Beijing » China has banned the use of its Olympic gold medalists' names as Internet addresses by anyone but the athletes themselves.

However, the Chinese government controls only Web sites with the ''.cn'' suffix and has no power over those assigned in other countries. The move, announced Tuesday, ''will better protect the interests of the Olympic gold medalists,'' said an official of the government's China Internet Network Information Center, quoted by the state Xinhua News Agency. It identified him only by the surname Hu. Domain names based on the names of at least 10 gold medalists, including weightlifter Chen Xiexia and gymnast Yang Wei, were registered before the games, according to Xinhua. People who registered names before the Olympics can keep them but ''were advised to give it to the medalist 'as a gift,' '' Xinhua reported.

- Associated Press

Sony's PSP gets another makeover

It looks just like the previous version of the Sony PlayStation Portable, but the handheld video game console is getting a makeover in the fall. Sony announced last week at the Liepzig gaming conference in Germany that the PSP 3000, which is expected to be released in the U.S. in October, will include a built-in microphone and an "enhanced" anti-glare screen that make it easier to see in daylight. The new unit, which looks exactly like the slimmer PSP 2000 model of late, will run $169 or $199 in bundle packs that include a game and a movie on the system's UMD disc format.

- Vince Horiuchi

Widgets: Multitasker¹s dream or info overload?

San Francisco » Hoping to plant their flags on the screens of Internet-connected television sets, Intel Corp. and Yahoo Inc. unveiled a new project to populate those screens with tiny programs called widgets.

Depending on your point of view, the goal is to create a multitasker's dream or an information-overload nightmare: It would let people do things like check their stock prices or peruse their photos all while watching TV.

The notion that the Internet will be the delivery mechanism for TV has been gaining momentum, and the Intel-Yahoo partnership, called "The Widget Channel," reflects the potential.

In a screen shot provided by the companies, a baseball game airs on the main part of the screen while various programs, like a personalized Flickr photo gallery and a menu of on-demand movie rentals, run in a strip along the bottom of the screen.

Intel and Yahoo are working with more than a dozen other companies to build and eventually deliver such widgets, including Blockbuster Inc., Comcast Corp., the Disney-ABC Television Group and MTV.

- Associated Press