With a lot of focus lately on how smartphone app developers are treated on Apple's and Google's app stores, Google has decided right now is a great time to announce more stringent app store billing rules.

Google draws a clear distinction between Android and iOS by pointing out that on Android, developers have a "choice of stores" and that most Android devices ship with multiple app stores. Google mentions twice that "each store is able to decide its own business model and consumer features" with the implication being that if developers want to be on Google Play, which has 2 billion active users, they're going to have to start following the rules or look elsewhere.

In a survey commissioned by IT security firm Forcepoint of just under 900 IT professionals, 40 per cent of commercial sector respondents and 36 per cent working in the public sector said they had privileged access to sensitive data through work.

Worryingly, of that number, about a third again (38 per cent public sector and 36 per cent private) said they had access privileges despite not needing them.

File-sharing sites like The Pirate Bay were widely used to illegally download music, but they have waned in popularity thanks to successful efforts to shut them down.

However, they have been replaced by websites and apps that allow users to download music taken from licensed streaming sites including YouTube and Spotify.

"Literally every single penny can make a massive difference in their ability to survive to the next great song."

In her statements, Judge Rogers seemed more inclined to Apple's view of its position in the wider video game market. "If we look at this plaintiff and industry, walled gardens have existed for decades," she noted. "Nintendo has had a walled garden. Sony has had a walled garden. Microsoft has had a walled garden... In this particular industry, what Apple is doing is not much different... It's hard to ignore the economics of the industry, which is what [Epic is] asking me to do."

The small bits of space junk identified by the study are often overlooked; they’re faint, small, and in a region that’s monitored less intensively than low-Earth orbit. As a result, scientists probing geosynchronous orbits above the equator found that the majority of debris located 36,000km out remains uncatalogued. That could be a problem – or more specifically, a danger – for any spacecraft placed in those orbits.

A total of 27 sarcophagi buried more than 2,500 years ago have been unearthed by archaeologists in an ancient Egyptian necropolis.

"Initial studies indicate that these coffins are completely closed and haven't been opened since they were buried," Egypt's antiquities ministry said in a statement on Saturday.

Speaking at Nominet’s annual general meeting (AGM) on Tuesday morning, the organisation’s CEO Russell Haworth shocked members by announcing he was shutting down its internal web forum – the only means of independent communication between members – effective immediately.

What makes the decision to kill any form of independent communication that much worse, however, is the fact that recent criticism leveled at Nominet has been entirely justified.

The week before that, Nominet was accused of actively misleading British punters by sending emails warning them about the need to renew domain names they never ordered and didn’t want.

An Amazon Web Services employee emailed a series of internal Amazon listservs and told them that their communications were being monitored for labor organizing efforts and processed in a data farming project by the company's Global Security Operations, according to an internal email obtained by Motherboard.

The email was sent during a period of increased scrutiny of Amazon for its efforts to thwart internal labor organizing efforts, and surveil workers' efforts to plan protests and other forms of collective action. Since the start of the pandemic, Amazon has fired at least two warehouse workers and two corporate employees who agitated and organized for improved working conditions.

Mozilla has already received more than enough money to set themselves up for financial independence. Mozilla received up to half a billion dollars a year (each year!) for many years. The real problem is that Mozilla didn't use that money to achieve financial independence and instead just spent it each year, doing the organisational equivalent of living hand-to-mouth.

In a climate of increasing regulation and public scrutiny, Sen thinks behavioral context will become more important as marketers can no longer assemble profiles built on a user’s online activity. Rather than knowing a user’s demographics or personal preferences, services will combine what they know about a user’s activity on their own apps with information on what they’re doing physically at the time.