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 Microsoft previewed several upcoming role-playing games (RPG) for its Xbox 360 in Tokyo on Tuesday. The games included three titles from Square Enix, one from Bandai Namco and two from Microsoft’s game studios.

Bandai Namco’s "Tales of Vesperia" will launch in Japan on Aug. 7 and cost ¥7,800 (US$73). It will go on sale in North America in August, during the summer in Asia but won’t be available in Europe until 2009.

Using a trick it’s employed with other high-profile games, the title will also be bundled in a pack with an Xbox 360 console. Sales of the console have been low in Japan compared with the rest of the world so all-in-one sets might be more attractive to Japanese gamers, many of whom might be interested in the game but don’t already own the Microsoft console. The set will include custom face-plates and the game and will cost ¥37,800.

Among the three games from Square Enix, "Star Ocean 4" was previewed and will be available in 2009.

Like the other titles in the series the game takes place in the aftermath of a nuclear war at a time when humans take to the stars to flee the dying Earth. The fourth installment takes place several hundred years before the original titles, around 2074– just a decade or two after the war when space travel is just becoming possible.

The only one of the Square Enix titles to get a launch date was the Xbox 360-exclusive "Infinite Undiscovery," which will hit store shelves on Sept. 11 in Japan and Asia. Square Enix didn’t name launch dates but shipping dates– when the packaged software leaves the warehouse for shops– for North America and Europe. They are Sept. 2 and Sept. 5 respectively.

In front of the largely Japanese crowd, Producer Hajime Kojima tried to spin the earlier shipping dates as meaning it will get into the hands of gamers around the world at "almost the same time" but foreign gamers can likely look forward to getting it several days earlier than those in Square Enix’s home market.

The final game on show was "Last Remnant." Square Enix promises the title in the winter with a simultaneous release in Japan, North America, Europe and Asia. The maker declined to give a more precise date but provided good news for Xbox 360 gamers by promising it will hit the platform before the PlayStation 3 version is launched.

From Microsoft will come "Fable 2," an action RPG that is due out by the end of this year.

The company also said it will bring "Mass Effect," which has already been launched in other markets, to Japan.

 MADRID (Reuters) - Spain’s Telefonica (TEF.MC) said on Wednesday it will distribute Apple Corp’s (AAPL.O) iPhone in a total of 16 countries after reaching deal covering most of the Latin American countries where it is present and the Czech Republic.

"The 16 countries where we will distribute the iPhone have a market potential of 500 million people, making us one of the global leaders in the distribution of these revolutionary handsets," Telefonica Chairman Cesar Alierta said in a statement.

On Tuesday, Telefonica said it will start selling the iPhone in Spain from July 11. It already sells the phone in the UK and Ireland through its O2 unit.

Now, it will add the Czech Republic, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela.

Telefonica will not have exclusive distribution rights in these countries, contrary to the position in Spain, UK and Ireland.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Number-crunchers can rejoice as Google Inc offers deeper access to the underlying figures for users’ Web searches, giving some insight into trends based on the relative popularity of various words.

The Internet search leader is expanding its existing Google Trends service to allow users to see underlying numerical data on the popularity of any particular search in Google’s vast database of search terms, relative to others.

Google Trends was begun two years ago as an entertaining but limited way to indicate what the world is thinking about over time, at least in terms of Web searches.

Now Google is giving users the ability to search across terms in its database, instantly chart how they compare to other search terms, then export the underlying numerical data into a common spreadsheet format to compare with other data.

Google Trends (http://trends.google.com/) lets users compare demand for various search terms and see how popularity differs across geographic regions, cities or languages.

A year ago, the company introduced Hot Trends, which gave users insight into fast-rising Web search trends with data refreshed several times daily. The tool’s power only grows as people conduct more and more of their everyday activities online, with Web search often their primary starting point.

The data in Google Trends stretches back to 2004. While the service is based on the many billions of individual searches performed each year, Google Trends only reveals data on the aggregate numbers of searches, not the searches themselves.

