Investors have often criticized Facebook for being slow to adapt to the transition from desktop to mobile. An own-branded phone would serve to demonstrate that Facebook is pushing all its chips forward to become a mobile-first company.

What's more, Facebook's messaging and camera apps will reportedly form the core functions of the phone, rather than the stock Android ones. The phone's primary contacts list will presumably be the user's Facebook friends, too.

The North Korean situation could spiral out of control, Russia has warned, after another day of inflamed rhetoric from Pyongyang.

North Korean state media reported leader Kim Jong-un "judged the time has come to settle accounts with the US imperialists".

North Korea has made multiple threats against both the US and South Korea in recent weeks, including warning of a "pre-emptive nuclear strike" on the US and the scrapping of the Korean War armistice.

Though the earnings saw big increases year-over-year, they were slightly below Wall Street's expectations of revenues of $349.4m, causing a 7 per cent slump in the share price.

Red Hat is previewing a version of OpenStack for enterprise customers at the moment, and plans to eventually release a commercial version, allowing the company to apply the same tactics to OpenStack that it so successfully applied to Linux.

Researchers at Kaspersky Lab are reporting that Tibetan activists are being hit by a highly targeted form of Android malware that seeks to record their contacts, call logs, SMS messages, geolocation, and phone data.

The commands to control the code contain Chinese characters, and the C&C servers are located in Los Angeles, but the commands travel via a domain registered to a Chinese firm.

The attacks have grown to more than 300 Gb/s of flood traffic: a scale that's threatening to clog up the Internet's core infrastructure and make access to the rest of the Internet slow or impossible.

CyberBunker argues that it is currently engaged in a blackmail war with Spamhaus. As Internet wars go, this one is using the nuclear option, and everyone is at risk of being caught in the blast.

Wind-up, solar-powered radios might seem like an excellent idea to help cash-strapped Zimbabwean villagers pass the long, dark evenings.

"A lot of people were taken to the police station and we were warned that those that would be found with the radios [in future] will disappear."

"It is very diabolic the taking of the radios, people are entitled to information about what is happening in the country… taking away these radios is to force them to listen to the ZBC, which they don't want to listen to," MDC spokesman Douglas Mwonzora told the BBC.

The central bank now says all will remain closed to ensure the whole banking system functions "smoothly".

The Cypriot government suggested that account holders with deposits of more than 100,000 euros should expect to lose about 30% of their balances.

Despite the Cypriot economy's relatively small size, many analysts had been concerned that the crisis would spread to the wider eurozone, had Cyprus been forced to give up the single currency.

Nvidia has reminded us that they want to virtualize the graphics processor. The company wants to take it out of the computer on your lap or on your desk and put it into a server somewhere without you noticing the difference.

There are situations where this makes sense. Given the cost of buying and maintaining workstation hardware, Nvidia's argument for the VCA seems more or less convincing. But I'm slightly less optimistic about the prospect for the Grid gaming server, or any cloud gaming service, really—call it leftover skepticism from OnLive's meltdown earlier this year.

No matter how fast your Internet connection is or how near you are to the server room actually rendering your game, Grid just won't be 100 percent as smooth as local rendering all of the time.

There is a trial currently in progress in which a British businessman is accused of fooling the military, the police, nay, even governments themselves into buying bomb detectors that were golf-ball finders.

The prosecution alleges that 56-year-old Jim McCormick persuaded many important people around the world that these things could spot bombs, ivory, drugs, and even bits of human bodies.

McCormick has pleaded his innocence in this trial. Still, as the case unfolds, one can only hope to discover how security professionals were fooled into buying the gadgets.

Hoping to strike a blow against sexism in the tech industry, developer and tech evangelist Adria Richards took to Twitter to complain about two male developers swapping purportedly offensive jokes at PyCon.

One of the developers and Richards have since lost their jobs, and even the chair of PyCon has been harassed for his minor role in the incident.

At PyCon 2013 last week, Richards -- who has upward of 9,400 Twitter followers -- overheard a couple of unnamed developers in the row behind her engaged in a private conversation. One made an anatomical joke about "dongles," and the other made a comment about "forking." Richards found their comments offensive, so she turned around, took their picture, and posted it to Twitter.