Videogames are serious business in China. The country’s online game market will reach 41 billion yuan ($6 billion) by 2010, accounting for half the global market, according to newly released data from Cnzz.com, a Beijing-based data analysis firm.

The Cnzz.com report says that almost two-thirds of China’s 338 million Web users are now online gamers. The online-game industry, which currently accounts for more than half of the total Internet economy, will see strong annual growth at a rate of 20 percent in future years, the report says.

The mainstream remains the awkwardly named sector of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs). In October, six out of the 10 most popular online games in China are MMORPG games, according to the report. World of Warcraft by Activision Blizzard (ATVI) still tops the list with the most registered players and peak simultaneous online users. But the current government regulatory fighting over its Chinese license, held by Netease, may yet have a negative impact on the game, according to the report.

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Wikipedia.org is the fifth-most-popular Web site in the world, with roughly 325 million monthly visitors. But unprecedented numbers of the millions of online volunteers who write, edit and police it are quitting.

That could have significant implications for the brand of democratization that Wikipedia helped to unleash over the Internet–the empowerment of the amateur.

Volunteers have been departing the project that bills itself as “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit” faster than new ones have been joining, and the net losses have accelerated over the past year. In the first three months of 2009, the English-language Wikipedia suffered a net loss of more than 49,000 editors, compared to a net loss of 4,900 during the same period a year earlier, according to Spanish researcher Felipe Ortega, who analyzed Wikipedia’s data on the editing histories of its more than three million active contributors in 10 languages.

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EarthLink (ELNK) email customers experienced outages over much of the weekend, according to numerous online complaints.

Starting Friday, Twitter users began to post updates about service outages. Alex Mendez tweeted “33:40 minutes on the cellphone dealing with TW / earthlink. UGH,” and Diane Fischler wrote, “Not getting email messages again. Woke up to about 60 left over from yesterday’s Earthlink outage, now seems to be down again. Who else?”

On Saturday and Sunday, EarthLink users continued to complain about their lack of service. Jim Rattray wrote: “#Earthlink email has been down for 24+ hours. ‘We’re aware and working on it.’ Not good enough,” while romeneskoblogs said, “I haven’t received Earthlink email since Friday night. Customer service rep (in India) said could be 72 hours b4 restored.”

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The term “3-D” has been largely synonymous with Hollywood blockbusters, buttered popcorn and ill-fitting cardboard glasses since the 1950s, when three-dimensionality was introduced to draw TV owners into theaters.

Over the past 20 years, 3-D-capable devices like set-top boxes as well as 3-D programming have become available at home. A lack of standard broadcasting formats, relatively little content and the need for 3-D glasses, however, have kept it from a broad audience.

Tech companies are betting that will all change, and when it does, you’ll be able to lose the glasses.

According to new data from Thomson Reuters, 3-D-related patents have risen sharply in recent years, led by companies such as Samsung, Panasonic and Toshiba. “It will only be a matter of time before 3-D televisions start showing up in the home,” the report says.

Patent activity in the 3-D television space grew 69 percent over a five-year period, with more than 1,000 unique invention patents filed last year alone. This year is on par, with 486 filed in the first half of 2009.

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China’s military is under attack. At least its Web site is…from hackers.

In a sign that China’s Ministry of National Defense faces the same kind of Internet security challenges that militaries around the world have reported, its new Web site was attacked more than 2.3 million times within a month of its August launch. The state-run People’s Daily newspaper reported that revelation Wednesday in an interview with the editor-in-chief of the Chinese defense department’s site, Ji Guilin.

In the report, Ji said it battled down a variety of hackers and no harm was done to China’s national security. He said the site has boosted its network security.

He didn’t say where the hacker attacks originated.

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Dell’s (DELL) fiscal third-quarter earnings fell 54 percent to $337 million, while revenue declined 15 percent to $12.9 billion.

The personal-computer maker saw revenue in its small and medium business unit slip 19 percent from the year-earlier period, while its consumer business was down 10 percent. In a statement, Michael Dell, its chief executive, said that the launch of Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows 7 has been “very well received” by consumers and businesses, and that the company will see those results more in the fourth quarter.

Dell also highlighted its performance in China, where sales grew 8 percent. Combined sales in China, India, Brazil and Russia rose 5 percent.

The company is likely to discuss its recent acquisition of Perot Systems, though investors may also want to hear more about its smart-phone plans and how it’s competing with Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), which reported a revenue drop as well as a purchase of its own last week.

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The use of peer-to-peer networks for sharing files has come under fire during recent months, including the dismantling of Swedish BitTorrent site Pirate Bay, but it turns out even members of Congress need to be kept in check over their file-sharing practices.

Congress on Tuesday introduced the Secure Federal File Sharing Act, which would restrict the use of peer-to-peer file sharing software like Limewire among federal employees.

The new legislation follows multiple embarrassing leaks of sensitive government information by means of open file sharing networks, including the location of a safe house for the First Family, financial files belonging to Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, the electronic schematics to President Obama’s helicopter, and a list of 30 lawmakers currently under investigation by the House Ethics Committee.

