At one point during the January 25 call, Nuland colorfully rejected recent overtures from European Union leaders by telling her colleague: "Fuck the EU."

The leak has strained other diplomatic relations, with Chancellor Angela Merkel saying Nuland's comment was "absolutely unacceptable." Nuland has since apologized for the remark.

It's all so "simple." Just "take sites down" and "keep them down." Like many people who frequently confuse "Google" for "the Internet", McGuinness overstates the simplicity of his request while granting powers to Google that it simply doesn't possess.

Google's main product is a search engine. It crawls and indexes sites. It is not in the "internet police" business. That's not what it's product is intended to do and that's not what a majority of those using the search engine want Google to be doing.

NBC reporter Richard Engel worked with a security expert to set up two test computers in order to see just how quickly he'd be attacked when logging onto Russian networks.

Once the two test computers went online, the hacking happened just as fast, Engel said. It took "less than 1 minute [for hackers] to pounce, and in less than 24 hours, they had broken into both of my computers."

"Vehicle-to-vehicle technology represents the next generation of auto safety improvements, building on the life-saving achievements we've already seen with safety belts and air bags," said US Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx when announcing the decision on Monday.

In these days of a snoop-crazy National Security Agency, however, exactly how well that privacy will be kept secure is, of course, an open question – as is the range of data that the in-car data systems will collect, distribute, or store.

The early build includes a number of changes that Microsoft is making to improve the keyboard and mouse experience in Windows 8.1. The most obvious change is a new title bar for Microsoft’s Windows 8-style apps, allowing you to close, minimize, and snap apps to appear side by side with a mouse.

Two days after Internet porn-blocking campaigner MP Claire Perry announced ISP filters were not overblocking content, the government has announced it is.

Once implemented, problems almost immediately began to be reported and in January Sky's filter blocked the jQuery plugin. The code.jquery.com website serves as a code library for developers to link to, and the mistake meant many sites using it were inaccessible for an hour.

Under the watchful gaze of two technicians from the British government spy agency GCHQ, the journalists took angle-grinders and drills to the internal components, rendering them useless and the information on them obliterated.

Heywood, sent personally by David Cameron, told the editor to stop publishing articles based on leaked material from American's National Security Agency and GCHQ. At one point Heywood said: "We can do this nicely or we can go to law". He added: "A lot of people in government think you should be closed down."

IBM on Friday announced that it inked a deal with Twitter in December that saw the social network acquire over 900 of its patents. The companies also entered into a cross-licensing deal on patents, though details on that agreement weren't announced.

Twitter's patent purchase could help the company defend itself against future patent infringement lawsuits.

Clapper lied to Congress when he denied that "any type of data at all" was being collected "on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans."

"Snowden claims that he’s won and that his mission is accomplished," said Clapper, according to a transcript of today's hearing published by The Washington Post. "If that is so, I call on him and his accomplices to facilitate the return of the remaining stolen documents that have not yet been exposed, to prevent even more damage to US security... The nation is less safe and its people less secure."

The dead-tree-coloring king said on Tuesday that it had closed two separate lawsuits with German firm BestUse, which failed to mount any kind of defense and now must pay HP's legal fees, in addition to disclosing information about its upstream suppliers.

HP's patent attorneys have also scored significant wins in Poland. The printer maker has named six businesses that it says have agreed not to sell patent-infringing cartridges.