"Based on the error pattern, we cannot exclude the possibility that the routers have been targeted by external parties with the result that they can no longer register on the network."

The company, which has 20 million customers in Germany, has issued a software update and is asking affected customers to disconnect their routers.

Many people believe that synthetic sweeteners will help them lose weight. But it turns out that one common substitute for sugar actually blocks the function of an enzyme that is essential for preventing obesity.

Why does aspartame not aid weight loss? "We found that aspartame blocks a gut enzyme called intestinal alkaline phosphatase (IAP)," explains Professor Hodin, who teaches at Harvard Medical School.

When logging into the website with a Google account it scans for apps and services you’ve created an account for, and creates a list of them with easy delete links.

Every account it finds gets paired with an easy delete link pointing to the unsubscribe page for that service. Within in a few clicks you’re freed from it, and depending on how long you need to work through the entire list, you can be account-less within the hour.

The apps, which include Truecaller, Sync.me and CM Security, ask users to upload their phone's contact lists when they install them. That means they end up with huge databases - one app claims to have two billion numbers while another claims more than a billion.

The security blogger Graham Cluley, whose mobile number is stored by one of the apps, says everyone needs to be more careful about what they share: "If you upload your address book, you're not just putting your own privacy at risk - but the privacy of everybody else in that address book.

Germany's government has been told that it should make suitable arrangements for that to happen. It has been refusing to invite Snowden to give evidence personally since it would need to guarantee that he would not be handed over to the US—a promise the German authorities say would risk damaging the political relations between the two countries.

The committee of inquiry is examining to what extent German citizens and politicians were spied on by the NSA and its so-called Five Eyes partners—notably GCHQ—and whether German politicians and intelligence agencies knew about this activity.

CETA is a smaller-scale agreement between the EU and Canada, but it's more important than it looks. It allows US companies with subsidiaries in Canada to use the agreement's corporate sovereignty provisions to sue the EU -- and there are 42,000 such companies according to one analysis.

As in the EU, then, the Canadian public is expected to sit back and meekly allow their government to sign up to a deal with open-ended risks, thanks to corporate sovereignty, but without any proper scrutiny of the costs and alleged benefits.

Oracle is also in the midst of a reinvention: it wants to become a cloud computing company that can compete with the likes of Amazon and Google. In that case, the acquisition of Dyn just might give Oracle a much-needed asset.

Amazon and Google already offer their own DNS services. So in a sense, Dyn just makes Oracle’s cloud offering more complete.

The latest Apple Inc. smartphones that run on Verizon Communications Inc.’s network are technically capable of downloading data faster than those from AT&T Inc. Yet in testing, the two phones perform about the same, according to researchers at Twin Prime Inc. and Cellular Insights.

Sacrificing performance in return for cheaper components may not go down well with Apple users.

Security researchers have discovered that third-party firmware included with over 2.8 million low-end Android smartphones allows attackers to compromise Over-the-Air (OTA) update operations and execute commands on the target's phone with root privileges.

The binary responsible for the firmware OTA update operations also includes code to hide its presence from the Android OS, along with two other binaries and their processes. A developer looking at active Android processes won't be able to tell when there's an update coming to his phone.

Google has released the fruits of new research into upscaling low-resolution images using machine learning to ‘fill in’ the missing details. Compared to the hoary standards Photoshop users have been used to for over twenty years, the results are quite impressive.

RAISR (Rapid and Accurate Image Super Resolution) uses machine learning to develop ‘routes’ from low to higher resolution versions of an originally small image, based on sampling the differences between smaller and (genuinely) higher-resolution versions of data training images in a set.