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Norwest Venture Partners on Wednesday announced that it had closed a new venture-capital fund sized at $1.2 billion. That’s nearly double the size of the Silicon Valley venture firm’s last fund in 2006, which closed at $650 million.

The new fund is unusual in this day and age amid a tough fundraising environment brought on by the recession. What’s more, many venture capitalists argue that funds need to be smaller to get back to the basics, especially since venture capital isn’t an industry that necessarily scales upwards.

Here’s what Promod Haque, NVP’s managing partner, had to say about all this:

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Cybercriminals are capitalizing on swine-flu fears by pitching sales of fake Tamiflu, security firm Sophos said.

Networks of fraudsters use spam and malware to direct Web traffic to phony pharmaceutical sites, wrote Graham Cluley, a technology consultant for Sophos.

“Although unwitting buyers do often receive some kind of drug as result of the transactional exchange, at best the drug doesn’t work and at worse it can pose serious health risks,” he added. Cybercriminals are “putting their customers’ health, personal information and credit card details at risk” with these counterfeit versions of Tamiflu.

Many of these fraudulent pharmaceutical sites originate in Russia, Sophos’s Dmitry Samosseiko noted in a paper on the topic. One network called GlavMed, for example, has more than 120,000 online pharmacy sites selling generic drugs under the name of Canadian Pharmacy.

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While Tony Hawk has been a skateboarding legend since the 1980s, today there is a generation of kids who know him for his eponymous videogames.

Starting with Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater in 1999, the Tony Hawk series has spawned more than 10 titles–among the more successful gaming franchises, and popular among skateboarders who play videogames as well as gamers who have never stepped on a board.

Mr. Hawk came to the Journal’s office Tuesday to show off his new game, Tony Hawk: Ride. Players control a virtual skater through a motion-sensing board instead of a joystick, following a growing number of interactive, stand-up games such as Guitar Hero and nearly everything on the Wii.

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China’s factories have long churned out high tech products. A big question facing Silicon Valley–underscored in a survey released Monday by Intel (INTC) and Newsweek–is how big a role the country will play in dreaming up those gadgets.

The survey found optimism among Chinese respondents and pessimism among the Americans. Some 63 percent of Chinese believe their country will overtake the United States in technology innovation over the next 30 years. Only one-third of Americans believed the U.S. would still lead over that period.

Justin Rattner, Intel’s chief technology officer, agrees that China will reduce the innovation gap with America. But that doesn’t mean that surpassing the U.S. is inevitable. “Speaking personally, there’s no reason for that to happen,” he said.

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President Barack Obama has been spending considerable time on East-West trade agreements while in Asia, but for one chip maker, the negotiations between China and Taiwan are even more important.

The two countries are slowly moving toward a formalized trade agreement, called the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement, or ECFA, that will address how their economies relate to each another. Its first iteration isn’t expected until early 2010, but Taiwan-based tech companies are already hoping to gain entry to China’s massive consumer market.

That’s especially true for Via Technologies, a chip maker running a distant third behind industry heavyweights Intel (INTC) and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). The company, founded in 1987, made a name for itself working on an underdeveloped part of the market: small, low-power chips.

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On the first day that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers opened registration for non-Latin script domains, Egypt says it has seized the opportunity to register the first all-Arabic domain name.

Information Technology Minister Tarek Kamel said at a U.N. sponsored Internet conference that his government had filed an application to register the domain “.masr”–or “.Egypt”–written entirely in Arabic, according to the Associated Press. ICANN chief executive Rod Beckstrom said so far six countries submitted applications for domains in three languages, AP reports.

Not everyone thinks the groundbreaking move deserves fanfare–Reporters Without Borders said it finds it “surprising and disturbing” that Egypt is playing host to the Internet Governance Forum. “It is astonishing that a government that is openly hostile to Internet users is assigned the organisation of an international meeting on the Internet’s future,” the advocacy group said in a statement.

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As the temperature drops, some cold-weather commuters are trying out an iPhone app that lets them climb in to an unlocked, pre-heated car.

Directed Electronics, the company that sells the Viper car-alarm system, has developed an accompanying app called SmartStart that lets customers use their phone to lock or unlock the car, or turn the alarm on and off.

“There’s so many apps that are neat but don’t necessarily bring much more utility to the user,” said Kevin Duffy, president of Directed. “This really makes your life better.”

They can also press a button to start it–something customers like because they can avoid a chilly ride this way, he said–open the trunk, or press a panic button that makes the headlights flash and sounds the horn. The panic button doubles as a car finder in crowded parking lots and has been known to be used as a wake-up call as well, he said.

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On Monday, researchers will release a twice-yearly list of the 500 biggest computers in the world. The latest rankings should provide some new clues about high tech’s relentless speed race, and how it’s being funded.

National labs and other research institutions buy these supercomputers to handle huge number-crunching tasks, like modeling weather patterns, nuclear explosions and aircraft designs. They rely heavily on advances from the semiconductor industry, since each system uses thousands of microprocessor chips–typically supplied by Intel, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and IBM (IBM).

Rankings on the so-called Top500 list are determined by performing a set of mathematical calculations known as Linpack that indicate how fast a system is.

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