Monthly Archives: May 2021

A major US fuel pipeline has reportedly paid cyber-criminal gang DarkSide nearly $5m (£3.6m) in ransom, following a cyber-attack. Colonial Pipeline suffered a ransomware cyber-attack over the weekend and took its service down for five days, causing supplies to tighten across the US. CNN, the New York Times, Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal all […]

President Joe Biden has signed an executive order to improve US cyber-defences in light of recent attacks. The detailed order issues strict deadlines for all government departments to tighten security. It comes as the US deals with a hack on the country’s biggest pipeline that has seen fuel shortages and panic-buying across multiple states. Colonial […]

Amazon has won a court battle over €250m (£215m) in taxes it had been ordered to pay Luxembourg. The European Commission had ordered the tech giant to repay the funds as back taxes, alleging that Amazon had been given unfair special treatment. But the EU’s General Court overturned that order, finding it had been given […]

The autopilot function on a Tesla car involved in a fatal crash in Texas in April was “not available” at the time, according to a preliminary report. Police said one victim was found in the front passenger seat, the other in the back after it crashed and caught fire. The early findings suggest the car’s […]

Live-audio app Clubhouse is launching on Google’s Android, more than a year after its initial launch. The invitation-only platform has previously been available on only Apple’s App Store, where downloads have significantly fallen. The app spiked in popularity this year, with celebrities using the service and invitations being sold online. But many are questioning its […]

Review platform TripAdvisor has apologised after initially opting to leave up an offensive review of the Auschwitz Museum in Poland. The review has now been deleted and the poster banned, it said, blaming a screening “failure”. The museum complained about the post, in which the reviewer joked about bringing a baby to the gas chambers […]

Virgin Media and Virgin Mobile customers face the longest wait to speak to customer service operators by phone, the regulator Ofcom has found. Virgin Media customers waited seven minutes and 40 seconds on average, while Virgin Mobile took six minutes and 44 seconds to answer calls in 2020. EE had the shortest average wait time […]

Donald Trump’s ban from Facebook and Instagram has been upheld by Facebook’s Oversight Board. But it criticised the indefinite nature of the ban as beyond the scope of Facebook’s normal penalties. It has ordered Facebook to review the decision and “justify a proportionate response” that is applied to everyone, including ordinary users. The former president […]

Apple has added extra paid-for advertisements to its App Store, a week after its new operating system limited tracking for ads from other companies. The new ad space lets app-makers advertise on the App Store search tab, rather than just in the search results. Last week’s release of iOS 14.5 placed strict limits on tracking […]