Staples can now officially be added to the growing list of retailers that have publicly admitted this year that their systems were attacked and customer data was breached.

On Nov. 18, Home Depot reported its third-quarter fiscal 2014 earnings, which included its breach-related costs. The pretax net expenses related to the data breach were reported at $28 million.

The sharp decline in solar energy costs is the result of increased economies of scale leading to cheaper photovoltaic panels, new leasing models and declining installation costs.

The cost of solar panels, or solar hardware, used to represent two-thirds of the overall price to install solar power. Over the past five years, however, that has flipped to where "soft costs," which include labor, permitting and advertising, now represent the majority of the cost.

Snapchat, known for sending photos that immediately disappear after being viewed, has teamed with payment processing service Square to help users send money to one another.

The move marks Snapchat's latest effort to expand beyond disappearing messages. In the three years since launching, Snapchat has become synonymous with a new breed of social-networking services that focus on simple communication of either a photo or video.

Facebook at Work will look similar to its existing social network, but users will be able to keep their personal profiles separate, the paper says.

They also would be able to chat with colleagues, build professional networks and share documents.

Since beginning in 2011, Rightscorp has lost $6.5 million. It now needs to find additional investors to avoid bankruptcy. "If the Company is unable to obtain adequate capital it could be forced to cease operations," it acknowledged in its most recent SEC filing.

Rightscorp's stock closed Friday around 14 cents per share, hovering near its all-time low.

The research focused on ZeroAccess as perhaps the best known click-fraud botnet. Click fraud uses compromised systems to click on advertisements, earning advertising affiliate fees for the criminals operating the botnet. In their study, the researchers were able to identify 54 ad units, or campaigns, related to ZeroAccess which produced about a million fraudulent clicks per day, with a likely value of $100,000.

They have also agreed to ensure that terrorist and extremist material is captured by their filters to prevent children and young people coming across radicalising material.

Speaking to an audience that included Australian prime minister Tony Abbott, Cameron said that he was pushing UK companies to do more “including strengthening filters, improving reporting mechanisms and being more proactive” in taking down harmful material.

A Downing Street spokeswoman said “we will keep pressing internet companies to be more proactive given the scale of the threats and the persistent propaganda from the terrorist groups”.

The Firefox browser, lagging its well-heeled rivals, will soon be serving up an array of ads to one and all.

"We are only collecting minimal viable data" related to sponsored tiles, Herman said. Mozilla will collect a user's location but no more specific than the country the user is from, how many impressions the tile received, and how many times users pinned the tile to their New Tab page or removed it.

The European Space Agency has confirmed that the Philae probe has successfully landed on the comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko and established contact with headquarters. The harpoons have deployed and reeled in the slack, and the landing gear has retracted. (Edit: They're now saying the harpoons didn't fire after all.)

Two men in the United Kingdom have been sentenced to jail for operating "Dancing Jesus," a website with illegal links to music that was operational between 2006 and 2011.

Piracy sites in the US have led to major civil lawsuits, but criminal copyright charges for distributing music are a rarity, with Kim Dotcom's Megaupload being a huge exception to that rule. In the UK, however, private copyright investigations can lead to criminal prosecutions and jail time, such as the four-year-sentence for Anton Vickerman, who created the illegal TV-linking site SurfTheChannel.