JD.com Inc, China's second-biggest e-commerce company by market share, will accept pre-orders for Microsoft Corp's Xbox One games console in China from July 28 to July 30, the firm said on Monday. The pre-orders will be taken via Tencent Holdings' mobile social networks Mobile QQ and WeChat, known as Weixin in China, JD.com said in a statement. Tencent holds a 17.6 percent stake in JD.com. The Xbox One will be the first gaming console to be released in mainland China since the government banned console sales in 2000, citing games' effects on mental health.

By Joseph Menn SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Personal data including text messages, contact lists and photos can be extracted from iPhones through previously unpublicized techniques by Apple Inc employees, the company acknowledged this week. The same techniques to circumvent backup encryption could be used by law enforcement or others with access to the "trusted" computers to which the devices have been connected, according to the security expert who prompted Apple's admission. In a conference presentation this week, researcher Jonathan Zdziarski showed how the services take a surprising amount of data for what Apple now says are diagnostic services meant to help engineers. As word spread about Zdziarski’s initial presentation at the Hackers on Planet Earth conference, some cited it as evidence of Apple collaboration with the National Security Agency.

(Reuters) - Facebook Inc said the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission dropped its probe into the social networking company over events surrounding its controversial initial public offering. In its quarterly report filed on Thursday, Facebook said the regulator in May "notified us that it had terminated its inquiry and that no enforcement action had been recommended by the SEC." Facebook shares began trading on May 18, 2012, but soon fell below their $38 per share offering price and had lost more than half their value by the middle of August, angering investors. Investors also complained they were not told just prior to the IPO that analysts at Facebook's investment banks were cutting their forecasts after learning of the company's internal projections for advertising revenue. The end of the SEC probe does not affect shareholder litigation against Facebook, Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg and many banks over the Menlo Park, California-based company's IPO.

By Euan Rocha and Alastair Sharp TORONTO (Reuters) - IBM Corp's recent move to partner with Apple Inc to sell iPhones and iPads loaded with corporate applications has excited investors in both companies, but two rivals say they are unperturbed for now. Top executives at Dell and BlackBerry Ltd scoffed at the threat posed by the alliance this week, arguing the tie-up is unlikely to derail the efforts of their own companies to re-invent themselves. I think it just made a good press release," John Swainson, who heads Dell's global software business, said in an interview with Reuters in Toronto on Thursday. PC maker Dell and smartphone maker BlackBerry are in the midst of reshaping their companies around software and services, as the needs of their big corporate clients morph.

By Leila Abboud and Julia Fioretti PARIS/BRUSSELS (Reuters) - European regulators have not yet decided whether to try to force search engines such as Google and Microsoft's Bing to scrub results globally when people invoke their "right to be forgotten" in the region. Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin - who heads France's privacy watchdog and the WP29 group of EU national data protection authorities - said in an interview on Friday that no consensus had yet been reached on what she called a "complicated issue". The European Union's top court ruled in May that search engines must take down certain results shown under a search of a person's name if the information was "inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant". Although the "right to be forgotten" existed as a concept in European law, the ruling marked the first time companies like Google have been asked to field such requests from the public.

The city of San Francisco — and most of Twitter — stopped and watched last November, as five-year-old Miles Scott became pint-sized superhero Batkid. Miles, who has leukemia, was given the chance to dress up as his favorite comic icon by the Make-A-Wish Foundation. His day was made even more remarkable by the reaction from the city he wanted to save, as thousands of people turned out to watch the tiny crusader catch cartoon criminals around San Francisco. The feature-length documentary, created by filmmaker Dana Nachman, was teased at Comic-Con with a three-minute trailer that later appeared online courtesy of Deadline.

Wired reporter Andy Greenberg recently demonstrated how an app designed to make it easy to get duplicates of your keys can be used to copy someone else's keys in just a few seconds. The app, KeyMe, uses the phone's camera to scan the keys and save them to your digital keychain. From there, you can get the keys made at one of their self-service kiosks.

It has only been two weeks since Marvel announced that that a woman would take up Thor’s hammer in the comics, but attendees at Comic-Con 2014 have eagerly embraced the news. This year, Marvel is the top choice for cosplayers looking for inspiration, and mixed in with all the Deadpools, Captain Americas, and Winter Soldiers, we found a number of women wielding Mjolnir and excited about the direction Marvel is taking its comics.

Does leaving a voicemail message create performance anxiety for you? The bad news is that, if you are a millennial, you cannot afford to regard leaving voicemail messages as obsolete.

Here in the Northeastern United States, we're in the thick of a hot, sticky summer, and with it, privy to theatrical summer thunderstorms almost every day. I love thunderstorms in the summer — there's just nothing like when the sky turns pitch black in the middle of the day and the clouds unleash their fury on the land below. There's a specific soundtrack that goes oh so perfectly with these storms: moody, atmospheric metal that builds from quiet nothing into crashing crescendos and soaring guitars. ...

It looks like Amazon is about to release another piece of hardware. After over a year murmurs, documentation from Staples' internal inventory system suggests that Amazon is almost ready to unveil its own point-of-sale system to compete with the likes of Square and PayPal Here. A copy of the inventory documentation provided to 9 to 5 Mac includes an unreleased product referred to as an "Amazon Card Reader." The site reports that it's marked as a $9.99 product and the system notes that signage related to the reader should be held until August 12th. In that report, the paper said that Amazon was working on a point-of-sale system similar to the Square reader.