Author: Kelly Fiveash

Google has won a High Court battle brought by StreetMap.EU Ltd, which had claimed in its lawsuit that the multinational's alleged search dominance had destroyed the UK-based online mapping company's business.

StreetMap alleged that Google's arrival in the online mapping market in 2007 was calamitous for the company. Its commercial director Kate Sutton told Ars that—at its height—StreetMap had a healthy turnover, five million users, and 20 staff members at its offices in Milton Keynes.

The British firm, founded in 1997, claimed StreetMap had been squished by Google when the multinational started displaying a map at the top of its search results. Google's map contained a thumbnail image directly generated from its own mapping service—known then as "Maps OneBox."

Microsoft-backed lobby group ICOMP's long-running fight against Google's search dominance in the European Union has collapsed, amid accusations that its members have been silenced.

Ars has learned that members including UK-based price comparison site Foundem—the original complainant in the antitrust case against Google—resigned from ICOMP, after Microsoft backed away from what had been a dogged campaign against its search rival in Europe. ICOMP was founded in 2008 to fight for an "online competitive marketplace."

One source told us that Microsoft had agreed to prop up ICOMP's food, travel, and accommodation expenses without having any active involvement in the group.

British chip maker ARM boisterously brushed aside concerns about a slide in smartphone sales growth on Wednesday morning, when it reported a robust rise in revenues and pre-tax profit.

The Cambridge-based company told the City that its annual sales had jumped 22 percent to £968.3 million in 2015, while profit before tax hit £414.8 million, up 31 percent from £316.5 million a year earlier. ARM—which has seen its share price take a knock, after Apple recently confirmed that iPhone sales would decline for the first time—added that it had shipped four billion chips in 2015. That's a 16 percent climb compared with its performance in 2014.

ARM said that its strong results had been buoyed by its shift into "emerging market opportunities," such as connected devices. It had also benefited from a growth in royalty sales, particularly for chips based on its ARMv8-A tech.

The UK government has outright rejected claims by a UN panel that Julian Assange has been "arbitrarily detained" by authorities in Britain and Sweden for more than five years.

"This changes nothing," said a spokesperson at the Foreign Office on Friday morning, immediately after the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention released its verdict this morning, which had been leaked to the press a day early. The Foreign Office—which does not recognise "political asylum"—added:

Julian Assange has never been arbitrarily detained by the UK. The opinion of the UN Working Group ignores the facts, and the well-recognised protections of the British legal system.

He is, in fact, voluntarily avoiding lawful arrest by choosing to remain in the Ecuadorean embassy. An allegation of rape is still outstanding and a European Arrest Warrant in place, so the UK continues to have a legal obligation to extradite him to Sweden.

The UN panel urged the government to end Assange's "detention," and added that he "should be afforded the right to compensation."

An eleventh hour data transfer "political agreement" has been reached between US and European Union officials, just as privacy watchdogs in the 28-member-state bloc were circling tech giants with the threat of enforcement action.

The European Commission's vice president Andrus Ansip—perhaps mindful of keeping national data regulators from the Article 29 Working Group at bay—said during a press conference on Tuesday afternoon that a framework agreement was now in place.

What that means, in practice, is that the Commission has negotiated some breathing space to strike a deal with the US.

Efforts to secure a new data transfer pact between the US and the European Union failed to meet a January 31 deadline set by national privacy regulators in the 28-member-state bloc.

Data watchdogs in the EU will meet tomorrow to finalise their own views on how data can be transferred from one side of the Atlantic to another, following a European Court of Justice ruling in October last year, which deemed the EU-US Safe Harbour pact invalid.

It's expected that the national data authorities will publish their own judgment on Wednesday.

HSBC has been battling an apparent Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on its online banking system for the past few hours.

Many customers have been struggling to access HSBC online—via the bank's app or website—all morning.

HSBC blamed the outage on a DDoS attack, and attempted to spin the whole thing as a success story to mainstream news outlets. By way of example, witness this headline over at ITV News.

Doctor Who fans prepare to be bitterly disappointed: you won't be getting your timey-wimey fix this year, because season 10 won't hit our screens until 2017, the BBC has confirmed.

The reason? Long-running showrunner Steven Moffat has run out of puff. He will pass the baton (OK, Sonic Screwdriver) to Chris Chibnall—the creator of ITV's gripping whodunnit, Broadchurch—who will take over the iconic British sci-fi drama at the start of season 11.

The BBC, which fiendishly buried this news late on Friday night in the hope that no-one would notice, has promised a Christmas Day special, but that will be the first and only time a new episode of the much-loved show will appear on the TV this year.

Google has—for years—kept secret the amount of money it has made from its Android operating system. But the cat is now out of the bag.

An Oracle lawyer has told a US court that the search and ad giant had generated £22 billion ($31 billion) in revenue, and £15 billion ($22 billion) in profit since the OS first launched in 2008, according to Bloomberg.

It was also disclosed that Google paid Apple £700 million ($1 billion) in 2014 to be the default search engine on the iPhone.

Facebook's lip-service 69p ($1) annual subscription fee for its WhatsApp messaging service has been dropped by the company.

However, the Mark Zuckerberg-run free content ad network has promised that WhatsApp will remain ad-free.

Instead—in a strategy that echoes that of the plans for Facebook's Messenger service—the multinational is hoping to tie-up deals with big name brands, such as airlines and banks, which may prove to be a red flag for privacy campaigners, particularly in Europe.