HP execs misled investors before August stock crash: lawsuit

(Reuters) - Hewlett-Packard Co and top executives misled investors for months before unveiling a series of major decisions, such as the demise of the TouchPad, that hammered its shares, a shareholder alleged in a proposed class-action lawsuit filed this week. Shareholder Richard Gammel accuses the world's largest technology company of concealing the fact that its existing business model was not working and that webOS -- the operating software it inherited after buying Palm -- was no longer central to its business model.

PE firm Silver Lake looking to buy Yahoo: reports

(Reuters) - Private equity firm Silver Lake is considering a bid for Internet firm Yahoo Inc , according to media reports late Thursday. As part of a deal, Silver Lake would sell off Yahoo's Asian assets and then attempt to turn around the main operations or find a buyer for that business, two people involved in the deliberations told Bloomberg.

RIM results, outlook stun investors even after warning

(Reuters) - Research In Motion reported a steep drop in quarterly profit on limp sales of its smartphones and tablets, and offered investors little hope of a turnaround anytime soon, sending its shares tumbling. RIM, which launched a string of refreshed BlackBerry phones in recent weeks, painted a dismal picture for its current quarter and said it now expects to reach only the lower end of an already reduced full-year outlook in a quarterly financial report issued late Thursday.

Analysis: China seeks to tether the microblog tiger

BEIJING (Reuters) - Mao Zedong famously said a single spark could start a revolutionary prairie fire. That fear is now driving his Communist Party successors to grapple with how to tame China's expanding legions of microbloggers. A stream of warnings in state media has exposed how nervous Beijing is about the booming microblogs and their potential to tear at the seams of party censorship and controls.

Most Asian nations realizing Internet cannot be tamed

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - It's not just dictators. Governments around the world, many of them popularly elected, have tried for years to control the Internet and social media, dismayed by their potential to incite violence, spread mischief and distribute pornography and dissent. But in Asia, home to everything from free-wheeling democracies to totalitarian regimes and others in between, many governments are increasingly realizing that controlling online content, including dissent, just will not work.

EBay lawyer: Craigslist "sought" criminal probe

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A criminal investigation involving eBay is a "game changer" that should slow Craigslist's attempts to obtain documents and depositions in a parallel civil case, an eBay lawyer said in court. The U.S. Department of Justice has launched a criminal probe into whether eBay employees took confidential information from classified ad website Craigslist as eBay sought to build a rival service.

Bulk of Oracle copyright claims vs Google allowed

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A U.S. judge will allow the bulk of Oracle Corp's copyright infringement claims against Google Inc over the Java programing language, according to a court ruling on Thursday. Oracle sued Google last year, claiming the Web search leader's Android mobile operating technology infringes Oracle's Java patents.