The idea is that you buy an airline ticket that has a layover at your actual destination. Say you want to fly from New York to San Francisco — you actually book a flight from New York to Lake Tahoe with a layover in San Francisco and get off there, without bothering to take the last leg of the flight.

In the lawsuit, United and Orbitz call Skiplagged “unfair competition” and allege that it is promoting “strictly prohibited” travel. They want to recoup $75,000 in lost revenue from Zaman.

Buried in one of the Sony leaks is an email conversation which confirms that the real settlement payment from Hotfile was just $4 million, just a fraction of the amount widely publicized in the press.

The huge difference between the public settlement figure and the amount that was negotiated also puts previous cases in a different light. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that the $110 million settlement with isoHunt and the $110 deal with TorrentSpy were just paper tigers too.

An AirAsia passenger jet carrying 162 people to Singapore went missing off the coast of Borneo on Sunday morning shortly after leaving Indonesia, and the search has resumed after being suspended overnight. Shortly before losing contact with air traffic control, the crew sought permission to deviate from the planned flight path to avoid foul weather.

Authorities suspended the search as night fell, having found no sign of the aircraft. The search is to resume Monday morning, and CNN reported that ships in the area will stay out, rather than return to shore, with their search lights illuminated.

The stories I came back with don’t really look like anything in the new breed of Hollywood war films, where central truths about war have all but vanished, even though they’re mostly based on real life.

Lone Survivor, the highest grossing war film of this era, portrays Navy Seals so adept at killing the Taliban that it seems their only weakness is mercy on goat-herders. In Zero Dark Thirty and Captain Phillips, Seal teams emerge only at the climax, with the long tail of logistical support from conventional aviation, infantry and intelligence units obscured by the shadow of the elite.

For every film or bestseller or PlayStation blockbuster about that tiny minority of commandos, the public misses another shot at the larger experience of soldiering in Iraq and Afghanistan. People under 40 no longer ask what war is like; they ask if it’s like Call of Duty.

The attack resulted in "massive damage" to the physical systems; a number of "system breakdowns resulted in an incident where a furnace could not be shut down in the regular way and the furnace was in an undefined condition," according to a translation of a report released by the German government.

TrapX's Wright argued that neither the compromise of the German manufacturing plant nor the breach of Sony were conducted by criminals with profit motives, but by more organized attackers with more complex motives, such as corporate espionage.

Both Xbox Live and PlayStation Network, the online services for Microsoft's and Sony's game consoles, have been intermittently down on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, according to tweets and status sites.

The PlayStation Network status page shows the service as currently being offline. Three tweets from @AskPlayStation over the past 20 hours, including one three hours ago, have all noted "issues accessing PSN."

The film is being offered through a dedicated website - seetheinterview.com - as well as via Google and Microsoft but is only available in the US.

After pulling the film, and being strongly criticised by the US president, Sony Pictures has played what was its only possible trump card: calling on help from the likes of Microsoft and Google to get this film out nationwide.

The Desolation of Smaug, the second of the three movies, was probably the one that strayed farthest afield from the source material. It invented several characters and showed situations that either didn't exist in the book or happened "off-screen" and were explained later.

The battles in Battle of the Five Armies are deadly boring, bereft of suspense, excessively padded, and predictable to the point of being contemptuous of the audience. Suspense is attempted mostly by a series of last-minute saves and switches.

The spy agency has suffered “significant” damage in its ability to monitor and capture serious organised criminals following the exposes by the former CIA contractor.

In its aftermath, Andrew Parker, Director General of MI5, said the leaks had been a “gift” for terrorists that allowed them to attack the UK “at will”.

Sir John Sawer, then Chief of MI6, said the UK’s “adversaries are rubbing their hands with glee” while al Qaeda was “lapping it up”.

Photo-sharing app Instagram has removed millions of accounts believed to be posting spam, angering many legitimate users.

Rapper Ma$e, who lost more than a million followers, deleted his account after he was accused of paying for more followers, while video blogger Jamie Curry tweeted: "I lost 30k followers on instagram omg.