The husband of Cuban dissident blogger Yoani Sanchez said he was attacked by government supporters as he waited on Friday to confront state security agents accused of detaining and beating his wife two weeks ago.

Sanchez, whose writing about the hardships of Cuban life were praised this week by President Barack Obama, said men believed to be government agents forced her into a car and hit her repeatedly in a brief detention on November 6.

Reinaldo Escobar, also a blogger, said he had gone to a Havana intersection hoping that state security agents would respond to a challenge he issued earlier to meet there for a "verbal duel" about his wife's incident.

The judge in the copyright infringement case pitting the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers (AAP) against Google and its book search program has set a date for the final hearing on the parties' controversial settlement proposal.

Judge Denny Chin from the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York has scheduled the "final fairness hearing" for Feb. 18, 2010 at 10 a.m. U.S. Eastern Time. As expected, the judge also granted preliminary approval to the proposed class-action settlement, according to an order he issued on Thursday.

Ruby, the popular open source dynamic language, is making headway not only on Java but also on the Windows and Mac platforms.

Appearing at the RubyConf event in Burlingame, Calif., on Friday afternoon, Engine Yard officials offered insights on JRuby, which puts Ruby on the JVM (Java Virtual Machine). В JRuby also functions with Windows. Apple personnel at the conference detailed MacRuby, which puts Ruby on Mac OS.

[ See InfoWorld's report on the JVM supporting multiple languages. ]

Few things in the Web 2.0 world are more frustrating than attempting to justify Twitter to a nonbeliever. Sure, plenty of arguments can be made in favor of the service—it's a great RSS reader, a good way to keep tabs on friends, and an immediate outlet for pithy bursts of creativity. Twitter is what you make it—there aren't any content guidelines, so the site's uses are as diverse as its user base. Some are using the service as a platform for disseminating customer service; others are scoring book and TV deals.

Anti-Twitter arguments, though, tend to boil down to one thing: "Twitter is just a bunch of people writing about what they ate for lunch." This is hyperbolic, as anyone who's spent time with the site can tell you. Still, it's a pervasive belief, and for good reason: A lot of people on Twitter do write about what they ate for lunch. In fact, if sharing brief insights into your culinary habits is your passion, you'll find few more suitable venues on the Web.

Two competing approaches to equipping mobile phones with contactless communications capabilities vied for supporters at the Cartes exhibition in Paris this week. Either approach could turn phones into self-service electronic tour guides, travel tickets or secure payment terminals.

One half of the technology is already in widespread use. Contactless smartcards -- credit-card-sized RFID tags with an embedded cryptographic chip for authentication and secure data storage -- are already used for access control, public transport tickets (such as Navigo in Paris and Oyster in London) and electronic payment systems (such as Visa Paywave), and the same chips can be used to add intelligent tags to objects or buildings, allowing shoppers or tourists to view related information. The chips are powered by a radio signal from the reader.

Everyone's all a-twitter over Google's newly announced operating system, Google Chrome OS. Some swear it'll be a hit; others are convinced it's destined for failure. Love it or hate it, though, this puppy's one tough piece of software to ignore.

So what's Chrome OS all about, and what could do it for you? Here are some answers.

What is Google Chrome OS?

Google Chrome OS is a lightweight, cloud-based operating system demonstrated by Google for the first time this week.

In a step to make YouTube videos more accessible to deaf people as well as to anyone else searching for videos online, Google has launched an automatic video captioning service.

Captioned videos are not entirely new at YouTube. Google first introduced manual user-generated video captioning three years ago, and people have already used the existing service to caption hundreds of thousands of videos.

But the new auto captioning service will exploit the speech-recognition algorithms used in Google Voice to produce captions automatically.

California's ban on plasma-screen televisions to reduce energy consumption could cost as much as $50 million per year in sales taxes because consumers are free to buy the sets online or in other states. "At a time when the state of California is facing its worst money crisis in history, this is going to be disastrous," said Jennifer Bemisderfer, a spokesperson for the Consumer Electronics Association, which lobbied against the ban.

The California Energy Commission's ban on plasma sets 58 inches or smaller is the first in the nation. It came after two years of debate on skyrocketing home energy costs and takes effect in 2011.

For entertainment hardware companies like Sony, a thriving, all-encompassing online media store is the Holy Grail. It's a glorious balance, in which the customer buys software through the store, and therefore becomes hooked on the hardware to which it's attached. That's how brand loyalty is created.

In other words, that's iTunes.

So I'm not surprised that Sony wants to unify its disparate hardware parts through a far-reaching media store, dubbed the Sony Online Service. An article in BusinessWeek states that this is Sony's answer to iTunes, and though it's not clear whether Sony's executives are actually saying that, they'd be wise not to.

Early last week, Apple released the 10.6.2 update to Snow Leopard loaded mostly with welcome, but unsurprising bug fixes, including a patch for the uncommon but extremely harmful user account deletion bug. However, hidden in the kernel update was dropped support for the hackintosh-friendly Intel Atom processor. The Atom is Intelвs smallest chip and has the distinction of being the processor of choice for people building cheap OS X netbooks with limited hackery required. When early builds of 10.6.2 removed Atom support, speculation and rumors were abound regarding the future of the easy-to-build Atom hackintosh.