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The peculiar story of Google’s humbling in China this week has been receiving strangely low levels of coverage in the Western media.

While much of the Western world struggles with broadband speeds in single digits, Japan’s national telco has just seen users of its 100 Mbit/s fiber-optic internet service become a majority as the slower ADSL is increasingly being left behind.

Several months after being announced, Y-E Data’s YD-300 WUSB hub is finally on sale in Japan.

Users of the Google Personalized Home page should notice an unusual departure for the traditionally spartan service when they log on this morning to be greeted by colorful graphical themes for the first time.

New product launches — like pretty much everything else — are done differently here in Japan and yesterday’s Windows Vista event was no exception.

Hitachi reckons its groundbreaking 1TB hard drive will be ideal for storing the ever-increasing libraries of home movies, photographs and other media we all have these days, but it’s a fairly safe bet that consumers of ‘arthouse’ cinema, illegal warez and pirate movies will be beside themselves with glee too.

Just as great oaks come from little acorns, so too do room-sized computers come from humble calculators.

Hard as it is to believe, Japan has been hit by yet another round of computers self immolating — this time it’s the desktop variety that are cashing in their chips.

If you’re in Japan, really desperate to stream video over the ‘net from your home PC and can’t be bothered hooking up a Slingbox, then Buffalo’s Itsu Demo TV II Skype relay solution is a good way to burn through ¥12,800.

A flaw in Mozilla’s Firefox browser makes it easy for cybercriminals to steal user information on websites where users create their own pages, such as MySpace.com.

Yahoo plans to buy Bix.com, a website that lets users create online contests, as part of its push into offering more online social media services.

Mozilla fired a shot back at Microsoft in the browser war’s latest battle this week, using a company-sponsored study to claim the antiphishing filter in Firefox 2 more accurately flags potential phishing attacks than the one in Internet Explorer 7.

The threat posed to computer users and companies by hackers is shifting from attacks on the computers to attacks on electronic transactions, the head of Symantec said in Tokyo last week. Check out the full video report after the jump.

In a rare piece of positive news, the chief executive of Symantec, John Thompson, says he is encouraged by moves Microsoft has made in recent weeks to open up the Windows Vista operating system.

IBM researchers have found a way to draw twice as much heat off of hard-working computer chips, clearing the way for server farms and data centers to use denser, faster processors.

Adobe president and COO, Shantanu Narayen, spoke to us last week about the company’s intriguing new Apollo initiative.

The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates.

Via Technologies is working with two computer makers in the U.K. to offer systems under a program designed to reduce the environmental impact of PCs.

So, whaddya get if you slice a DVD horizontally into ten wafer-thin slices, each less than 0.1mm thick? Yup — Hitachi Maxell’s new Stacked Volumetric Optical Disc (SVOD) storage medium capable of schlepping around terabytes of your Pirate Bay-ed goodness.

If you’re thinking of using your PC to play high-definition Blu-ray Disc or HD DVD movies then you might have to think again. While computer drives for both blue-laser formats make PC playback a possibility, you’ll need to have a high-performance PC if you want to watch the majority of movies.

That NEC Blu-ray PC showed us its water-cooled mojo yesterday and it looks like one mighty beast. One question, though — are all Blu-ray movie releases gonna be as totally worthless as the one NEC had on show?

Japanese users won’t have to worry about a noisy cooling fan disturbing them while they watch high-definition movies on NEC’s newest computer — the PC, equipped with a Blu-ray drive, uses water-cooling instead.

Blu-ray is now firmly entrenched in Sony’s lineup, from Vaio PCs with video editing software right through to high-def TV recorders with hard drives. Check ‘em out after the link.

Sony will launch a pair of Blu-ray Disc video recorders in Japan this December, the company said Tuesday at Ceatec.

By 2010, processor performance will increase 300 percent per watt as users demand eight times more grunt for encoding, according to Intel.

Hewlett-Packard and its Watergate re-enactment now own the tech scandal headlines, but during the summer our attention focused on other alleged malfeasance, by the company with the normally shiny image, Apple Computer.

With attackers finding new ways to exploit a critical flaw in Internet Explorer, Microsoft has released a patch for the problem ahead of its next scheduled round of security updates.

It may seem like tilting at windmills, but Wallop Technologies expects to shake up the social networking market, currently dominated by entrenched players like MySpace, Facebook and Friendster.

Hackers are taking advantage of a newly discovered vulnerability in Internet Explorer to install spyware on PCs that visit a number of Russian porn sites.

In an effort to simplify the distribution of Windows Vista and make it easier for customers to upgrade, Microsoft will include the various retail versions of the OS on one DVD instead of having separate DVDs for each Vista edition.

Microsoft hopes to bank on the popularity of online video-sharing services such as YouTube and Google Video with its own competitive service, which goes into beta on Tuesday.

Hackers have discovered a new vulnerability in Internet Explorer, and they’ve released code that could be used to attack users of Microsoft’s popular browser.

Yahoo plans to significantly expand the number of people with access to its next-generation webmail service, which has been in test, or beta, mode for about one year.

With the latest beta of Skype for Mac OS X, released on Wednesday, Skype hopes to help bridge the barrier between Macs and PCs for video calling.

Google is partnering with Discovery Networks, the U.S. National Park Service and others to enrich its Google Earth mapping application with text and multimedia about geographic locations.

Intel has teamed up with a Taiwanese motherboard vendor to tap China’s burgeoning Internet cafe market, on the heels of a similar announcement earlier this year by rival AMD.

The California Highway Patrol (CHP) is investigating the apparent hacking of a computer in Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s office.

Microsoft is removing the beta tag from Live Search, its next-generation search engine, and making it the underlying search tool at its MSN.com portal.

Samsung showed off its first 40 nanometer chip, a 32GB NAND flash memory that can be used in memory cards able to store up to 64GB of data, or 40 movies.

User-uploaded video might be making all the waves on the Internet right now but the future lies in professional content, according to the head of one video portal.