"There are millions of people who possess useful knowledge that they would love to share, and there are billions of people who can benefit from it," Manber said in the post.

"The goal is for knols to cover all topics, from scientific concepts, to medical information ... to how-to-fix-it instructions."

The word "knol" is used to refer to the project and to an entry on the shared Web site. Google's site will identify the authors posting the information. It will not serve as an editor of the information or endorse what is written on the site.

The site will eventually be opened to the general public and allow users to submit comments, questions or edits, as well as rate posts. Knol writers will be able to include ads in their posts, sharing the revenue with Google.

The Hamburg District Court said Tuesday that T-Mobile, part of Deutsche Telekom AG, could indeed sell the phone, coupled with a two-year contract, that could not be used on networks provided by rival wireless companies.

The arrangement is similar to those Apple Inc. has with other carriers around the world. In the United States, AT&T Inc. is Apple's exclusive partner.

"We are pleased with the outcome," T-Mobile spokesman Rene Bresken said. Shares of Deutsche Telekom gained 1.2 percent after the decision to 15.28 euros ($22.41) in Frankfurt.

The company will stop selling an unlocked version but said that after customers' contracts expire, it will unlock their iPhone at no charge.

The iPhone made its German debut on Nov. 9 — available only with the two-year contract from T-Mobile. The German unit of rival Vodafone Group PLC protested that at the Hamburg court.

That court agreed, issuing an injunction barring T-Mobile from offering the iPhone tied to the minimum 24-month contract and from selling it only with a so-called SIM lock that prevents users from switching the device to any other operator's network.

T-Mobile had appealed, but in the meantime offered an unlocked version of the phone priced at 999 euros, or nearly $1,500, more than twice the 399 euro ($585) price of a phone sold in combination with the contract.

Companies routinely offer phone discounts to customers who sign up for lengthy contracts.

Apple's strategy thus far had been to offer the iPhone through an exclusive mobile operator for each region: AT&T Inc. in the United States, O2 in Britain, T-Mobile in Germany and France Telecom's Orange wireless arm in France.

It also has issued software updates that have disabled the workarounds hackers developed to get the iPhone to work on other networks. Apple faces two consumer lawsuits in the United States that accuse the company of unlawfully restricting consumer choice by preventing users from unlocking their iPhones.

Named invention of the year by Time magazine for its design, feel and pioneering software, the iPhone has won over users since it debuted June 29 in the United States.

Cupertino, California-based Apple has sold over 1.4 million iPhones so far and hopes to sell 10 million in 2008, helped by its launch in Europe, then in Asia next year. In Germany, 10,000 sold on Nov. 9 alone.

In the United States, AT&T sells the 8-gigabyte iPhone for $399, having slashed the price by a third about 10 weeks after its debut. Consumers in Britain pay about $556, while in France, Orange is selling unlocked handsets to comply with French consumer law for $950. European price tags include value-added tax.

Social networking Web sites can seem dedicated to the idea that nobody’s personal life is worth keeping private, but when it comes to Mark Zuckerberg — the founder of Facebook, one of the largest networks — Facebook disagrees.

Facebook tried last week to force the magazine 02138 to remove some unflattering documents about Mr. Zuckerberg from its Web site. But a federal judge turned down the company’s request for a court order to take down the material, according to the magazine’s lawyers.

The dispute stemmed from a lawsuit charging that in 2003 and 2004, as a student at Harvard, Mr. Zuckerberg stole the idea and some of the computer source code for Facebook from some fellow students. They were planning a networking site of their own and had hired Mr. Zuckerberg to help with the programming.

Their project fizzled, while Facebook made Mr. Zuckerberg a billionaire — at least on paper — at the age of 23.

02138, which refers to Harvard College’s ZIP code in Cambridge, Mass., and consists primarily of articles about Harvard and Harvard alumni, published an article last week about the genesis of Facebook and the resulting lawsuit. The piece is sympathetic to the plaintiffs’ account and questions the validity of Mr. Zuckerberg’s claims.

The article relied in part on documents submitted in the lawsuit, in Federal District Court in Boston, that were ordered sealed by the judge in the case, Douglas P. Woodlock. On its Web site, 02138 posted not only the article, but also the documents, which include Mr. Zuckerberg’s handwritten application for admission to Harvard and an excerpt from an online journal he kept as a student that contains biting comments about himself and others.

Luke O’Brien, the freelance reporter who wrote the article, said that he had done nothing wrong in obtaining the documents and that neither side in the lawsuit had improperly leaked them to him. He said he had obtained the papers in mid-September from the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston, which considered a part of the case, where a clerk apparently made a mistake and let him read and copy sealed documents, along with those that were still supposed to be open to the public.

“There were a whole bunch of manila envelopes taped shut, clearly sealed, and I did not open those,” he said.

Some of the pages he copied were stamped “Confidential” or “Redacted.” Bom Kim, founder and editor of 02138, which is not affiliated with the university or its alumni association, said that gave him pause.

“We cleared it with our lawyers,” he said, who said that any order sealing the documents would apply only to the parties to the lawsuit. “We did wonder if they were under seal. But since we had obtained them legally, we got clearance.”