National differences in the endless human search for sex or love can vary widely, according to a Google Trends chart. http://tinyurl.com/5jt5ce/

Google Trends users can also chart the explosion of interest in the term "backdating" since 2006, reflecting the scandal over how hundreds of companies backdated options for executives. http://tinyurl.com/5l8osu/

Searches for the word "Microsoft" had a more than two-to-one-lead in searches over "Apple" three years ago, but Apple had virtually closed the gap by the end of 2007.

Then news reports of its takeover bid for Yahoo appears to have stoked a recovery in Microsoft this year. Searches for Microsoft have outnumbered those for Apple by about 7 to 5 in recent weeks, according to Google Trends data.

Users must be registered and signed into a Google account to use the service. One can then see the evolution of new terms or concepts through Google searches, including the rise of "Google Trends" itself. http://tinyurl.com/6zd6pg/.

NEW YORK (AFP) - One of the cofounders of Internet giant Google, Sergey Brin, has booked a flight to space aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket for 2011, The New York Times reported Wednesday.

Virginia-based Space Adventures, which arranges space flights for ultrawealthy clients, plans to buy a private Soyuz flight in 2011, and Brin is a new investor in the company, the report said.

Brin, Google’s technology president, made a five-million-dollar investment that "will serve as a deposit on a future flight," the report said.

"I am a big believer in the exploration and commercial development of the space frontier, and am looking forward to the posibility of going into space," he said in a statement.

Space Adventures, which has sent five tourists into space, was expected to announce the news Wednesday.

SAN FRANCISCO - Attackers could gain control of water treatment plants, natural gas pipelines and other critical utilities because of a vulnerability in the software that runs some of those facilities, security researchers reported Wednesday.

Experts with Boston-based Core Security Technologies, who discovered the deficiency and described it exclusively to The Associated Press before they issued a security advisory, said there’s no evidence anyone else found or exploited the flaw.

Citect Pty. Ltd., which makes the program called CitectSCADA, patched the hole last week, five months after Core Security first notified Citect of the problem.

But the vulnerability could have counterparts in other so-called supervisory control and data acquisition, or SCADA, systems. And it’s not clear whether all Citect clients have installed the patch.

SCADA systems remotely manage computers that control machinery, including water supply valves, industrial baking equipment and security systems at nuclear power plants.

Customers that use CitectSCADA include natural gas pipelines in Chile, major copper and diamond mines in Australia and Botswana, a large pharmaceutical plant in Germany and water treatment plants in Louisiana and North Carolina.

For an attack involving the vulnerability that Core Security revealed Wednesday to occur, the target network would have to be connected to the Internet. That goes against industry policy but does happen when companies have lax security measures, such as connecting control systems’ computers and computers with Internet access to the same routers.

A rogue employee could also access the system internally.

Security experts say the finding highlights the possibility that hackers could cut the power to entire cities, poison a water supply by disrupting water treatment equipment, or cause a nuclear power plant to malfunction by attacking the utility’s controls.

That possibility has grown in recent years as more of those systems are connected to the Internet.

The Citect vulnerability is of a common type. Called a "buffer overflow," it allows a hacker to gain control of a program by sending a computer too much data.

"It’s not a very elaborate problem," Ivan Arce, Core Security’s chief technology officer, said in an interview. "If we found this thing — and this was not that hard — it would be easy for someone else to do it."

Citect is a subsidiary of French power-equipment giant Schneider Electric SA. Company representatives did not return repeated calls for comment.

Citect said in a statement included in Core Security’s advisory that customers should isolate their SCADA systems entirely from the Internet or make sure they use firewalls and other technologies to prevent the systems from talking to the outside world.

Normally, the facilities that use SCADA systems fix flaws privately and very little is revealed publicly about any problems.

What’s clear is that such control systems are increasingly vulnerable to Internet-borne threats, since viruses and worms have disrupted service in power plants, automobile factories and gasoline pipelines — even when those facilities weren’t targeted.

Alan Paller, director of research for the SANS Institute, which operates the Internet Storm Center, an early warning system for computer attacks, said Core Security Technologies’ discovery shows many major facilities may remain vulnerable.

"It dashes the defense of, ‘We’re different, we don’t have that kind of problem,’" Paller said. "That’s why this is significant."

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