"In a small number of countries, the law dictates that specific agencies and authorities must have direct access to an operator's network, bypassing any form of operational control over lawful interception on the part of the operator," the report said.

Vodafone also noted ominously that “several countries empower agencies and authorities to require the disclosure of the encryption ‘keys’ needed to decrypt data. Non-compliance is a criminal offense."

John Lewis has been ordered to pay damages for sending "spam" emails in a privacy ruling that could open the floodgates for harassed consumers.

"John Lewis' lawyers then argued that because I browsed their website I had "negotiated" with them for a sale and a business relationship existed between us which would allow them to email me. The judge threw that out too."

A spokesperson for John Lewis said the case consisted of a "very specific set of circumstances" and while they disagreed with the judge's decision they would abide by the ruling.

A junior high school suspended a student and turned him over to police because of a "doodle" he drew showing a person being hanged, his father claims in court.

Keller, suing for himself and his son, B.R.K., claims that on May 2, 2013, his 13-year-old son "was interviewed at his school, Raleigh Hills, K-8, by officers of the Beaverton Police Department regarding an alleged threat of harm based on a doodle that was drawn during class.

Snowshoe spammers spread their message over many different IP addresses, each used in low volume, to send the message.

"Bypassing filters is a big money-making effort for snowshoe advertisers, and as long as you’re facing off against intelligent adversaries who have a financial incentive to keep trying until they get through, they will keep coming up with advances in spam warfare techniques," Wosotowsky said.

What it is, is an entirely new syntax that – in the words of Apple senior VP Craig Federighi, who unveiled it during the Monday morning WWDC keynote – aims to be "Objective-C without the baggage of C."

Like scripting languages but unlike C, Swift lets you get straight to the point. The single line println("Hello, world") is a complete program in Swift. Note, also, that you don't even have to end the statement with a semicolon, as you do in C. Those are optional, unless you're combining multiple statements on a single line.

The National Security Agency is harvesting huge numbers of images of people from communications that it intercepts through its global surveillance operations for use in sophisticated facial recognition programs, according to top-secret documents.

The agency intercepts “millions of images per day” — including about 55,000 “facial recognition quality images” — which translate into “tremendous untapped potential,” according to 2011 documents obtained from the former agency contractor Edward J. Snowden.

Google has made an online form and process available for people in the European Union who want to have information about them removed from searches. The move complies with a recent court order in the EU that search providers such as Google must have such a process to "forget" things about people if they make removal requests.

Users who want to make a removal request will have to provide their full name, a copy of a valid photo ID and other related information.

Basically, more than half the cost of making a smartphone these days is in paying off patent holders.

And, of course, many of these fees are going to pure trolls, who have contributed nothing to making actual smartphones. The paper highlights the explosion of troll lawsuits in the past few years.

Rather than going towards innovation and better, more affordable products for the pubic, money is going to lawyers and patent trolls who have contributed nothing to society. It's a massive dead weight loss to the economy.

According to a German media report, officials do not believe they have enough evidence to press charges, even though German Chancellor Angela Merkel is thought to have been one of the targets of the surveillance.

While actual legal charges may not be on the horizon, fallout from the incident is still being felt and will likely continue to have an impact on relations between Germany in the US in the coming years.

An emerging trend, called “dark social”, is threatening to upset the social media establishment dominated by Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Google.

Up to 80 per cent of all “sharing” of publisher and brand content is being distributed through email and text messaging to smaller, “off-the-grid” user networks.

“There’s a big world of sharing going on out there which is not being dictated by social media,” RadiumOne Asia-Pacific managing director Kerry McCabe said.