The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that it commissioned a study on the way in which search results related to President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are displayed on Google. The study found that when users search for "Obama" or "Romney," Google displays standard results. Other related searches, however, are treated differently.

Those who had already searched for "Obama" found that their results were customized to relate in some way to the president. Searches on those topics yielded no such customizations for Romney seekers.

Apple, like many other global companies, generate much of its profits overseas where tax rates are more favorable. But the profits are often stuck overseas, because they would be taxed at the higher 35 percent U.S. corporate rate if they were brought home, a process known as repatriation. Many companies, such as Cisco Systems, have argued for tax relief for the repatriation of foreign profits.

Sandy-related power cuts were still affecting some 2.5 million customers in the US early on Saturday, according to the US Department of Energy's Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability, quoted by Reuters.

Mayor Bloomberg criticised Lipa for making inadequate progress in restoring power, particularly in the Rockaways, a series of beachfront neighbourhoods hard hit by the storm.

Dangerous website flaws have been discovered in PayPal that grant attackers access to customer credit card data, account balances and purchase histories.

One of the holes was publicly disclosed after a failed effort in July to responsibly disclose them under PayPal's bug bounty program.

“Communication is paramount. Researchers are often not doing it for the financial reward (you can make more on the black market selling these), but out of a sense of trying to better the landscape around them. Without a personal level of communication, companies often interpret well intended reports as malicious, and researchers lose the drive to participate when they do not see actionable results,” Smith said.

Costas Vaxevanis published a list of Greeks with Swiss bank accounts, including a government minister and other prominent figures in public life.

The list of suspected evaders was reportedly leaked by an employee at the HSBC bank and passed to IMF chief Christine Lagarde when she was French finance minister in 2010.

Ms Lagarde apparently handed the list to the Greek authorities, but they took no action.

Prosecutors had accused him of publicly ridiculing people and delivering them "to a society that is thirsty for blood".

The Motion Picture Association of America told a federal judge in Virginia today that any decision to allow users of the embattled file locker to access their own files could "compound the massive infringing conduct already at issue in this criminal litigation."

"It makes little sense for the MPAA, or MegaUpload, or Carpathia, or even the government -- despite its actions otherwise -- to prevent third parties access to their legal property," Julie Samuels, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told CNET this afternoon.

France may introduce a law to make Google pay to republish news snippets if it doesn't strike a deal with French news publishers before the end of the year, the office of French President François Hollande said.

In August, the German cabinet backed a proposal to extend copyright protection to news article snippets republished by search engines. If the law comes into force, publishers could be allowed to charge Google and other search engines for republishing parts of their articles.

In a presentation at Ubuntu Developer Summit currently going on in Denmark, Drew Bliss from Valve said that Linux is more viable than Windows 8 for gaming. Windows 8 ships with its own app store and it is moving away from an open platform model.

Because the runtime needs access to /dev (if the target system is Linux) and an output bus, Wightman says the runtime is often given root or (in the case of Windows-based targets) administrator access.

“The TCP listener service allows for file transfer as well as a command-line interface,” the post states. “Neither the command-line interface nor the file transfer functionality requires authentication.

As it turns out the RIAA failed to mention to its partners that the “impartial and independent” technology expert they retained previously lobbied for the music industry group. In a response to the controversy, CCI is now considering whether it should hire another expert to evaluate the anti-piracy monitoring technology.

The lobbying job earned the company more than half a million dollars ($637,000), which makes it hard to view the company as “independent and impartial” as the agreement between the copyright holders and ISPs requires.