I received a terse e-mail from the university last week. Upon advice of counsel, it said, Purdue “will not be able to publish your particular video” and will not be sending me a copy. The conference hosts, once warm and hospitable, stopped replying to my e-mails and telephone calls.

It turns out that Purdue has wiped all copies of my video and slides from university servers, on grounds that I displayed classified documents briefly on-screen.

They have periodically forbidden personnel — and even their families — to visit mainstream sites such as The Washington Post and The New York Times for fear of exposure to documents from Snowden or Wikileaks.

Other major American tech firms—including Cisco, Google, Hewlett-Packard, and Oracle—are among the largest companies that are using legal but questionable tax tricks to keep money overseas and effectively pay little to no American federal corporate taxes.

"Losing $90 billion of potential tax revenues every year is a very big deal," Neil Buchanan, a professor at George Washington University, said by e-mail.

In July 2014, Ars also reported that Google Ireland Limited paid an effective tax rate of just 0.16 percent on €17 billion ($22.8 billion) revenue in 2013.

Smartphone users can do "very little" to stop security services getting "total control" over their devices, US whistleblower Edward Snowden has said.

Mr Snowden also explained that the SMS message sent by the agency to gain access to the phone would pass unnoticed by the handset's owner.

In a statement, a spokesperson for the UK government said: "It is long-standing policy that we do not comment on intelligence matters.

AdBlock said yesterday that it has been acquired by an unnamed purchaser, and that it is now participating in Germany's Adblock Plus Acceptable Ads system, which sets the criteria for whether publishers and websites can be unblocked.

"As a result I am selling my company, and the buyer is turning on Acceptable Ads. My long-term managing director will keep working with the new company. I believe this is a great time for you users."

Work at Russia's new $ 3 billion spaceport in the Far East has ground to a halt after a critical piece of infrastructure was discovered to have been built to the wrong dimensions, and would not fit the latest version of the country's Soyuz rocket, a news report said.

The project has come under strict scrutiny from Russian officials such as President Vladimir Putin - who last year demanded the facility be ready for a first launch in December 2015 - and Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, who has threatened to rip the heads off any contractors that slow up construction efforts.

Artists in Helsinki will hit play on a 1000-year-long animated GIF loop in an homage to Cage’s piece. Titled “AS Long As Possible,” the work features 48,140,288 frames, and unlike Cage’s it has a designated speed and no end: each frame will last for about 10 minutes, so the file will reach its end only in the year 3017 — until it loops back to frame number one.

No matter its display method, however, the artists will store a mother file somewhere and create many iterations of the loop in various locations — and if one fails, it may be easily synchronized with, and replaced by, another.

Caribbean and South Pacific ISP Digicel has started blocking Google and Facebook ads from appearing on the company's mobile network in the apparent belief that the service provider is owed a slice of these companies' ad revenues. In a notice posted to the Digicel website, this move is framed as something that was motivated purely for altruistic, pro-consumer reasons.

The states of Washington, New York, Michigan, and Vermont already have adopted the spy-friendly, voluntary program that links your license with the Department of Homeland Security. For the moment, the cards are designed to be used instead of passports at US land borders in a bid to speed up the entrance lines from Mexico and Canada.

The American Civil Liberties Union, for instance, is decrying the move to RFID chips in driver's licenses as a "civil liberties nightmare."

Microsoft confirmed Wednesday that a suspicious-looking update pushed out to Windows machines globally in the early hours was nothing more than a test gone errant.

It's not immediately clear what was inside the patch, or whether it modified any Windows files. In any case, the Windows Update system is a core and vital part of keeping computers around the world up-to-date. Shaking confidence in that system is going to have a lasting effect, especially in a day and age of almost daily hacks and ongoing government surveillance.

Microsoft announced some major new developments surrounding its cloud-based big data processing capabilities in advance of AzureCon, a free virtual event that kicks off Sept. 29.

"The Data Lake Store provides a single repository where you can easily capture data of any size, type and speed without forcing changes to your application as data scales," stated Rengarajan in a Sept. 28 announcement. "In the store, data can be securely shared for collaboration and is accessible for processing and analytics from HDFS [Hadoop Distributed File System] applications and tools."