he Boston Celtics won their third straight game with a 92-87 triumph over the Cleveland Cavaliers on Wednesday, the NBA leaders charging to victory on the back of 22 points from Ray Allen.Boston improved to a league-best 44-12 with the win as Kevin Garnett chipped in with 18 points and 11 rebounds to help the Celtics overcome a milestone performance by Cleveland’s LeBron James.

Despite suffering a sprained ankle that forced him out of the game with 4:24 left in the first half, James returned in the second half to amass 26 points that allowed him to become the youngest player in NBA history to reach 10,000 points.

James reached the milestone after 368 games aged 23 years and 59 days, more than a year younger than LA Laker Kobe Bryant was when he hit the mark in 2003 (24 years, 193 days).

After X-rays on James’ ankle indicated no serious damage, the Cleveland forward returned but was unable to rally his team past the Celtics, who were opening a five-game home stand.

“I didn’t want to go down,” James told reporters about his injury. “I know my ankle, and tomorrow it’s going to be a lot worse.

“It doesn’t make me happy to do it (break the record) in a losing effort but to be in the record books is a tribute to my team mates, myself and my family.”

The Cavaliers trailed by double-digits for most of the game and only got close in the final minute as the Celtics evened their season series at 2-2 against the defending Eastern Conference champions.

Web search company Google Inc is testing in the United States an online storage bank where individuals can store and access their medical records, the company said on Thursday.Just last week, Google said it was teaming up with the Cleveland Clinic, a leading academic medical center, to test an exchange of medical data that Google says will put the patient in charge of his own records. The electronic system will allow patients to control their records and interact with multiple physicians, health care service providers and pharmacies.

Google said other possible partners include health insurer Aetna Inc, medical testing company Quest Diagnostics, Walgreens and Walmart pharmacies, and hospitals.

Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, addressing a Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society Conference in Orlando, Florida, described a secure information service in which consumers store their health records in a Web-based system on Google computers.

Access to medical records would require a login and password, he said. Privacy is one of the first principles of the system, Schmidt added.

“The information in your health record is yours and it doesn’t get shared with anyone else without your permission,” he said.

Asked if the system would make money for Google, Schmidt replied, “Not in the short-term.”

LinkedIn came up with a fresh new homepage this week, and with a fresh new member, as Bill Gates gave up his Facebook account and joined the 19 million LinkedIn users in an unusual manner, by posing a question on his new favorite community site, asking for suggestions to encourage young people to pursue careers in science and technology.

What’s the connection between LinkedIn’s latest features and Gates’ “divorce” from Facebook? Obviously, Facebook! While still trying to catch up with its rival, LinkeIn has been also working on making the “staying” more enjoyable for cyber-visitors, through a status feature similar to that of Facebook, and by turning Facebook’s most popular user into a new “acquisition”, as strange as that may sound.

LinkedIn is currently submitted to a makeover meant to re-boost the site’s positions compared to its rivals. A good way to start was to personalize the user interface with a series of modules that allow users to organize their information on the profile page and keep their friends updated with whatever they are up to.

Gates’ presence only made things better for LinkedIn, as his profile became the most searched profile on the site. This time however, the philanthropist won’t have to worry about getting suffocated with too many friend requests, as LinkedIn will block friend requests. After all, they wouldn’t want to lose their most popular user like Facebook, would they?

At the end of the day, LinkedIn is working on improving the time people spend on the site, which allowed Facebook to be one step ahead, at least until now. The task is a difficult one, considering the differences between the two rivals. LinkedIn has an average of 6 and a half minutes per visit, while Facebook has 21 minutes. If we think of it, Bill Gates’ new account could give them a little push, but the new design should have much more to do with a future success.

The Philadelphia Eagles have released defensive end Jevon Kearse, the team announced Thursday. The move comes as no surprise to Kearse, says agent Drew Rosenhaus.

The team and Kearse had been working to restructure his contract, but to no avail. Kearse signed with the Eagles in 2004 but never really made much of an impact. He had only 7 1/2 sacks in each of his first two seasons with the team and then sustained a major knee injury in the second game of the ‘06 season.

Last season, Kearse had just 3 1/2 sacks and lost his starting job to Juqua Thomas.

“Jevon is still a very talented pass-rusher,” Rosenhaus told reporters over the weekend at the NFL Scouting Combine. “Those guys are hard to find. It’s not a deep year at that position. We think he’ll find a home pretty quickly, once he gets into free agency.”

ProFootballTalk.com reports that Kearse could return to the Tennessee Titans, with whom he was the league’s defensive rookie of the year in 1999.

YouTube was hard to reach this week following action by Pakistan to block access inside its borders for its hosting of a “blasphemous” video clip.

Analysis suggests the block was taken up by net hardware that routes data effectively cutting off the site.

But a spokeswoman for Pakistan’s telecoms authority said the problem was caused by a “malfunction” elsewhere.

Dead end

“We are not hackers. Why would we do that?” Shahzada Alam Malik, head of the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), told the AP news service.

The Peshawar office of the PTA issued a blocking order for YouTube last week in a bid to block access to a video clip the Pakistani government regarded as “very blasphemous”.

Analysis by net monitoring firm Renesys shows that the problems getting through to YouTube began as a result of the action taken by Pakistan Telecom to implement the block.

Essentially, Pakistan Telecom took over some of the net addresses assigned to YouTube.

Crucially the path it offered to this group of addresses was faster than the usual one used by the hardware, or routers, that speed traffic around the internet.

Pakistan Telecom let this address change propagate to the routers of one of its partners - PCCW.

Routers are constantly in search of faster ways to get the data passing through them to its destination so news about this faster path started propagating across many of the net’s routers.

However, because Pakistan Telecom was stopping the traffic reaching YouTube all the data reached a dead end.

“While it is hard to describe exactly how widely this hijacked prefix was seen, we estimate that it was seen by a bit more than two-thirds of the internet,” wrote Martin Brown of Renesys in a company blog post analysing the sequence of events.

The problems getting through to YouTube were most severe for two hours on Sunday but the problem was cleared up soon after.

Access to YouTube was restored in Pakistan on Tuesday when the video clip was removed.