The security of Oracle's Java software framework, installed on some three billion devices worldwide, is taking a turn for the worse, thanks to an uptick in attacks targeting vulnerabilities that will never be patched and increasingly sophisticated exploits, security researchers said.

The version, which Oracle stopped supporting in February, is still used by about half of the Java user base, he said.

Just 2% of UK internet users accounted for almost three-quarters of online piracy over a year, the report Ofcom indicated.

It also said pirates spent more on legal downloading and streaming than those who never access illegal content.

The company processed 21,475 responses to four surveys over the year to research the report.

Aside from targeting Petrobras, Fantastico revealed that in a May 2012 presentation reportedly used by the agency to train new recruits how to infiltrate private computer networks, Google is listed as a target.

Further afield, the NSA has apparently targeted the computer networks of Saudi Arabia’s Riyad Bank and Chinese technology company Huawei for surveillance, the documents show.

The internal computer network of Petrobras, the Brazilian oil giant partly owned by the state, has been under surveillance by the NSA, the National Security Agency of the United States.

These new disclosures contradict statements by the NSA denying espionage for economic purposes.

Other targets include French diplomats – with access to the private network of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of France – and the SWIFT network, the cooperative that unites over ten thousand banks in 212 countries and provides communications that enable international financial transactions.

The statement also stresses that the collected intelligence is not used “to steal the trade secrets of foreign companies on behalf of – or give intelligence we collect to – US companies to enhance their international competitiveness or increase their bottom line.”

"We want to be really, really clear that whenever you give us information, we're going to take it."

You might translate Egan's words as: "We're going to use everything you give us to make money. How could you possibly think otherwise, silly?"

Last Thursday, Google was in a San Jose court explaining very politely that of course it has every right to not only scan every e-mail you send via Gmail -- but also every e-mail that's sent to your Gmail account.

The argument used by Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter, and the NSA is the same: Trust us. We're just doing our job. We know right from wrong.

TSA Precheck allows passengers who have been pre-approved to keep on their shoes and belt, not remove their jackets, keep their laptops inside their cases, and not have to remove select liquids and gels from their bags.

Later this year, the TSA said it will allow other U.S. citizens to apply for 5-year enrollment online after submitting fingerprints and paying an $85 fee.

The agency has circumvented or cracked much of the encryption, or digital scrambling, that guards global commerce and banking systems, protects sensitive data like trade secrets and medical records, and automatically secures the e-mails, Web searches, Internet chats and phone calls of Americans and others around the world, the documents show.

Intelligence officials asked The Times and ProPublica not to publish this article, saying that it might prompt foreign targets to switch to new forms of encryption or communications that would be harder to collect or read.

Their IndieGoGo campaign has been a huge success, going past their $100,000 target, and is currently at around $137,000, which will allow the three person team to focus on it full time.

Except... as the team announced this morning, PayPal, for reasons known only to PayPal, has decided to freeze their funds and won't let Mailpile access the money that people donated.

"Afer 4 phone calls, the last of which I spoke to a supervisor, the understanding I have come to is, unless Mailpile provides PayPal with a detailed budgetary breakdown of how we plan to use the donations from our crowd funding campaign they will not release the block on my account for 1 year until we have shipped a 1.0 version of our product."

British dance music label Ministry of Sound (MoS) has filed a lawsuit against Spotify. MoS claims that by hosting playlists that mimic tracklists on its collections, Spotify has violated UK copyright law.

The company is now arguing that its actual track listings are creative works worthy of copyright protection. It's an extraordinary claim, not too different from claiming a copyright over something like a simple list of one's own favorite songs.

BT, Virgin Media, BSkyB and TalkTalk are being asked by music and film companies to sign up to a voluntary code for policing illegal downloading. Negotiations have been under way for months with the BPI and the British Video Association, whose members include the BBC and Hollywood studios.

Measures could include throttling internet connections to slow them down, blocking users from particular sites, disconnecting offenders from broadband for a limited period and ultimately prosecution. Broadband companies would need to keep a list of those customers they had sent letters to.