China's slow but steady ascent toward becoming a worldwide leader in technological innovation. Fannin argued that the first wave of Chinese start-ups, which were created by returnees from abroad and essentially imitated foreign firms, were being replaced by a new crop of homegrown entrepreneurs with their own innovative technology and business models. Today, despite the 18 months of economic pain and vanishing venture capital that have followed her book's release, Fannin stands by its central thesis. The recession, she argues, hasn't altered the direction of China's rise so much as the country's speed. And in some ways, the global slowdown has only served to reduce Silicon Valley's head start in the race for innovation, leaving China poised to close the gap.