1. and : The European Commission fined Intel €1.06 billion (US$1.44 billion) for antitrust violations. E.U. Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes minced no words: "Intel has harmed millions of EU consumers," so the big fine should "therefore come as no surprise." Intel CEO Paul Otellini was more "baffled," as he put it, than surprised, and vowed to appeal the decision.
2. : We know you'll appreciate a glimmer of economic optimism, so we offer up one of the most-read stories at Network World this week for our number-two spot. The slide show featured 10 U.S. cities with thousands of IT job openings.
3. : A system error directed some Google Web traffic through Asia, which led to hang-ups and interruptions with the Google Apps service. Service was slow or interrupted for about 14 percent of Google users and affected all of the company's products -- search, news, Gmail, maps and Google Reader.
4. : Online storage services are shutting down operations left and right, and they aren't always handling those shutdowns well, as customers who have lost data discovered. Larger services run by AOL, Hewlett-Packard and Yahoo gave users months to remove data before shuttering sites, but some smaller companies have had to pull the plug quickly.
5. : A flood of Microsoft software is soon to be upon us, with updates of four of its major product lines expected to ship late this year or early next.
6. : The days of lax antitrust enforcement are over in the U.S., at least for now, with a policy repeal at the Department of Justice. The repeal "is a shift in philosophy and the clearest way to let everyone know that the Antitrust Division will be aggressively pursuing cases where monopolists try to use their dominance in the marketplace to stifle competition and harm consumers," said Christine Varney, assistant attorney general in charge of that division.
7. : Photos of Research In Motion's Storm update showed up on the Web, just days after RIM's images of the company's unannounced Onyx update surfaced, which followed other recent product leaks.
8. : Two-thirds of the 4,000 teenagers surveyed by Panda Security said they have hacked instant-messaging or social-network accounts of people they know. While that finding gives us pause, this one really brought us up short: Twenty percent have published embarrassing photographs or videos of acquaintances on the Internet.
9. : Facebook users were hit with a two-bit phishing attack, complete with grammatical errors and misspellings in the malicious e-mail used as a lure. The good news is that just like the phishing attacks on Facebook late last month and earlier this month, it appears that computers aren't being infected with viruses, although user names and passwords are being stolen. (We have a hard time understanding, honestly, why anyone with half a sparking brain cell would click on a link in such an e-mail.)
10. : The U.S. Federal Trade Commission officially dropped its antitrust case against memory maker Rambus. The Supreme Court in February upheld an appellate court in a ruling against the FTC, which had effectively ended the legal saga.