Tech 2.0 for Monday, September 24, 2012

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Contributor: Matt Davenport

Email: mdavenport@kpvi.com

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Published: 9/24/2012 2:21 pm

Updated: 9/24/2012 2:33 pm

The company that makes Apple's iPhones has stopped production at one of its plants -- this after a fight that it said involved as many as 2,000 employees. Foxconn Technology Group and police say the fight broke out yesterday at a privately managed dormitory near the factory, located in northern China. The official Chinese news agency says the brawl was brought under control after 10 hours. Foxconn says production at the factory will resume tomorrow. But it wouldn't confirm whether the factory in question makes the Apple smartphone.

Timing is everything in life -- and the timing couldn't have been much worse the other day for Research in Motion, makers of the BlackBerry smartphone. The chief executive of the scuffling company issued an apology Friday for a service outage that struck Europe and Africa. The outage and its scope would have been bad enough on its own. But it also came the same day Apple released its new iPhone 5. Blackberry resolved the outage issue later the same day. But the service disruption brought up unpleasant memories of last year's troubles with emails and chat messages that left many users out of touch for up to three days.

Google says it's closing a music download service in China -- because so few people were using it. Google launched the music site in 2009 as a legal alternative to Chinese pirate web sites. To make money, it shared ad revenue with music companies. But now, Google says the service is getting such low support, it's pulling the plug. The move will further reduce Google's presence in China, which is the world's most populous Internet market. Two years ago, Google shut off the tap for its mainland search engine in a dispute over censorship and computer hacking.