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Google has announced that it has joined a consortium to build a new trans-Pacific cable between Japan and California.

The Unity consortium is a joint effort by Bharti Airtel, Global Transit, Google, KDDI Corporation, Pacnet and SingTel and will initially increase Trans–Pacific lit cable capacity by about 20 percent, with the potential to add up to 7.68 Terabits per second.

Google was rumored to be in talks about participation in Unity in September 2007, although at that stage it was believed the cable would go to Australia via Guam.

EA is relaunching The Sims Online as a free service with a new name and new features, including UGC, commerce and land ownership.

EA-Land is the new, free Sims Online (TSO). The 12 different cities from TSO are being moved to EA-Land and the game area is being expanded to be “100 times bigger than the previous size of any city.” Existing TSO users will be able to purchase land in EA-Land before the new (reincarnated) world is open to the public with paying TSO users becoming “EA-Land subscribers” in a similar fashion to the way Linden Lab charges for land in Second Life.

Users of EA-Land will have the ability to upload custom content and (more importantly) buy these customizations from other players.

There is one significant difference though to Second Life: EA-Land won’t become the wild west as EA will be “approving all of the content [so] this user content is safe to be viewed by everyone.”

Second Life fans will point out that TSO/ EA-Land has a lot of difference to Second Life in terms of capabilities, and that is true. And yet really basic 2D service such as Club Penguin and Habbo Hotel have millions of users compared to Second Life’s 100-200,000 regular users over a 60 day period. As much as I hate the name, free is a great selling point and EA-Land has the potential of catering to users who want something more from their online words than the basic services, without the hassles of Second Life.

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Siemens plans on Tuesday to announce that it intends to eliminate up to 7,000 jobs, or 40 percent of the workers in its troubled business telecommunications unit in Germany and Brazil, as it seeks a buyer for the business, a person with direct knowledge of the situation said.

Executives were to disclose the plans for the unit, Siemens Enterprise Communications, which makes corporate phone networks, at a meeting with representatives of the workers’ council in Munich.

According to the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity, executives will announce plans to cut up to 4,000 jobs in the unit, which employs 17,500, and advise the worker representatives that a further 3,000 jobs could be transferred into ventures with new business partners.

The layoffs could occur in Leipzig, Germany, and in Brazil, where Siemens has factories that produce phones and corporate communications networks, the person said. About half of the 4,000 layoffs will be in Germany, this person added.

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YouTube was back up two hours after Pakistan, in an act of information provincialism, inadvertently made the video-sharing site inaccessible to users around the world Sunday afternoon.

The blackout left network administrators and Internet activists wondering on Monday how Pakistan’s actions, meant to restrict only its own citizens from accessing YouTube, could have such widespread reverberations — and whether such a disruption could be reproduced by someone with more malicious intent.

The incident began Friday, according to reports, when the Pakistani government of Pervez Musharraf became worried that a video clip attacking Islam might generate widespread unrest among its Muslim population. The government asked the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, which oversees the country’s Internet providers, to cut off access to YouTube for the country’s estimated 8.2 million Internet users.

That action is not unusual. China, Morocco and Turkey have all reacted to potentially risky material posted to YouTube by blocking access to the site within their borders.

But two critical errors allowed Pakistan’s action to echo around the globe for at least a brief period on Sunday afternoon, according to Martin A. Brown, a data engineer at the Renesys Corporation, an Internet monitoring company, which posted a timeline of the incident on its Web site.

As part of its effort to block YouTube within the country, Pakistan Telecom created a dummy route that essentially discarded YouTube traffic, sending it into what Internet experts call a black hole.

Pakistan Telecom then made an error by announcing that dummy route to its own telecommunications partner, PCCW, based in Hong Kong, shortly before noon New York time on Sunday, according to Renesys.

PCCW then made a second error, accepting that dummy route for YouTube and relaying it to other Internet providers around the world.

Internet service providers now had two conflicting online “roads” leading to YouTube. But because an important online protocol called Border Gateway Protocol favors longer routing addresses — they are thought to be more specific — at least 97 major Internet providers and thousands of smaller ones chose the dummy route, Pakistan’s black hole.

About 1 p.m. Sunday, according to the Renesys timeline, YouTube began working to correct the error, in part by telling Internet service providers that they should direct traffic around Pakistan’s dummy route. YouTube has removed the video clip that had concerned Pakistani officials.

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Electronic Arts, the video gaming giant, made an unsolicited $2 billion bid on Sunday for rival Take-Two Interactive, publisher of the Grand Theft Auto franchise, a deal that would further a wave of consolidation in the rapidly growing industry.

