IBM pledged not to use genetic data to screen employees and applicants in what it said was the first such move by a major corporation to safeguard a new category of privacy.
IBM (IBM) also said it would refrain from using the data in determining eligibility for health-care or benefits plans.
The pledge comes as Congress debates a proposed privacy bill that would bar health insurers and employers from discriminating against people with a genetic predisposition to disease.
Four years ago, railroad conglomerate Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNI) agreed to abstain from submitting its employees to genetic testing after being sued by federal regulators.
IBM employs more than 300,000 people worldwide.
The Genetic Alliance, a Washington-based patients' advocacy group, called IBM's policy "remarkable" and predicted it would spur other U.S. corporations to follow suit.
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Cool search: Yahoo's online news search tool added internet journal entries as a supplement to professional media offerings -- an experiment that figures to test the public's appetite for information from alternative sources.
Under Yahoo's new approach, a keyword search for online news will include a list of relevant blogs displayed in a box to the right of the results collected from mainstream journalism.
In addition, Yahoo (YHOO) is introducing tools for finding, organizing and rating podcasts.
Although it can do several things, the free service focuses on making it easier for people to sift through the tens of thousands of podcasts currently available on the web to find the programming best suited to their personal interests.
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Nice shootin', Ace: Taiwan's Acer, the world's fourth-largest PC maker, wants to challenge Dell and Lenovo in their home markets as it aims to boost sales of its own brand by up to two-fifths in 2006.
In the second quarter, Dell was the world's top PC seller with 19 percent of the market, followed by Hewlett-Packard at 15.4 percent, Lenovo at 7.5 percent and Acer at 4.4 percent.
The Taiwanese firm's growth plan hinges on recently secured deals with retailers and distributors such as Circuit City.
Acer intends to ramp up North American sales of PCs bearing its label to $2 billion in 2006 -- or about a fifth of global Acer-brand sales, versus 11 percent to 12 percent this year.
In China, Acer President Gianfranco Lanci hopes Acer-branded PC sales would account for 4 percent to 5 percent of global sales this year, or about $320 million.
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Gates keeps it real: Longtime adversaries Microsoft and RealNetworks scheduled a joint news conference amid indications that the companies had settled Real's antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft.
The news conference in Seattle was scheduled to include the heads of both companies, Microsoft's Bill Gates and RealNetworks' Rob Glaser.
RealNetworks sued Microsoft in December 2003, accusing the software giant of illegally forcing Windows users to accept Microsoft's digital media player. RealNetworks said its music player suffered as a result.
A settlement in the works between the companies would cost Microsoft $750 million, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing unidentified sources. It was unclear how much of that would be in cash; the Journal said that Microsoft would work to promote RealNetworks' music and game services and that the companies would collaborate on technology initiatives.
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PC with two brains: Months earlier than expected but still half a year behind its competition, Intel has started shipping server multiprocessors that have two computing engines on a single chip.
The new dual-core Xeon chips for two-processor servers promise up to a 50 percent improvement over systems with two single-core processors.
Both Intel and Advanced Micro Devices launched dual-core chips this year as a way of gaining performance while controlling power consumption. AMD initially focused on servers while Intel started with chips for desktop computers.
As a result, the new Xeon is arriving about six months after AMD's dual-core Opteron chip made its debut.
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Compiled by Keith Axline. AP and Reuters contributed to this report.
