Author: Kelly Fiveash

Imagination Technologies has confirmed plans to axe 350 jobs—a 5 percent reduction in its staff headcount—as it "accelerates" its multi-million pound cost-cutting strategy announced in February.

The beleaguered British semiconductor supplier told the City on Thursday morning that it needed to shave another £12.5 million off its cost base in addition to the £15 million operating costs slash that it revealed last month, when Imagination's long-serving CEO Sir Hossein Yassaie stepped down from the firm.

Apple and Samsung are among Imagination's high-profile customers. However, a recent slump in growth in iPhone sales has hurt the firm. In February it noted that the slowdown in the semiconductor sector was failing to show any immediate signs of recovery.

Google has suffered a major blow in Russia, after a court sided with an earlier ruling that the ad giant had violated the country's anti-trust rules by having its services bundled on Android-based devices.

Last September, competing search engine—Yandex, which is headquartered in Russia—brought a successful complaint against Google pre-installing its products on Android phones and tablets. At the time, the Russian Federal Anti-Monopoly Service (FAS) ruled that users of Google's operating system shouldn't be lumped with the ad and search giant's other services.

On Monday, Moscow's Arbitration Court chucked out Google's appeal against that ruling, and said that it "fully supports" the earlier FAS decision. "Google['s] actions led to prohibition of pre-installation of apps of other producers," it added.

Google has responded to European Union data watchdogs by expanding its right-to-be-forgotten rules to apply to its search websites across the globe.

In 2014, search engines were ordered by Europe's top court to scrub certain listings on their indexes. Google—which commands roughly 90 percent of the search market in the EU—claimed at the time that such measures amounted to censorship of the Internet.

However, the landmark European Court of Justice ruling in fact stated that search engines were required to remove links that are old, out of date or irrelevant, and—most significantly of all—not found to be in the public interest.

A man has been jailed for life after being convicted of raping, and assaulting divorced or widowed women he met on dating website Match.com.

Jason Lawrance, 50, of Arundel Close, Liphook, Hampshire was described by detective chief inspector Allison Rigby—who led the police investigation—as "a prolific, serial rapist who preyed on women he had contacted through Match.com."

On Wednesday, Lawrance was found guilty of five counts of rape, one of attempted rape, and one count of sexual assault by a jury at Derby Crown Court, following a two-week long trial.

Facebook's vast data stockpile has caught the eye of competition officials in Germany, who have opened an investigation into claims that the company may have abused its dominant position in the social network market.

On Wednesday, the Bundeskartellamt (literally the "Federal Cartel Office") said that it was mulling whether Facebook had taken advantage of its market power by violating data protection rules. It's unusual for an antitrust watchdog to conduct proceedings that cite concerns about data-hoarding, Germany's cartel office noted. Facebook appears to be an exception, however.

"Dominant companies are subject to special obligations. These include the use of adequate terms of service as far as these are relevant to the market," said the Bundeskartellamt's president, Andreas Mundt. "For advertising-financed Internet services such as Facebook, user data are hugely important. For this reason, it is essential to also examine under the aspect of abuse of market power whether the consumers are sufficiently informed about the type, and extent of data collected."

Western Digital has reaffirmed its plans to buy SanDisk, even though the deal suffered a major blow after a would-be Chinese investor bowed out of the multi-billion dollar bid.

The storage giant said it would now pick up the tab in a cash and stock deal valued at £11.2 billion (~$15.8 billion). It said in a statement that shareholders would receive the "alternative merger consideration," after an agreement with China's Unisplendour Corporation disintegrated amid US government concerns about national security.

The US foreign investment committee had confirmed plans to probe the proposed £2.7 billion ($3.8 billion) deal, which would have given Unis a 15 percent stake in the merger. Western Digital said the new agreement—sans Unis—had valued SanDisk at £55.64 ($78.50) per share, based on WD's closing share price on February 22.

Planet Earth II in all its glory. (credit: BBC)

It's been 10 years since the BBC's groundbreaking Planet Earth series hit our screens—and it's now making a welcome return, complete with full use of the latest UHD 4K technology.

Sir David Attenborough will once again front the show, which will appear on TV later this year, the BBC said. Planet Earth II has been three years in the making, and is billed by the Corporation's controller, Charlotte Moore, as a series that "uncovers stories about the natural world we have simply never been able to witness before.”

The BBC—which didn't reveal an air date for the six episodes—has not only shot the whole thing in UHD, but it also used the latest camera stabilisation, remote recording, and aerial drone technology, too. "We take the audience closer to nature and allow you to experience the wilderness as if you were there," it said.

Linux Mint forum users, and anyone who downloaded and installed a copy of the 17.3 Cinnamon edition on Saturday have probably been compromised by hackers and need to take action immediately, the distro's creator has warned.

Clem Lefebvre, confirmed in a blog post that the "intrusion" had taken place over the weekend. He said: "Hackers made a modified Linux Mint ISO, with a backdoor in it, and managed to hack our website to point to it."

He added that the resultant malware infection had only affected ISOs downloaded from the Linux Mint site on Saturday, February 20. "As far as we know, the only compromised edition was Linux Mint 17.3 Cinnamon edition," Lefebvre said. However, by Sunday it was a different story, with Linux Mint confirming that its forums database had also been targeted in the hack of its systems.

Twitter has applied a fix to what it described as a "password recovery bug" that has exposed nearly 10,000 accounts on the microblogging site.

The company added in a blog post that the e-mail addresses and phone numbers attached to those accounts had been affected by the security flaw. It said:

We take these incidents very seriously, and we’re sorry this occurred.

Any user that we find to have exploited the bug to access another account’s information will be permanently suspended, and we will also be engaging law enforcement as appropriate so they may conduct a thorough investigation and bring charges as warranted.

In this instance, Twitter said that the security blunder had not revealed the affected users' passwords.

A Virgin Atlantic aircraft was forced to abandon its flight from London to New York after it was "hit by a laser strike."

Not long into the flight, a pilot on the aircraft—which had set off from the capital's Heathrow airport—made a distress call confirming that the 15 crew, and 252 passengers on board flight VS025 needed to return to London as a precaution.

He calmly explained the situation to Irish air traffic control: "We have a medical issue with one of the pilots after a laser incident after take off. We're going to return to Heathrow," he said, according to an audio recording of the drama.