Electronic Arts, which publishes hit games like the Madden N.F.L. and Need for Speed series, offered to pay $26 a share for Take-Two, a 50 percent premium over its share price of $17.36 on Friday. The offer was made publicly after a series of private offers to Take-Two were rejected by its board.

Electronic Arts approached Take Two with a $26-a-share offer on Feb. 19, up from $25 share it initially offered on Feb. 15.

The timing of the bid appears to be an attempt to acquire Take-Two before it releases what is widely expected to be the top-selling game of 2008, the fourth installment of the crime thriller Grand Theft Auto. The Grand Theft Auto franchise, Take-Two’s crown jewel, has sold more than 60 million copies since Grand Theft Auto III took the game industry by storm in 2001.

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On sabbatical in 2001 from Macromedia, Kevin Lynch, a software developer, was frustrated that he could not get to his Web data when he was off the Internet and annoyed that he could not get to his PC data when he was traveling.

On Monday, Mr. Lynch, who was recently named the chief technology officer at Adobe Systems, which bought Macromedia in 2005, will release the official version of AIR, a software development system that will power potentially tens of thousands of applications that merge the Internet and the PC, as well as blur the distinctions between PCs and new computing devices like smartphones.

Adobe sees AIR as a major advance that builds on its Flash multimedia software. Flash is the engine behind Web animations, e-commerce sites and many streaming videos. It is, the company says, the most ubiquitous software on earth, residing on almost all Internet-connected personal computers.

But most people may never know AIR is there. Applications will look and run the same whether the user is at his desk or his portable computer, and soon when using a mobile device or at an Internet kiosk. Applications will increasingly be built with routine access to all the Web’s information, and a user’s files will be accessible whether at home or traveling.

AIR is intended to help software developers create applications that exist in part on a user’s PC or smartphone and in part on servers reachable through the Internet.

To computer users, the applications will look like any others on their device, represented by an icon. The AIR applications can mimic the functions of a Web browser but do not require a Web browser to run.

The first commercial release of AIR takes place on Monday, but dozens of applications have been built around a test or beta version.

EBay offers an AIR-based application called eBay Desktop that gives its customers the power to buy wherever they are. Adobe uses AIR for Buzzword, an online word processing program. At Monday’s introduction event in San Francisco, new hybrid applications from companies including Salesforce, FedEx, eBay, Nickelodeon, Nasdaq, AOL and The New York Times Company will be demonstrated.

Like Adobe’s Flash software, AIR will be given away. The company makes its money selling software development kits to programmers.

Mr. Lynch and a rapidly growing number of industry executives and technologists believe that the model represents the future of computing.

Moreover, the move away from PC-based applications is likely to get a significant jump start in the coming weeks when Intel introduces its low-cost “Netbook” computer strategy, which is intended to unleash a new wave of inexpensive wireless connected mobile computers.

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Seeking to satisfy European antitrust officials, Microsoft said on Thursday that it would open up and share many more of its technical secrets with the rest of the software industry and competitors.

Microsoft executives, in a conference call, characterized the announcement as a “strategic shift” in the company’s business practices and its handling of technical information. They also portrayed the moves as only partly a nod to the continuing challenge Microsoft faces from Europe’s antitrust regulators.

The broader goal, they said, is to bring Microsoft’s flagship personal computer products — the Windows operating system and Office productivity programs — further into the Internet era of computing. Increasingly, people want a seamless flow of documents, data and programming code among desktop PCs and the Internet, especially as they make the shift from using software on a PC to using services on the Web.

“These steps are being taken on our own,” said Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive. The move, he said, was a recognition of Microsoft’s “unique legal situation,” but it was also the company’s effort to adapt to “the opportunities and risks of a more connected, more services-oriented world.”

Microsoft’s first step will be to put on its Web site 30,000 pages of technical documentation detailing how its Windows desktop and Microsoft server programs communicate and share information. Until now, that information was treated as a trade secret and was available only under a special license.

Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief software architect, said that by sharing more information, Microsoft would make it easier for others to write Internet programs that tap into personal information on a PC.

That, Mr. Ozzie added, should bring new sets of Web services that, for example, might match a person’s calendar information with a doctor’s schedule. Then smart software could make an appointment. At home, he noted, someone’s digital collection of music, movies and family photos would be more easily shuffled to different devices and screens.

“The Internet opens up a world of potential innovation,” Mr. Ozzie said. “And I think we’ve just scratched the surface.”

Microsoft announced other plans to open up its technology, like allowing developers to add more non-Microsoft document formats to its Office word processing and spreadsheet programs. Microsoft also made commitments to increase its support for industry standards and work with open-source software developers.

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