On Thursday, Facebook asked Judge Woodlock to order 02138 to strike the documents from its Web site. Lawyers for 02138 said that late Friday, the judge, in an oral ruling, turned down the request; Facebook and its lawyer refused to confirm or deny that account. Calls to the court went unanswered.

“We filed the motions to let the court know that its orders were being violated,” Facebook said in a statement Friday. “One reason the court ordered certain documents’ protection was to prevent exactly what has happened: misusing documents and taking documents out of context to sling mud.”

With oil prices surging and U.S. stock prices slumping, chip maker Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s sale of an 8.1 percent stake to the Abu Dhabi government's investment arm represents the latest plunge by a wealthy Middle Eastern nation into a troubled U.S. corporation.

It also raises fresh questions about the appropriateness of Middle Eastern firms owning large chunks of U.S. businesses that specialize in advanced technologies.

Sunnyvale-based AMD, the world's No. 2 microprocessor maker, needs the $622 million investment from the Mubadala Development Company to help lift the company out of a deep financial slump.

AMD has lost more than $1.6 billion so far this year, and has just $1.5 billion in cash on hand as it works to pay down $5.3 billion in debt. The financial woes have caused AMD's stock to fall more than 35 percent since the start of the year, a slide that has wiped out nearly $4 billion in shareholder wealth.

The infusion, announced Friday, is a necessary jolt for AMD is it hunts for money to fund its counteroffensive against Intel Corp., the world's largest chip maker, and amid a huge spike in investments in U.S. companies from Middle Eastern nations.

Middle Eastern investments in U.S. companies has increased more than fivefold in 2007, leaping from $4.5 billion on 32 deals last year to nearly $25 billion on 42 deals so far this year, according to data compiled by Thomson Financial.

The money invested in the past two years is more than the entire total invested from 1990 to 2005, according to the latest Thomson data. During that period, $24.8 billion in investments were made in 258 deals.

Oil-rich countries have been enriched further in recent months by a run-up in the price of a barrel of oil, which has been hovering in the $90 range while many U.S. stocks continue to suffer from the housing and lending morass that's led some banks to absorb billions of dollars in losses.

The biggest deal so far this year involving Middle Eastern firms was General Electric Co.'s $11.6 billion sale of its plastics division, completed in August, to petrochemicals manufacturer Saudi Basic Industries Corp., a public company based in Riyadh that is 70-pecent owned by the Saudi Arabian government.

Firms based in the United Arab Emirates, a federation of seven oil-rich states, have invested nearly $10 billion in real estate, financial, power generation and other types of companies in the United States.

Earlier this year, Mubadala bought a 7.5 percent stake in the management operations of private-equity firm Carlyle Group for $1.35 billion, and this week unveiled a partnership with military contractor Northrop Grumman Corp. to collaborate on aerospace and aviation technologies.

The deal with AMD makes the Abu Dhabi government-run investment fund AMD's third-largest shareholder, according to AMD's latest regulatory filings, a development that AMD vows will not trigger a review by the U.S. government because it's a minority investment and Mubadala will not get a board seat.

However, some experts doubt that claim, citing the sensitivity of AMD's technology, which besides being used widely in consumer personal computers and corporate servers is also used in Defense Department computers and other government machinery.

John Reynolds, an attorney at Wiley, Rein & Fielding in Washington, said the transaction could face scrutiny by Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., or CFIUS, a 12-member panel headed by the Treasury Department, because the U.S. government is very interested in acquisitions by government-run investment funds, known as sovereign wealth funds, such as Mubadala.

China, Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern and Asian countries have set up such funds, which control an estimated $2.5 trillion in assets.

In addition, if AMD has government contracts for classified work, interest from CFIUS and Congress "is apt to be considerable, even if the investment is non-controlling," Reynolds said.

Generally, passive investments of less than 10 percent of a company's shares do not trigger review by CFIUS. But that is not a hard-and-fast rule, Reynolds said, and an ownership stake below 10 percent is not automatically shielded from review.

The new $15 billion price tag attached to Facebook was more a reflection of Microsoft's need to do a deal with the company rather than an indication of its true worth, analysts said today.

Fears that the internet industry - which has hosted a string of multi-billion dollar deals in recent months - was entering another bubble similar to the one it experienced seven years ago were also dismissed, with analysts pointing out that in most cases investment had come in areas that showed significant growth potential.

Yesterday Microsoft announced that it would buy a 1.6 per cent stake in Facebook for $240 million, ending a months-long bidding war with Google, its arch rival, which was also keen to share a piece of the lucrative advertising revenues that Facebook is expected to start generating.

As part of the deal, which values Facebook at roughly 100 times its estimated $150 million revenues, Microsoft will have exclusive right to serve ads on Facebook's platform, expanding an agreement which was already in place for ads on the US site.

Microsoft's investment, which makes Facebook's 23-year-old chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, worth an estimated $3 billion - at least on paper - follows a string of high-value deals in the internet sector, including Google's acquisition of DoubleClick, the advertising platform, for $3.1 billion, and Microsoft's previous purchase of aQuantive, another server of internet ads, for $6 billion.

The deal gave rise to a wave of blog entries with titles like 'Facebook's funny money', and recalled the early valuations of Yahoo!, the search firm, which had a price to earnings multiple of 1,000 in March, 2000.