Author: Tom Mendelsohn

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Microsoft's quest to put a stop the US government's habit of demanding access to customers' digital records in court-ordered secrecy has won dozens of allies in the tech world.

The likes of Apple, Google, and Mozilla—among many others—have put their names to an amicus brief in support of a lawsuit Microsoft filed against the federal government over its controversial and continued use of gagging orders.

When the software giant filed the suit in April, its chief legal officer Brad Smith said that gag orders had been applied to 2,576 demands by various law enforcement agencies for access to user data, including e-mails, over an 18-month period.

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SpaceX faces a potentially big payout in the aftermath of last week's launchpad explosion, after Israeli communications firm Spacecom—which lost one its satellites in the accident—demanded £37 million ($50 million) or a free flight from Elon Musk's company.

The Falcon 9 rocket, which had been set to deploy an Amos-6 satellite to provide wireless services to sub-Saharan Africa as part of Facebook's Internet.org initiative, was destroyed on Thursday as it was prepped for launch. Its payload was worth an estimated £150 million ($200 million), while the rocket itself cost £45 million ($60 million).

Shares in Spacecom, which operates three other satellites, plunged by more than 40 percent in the wake of the explosion. Bosses have also suggested that the firm might pursue £153 million ($205 million) from Israel Aerospace Industries, which manufactured the satellite.

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Two of the gaming world's biggest properties battled major outages on Wednesday, as Blizzard's World of Warcraft was slammed by a distributed denial of service attack, while EA's Battlefield 1 suffered a suspected DDoS thrashing.

Players hoping to take part in the online-only beta of EA's forthcoming World War I shooter Battlefield 1 were left frustrated for most of the day after the servers went down, preventing people from logging in. Blizzard, meanwhile, experienced difficulties of its own, confirming that it was being targeted by a sustained DDoS attack seemingly timed to coincide with the release of Legion, the World of Warcraft expansion.

It is unclear, however, whether the two attacks are linked.

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Dropbox hurriedly warned its users last week to change their passwords if their accounts dated back prior to mid-2012. We now know why: the cloud-based storage service suffered a data breach that's said to have affected more than 68 million accounts compromised during a hack that took place roughly four years ago.

The company had previously admitted that it was hit by a hack attack, but it's only now that the scale of the operation has seemingly come to light.

Tech site Motherboard reported—citing "sources in the database trading community"—that it had obtained four files, totalling 5GB in size, which apparently contained e-mail addresses and hashed passwords for 68,680,741 Dropbox users.

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WhatsApp will do what it once said would never happen: let businesses use the messaging app to serve ads to users.

In a move that was inevitable once it was acquired by Facebook for $22 billion in 2014, WhatsApp has put its users on notice that it will soon begin sharing their phone numbers, and selected other data, with its parent company.

This information will then be used to offer customers "more relevant" Facebook ads, new "ways for people to communicate with businesses" via the app, and new friend suggestions, the blurb reads.

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Leslie Jones, the black comedian who starred in the recent all-female remake of Ghostbusters, has been forced to take her website down after hackers seemingly took control, posted racist abuse, personal information, and what were apparently nude pictures stolen from the actor's iCloud account

Jones, 48, has been the target of sustained online attacks for months, much of it racist and sexist in nature.

On Wednesday, hackers escalated the situation by posting a picture of the dead gorilla Harambe onto her personal Tumblr site, as well as explicit photos, her phone number and Twitter password, and screen grabs of her driver's licence and passport, according to TMZ.

Pokémon Go is starting to lose its buzz, with the latest tracking data seeming to suggest the game is simply a fad.

It had almost 45 million daily users in July, but this figure appears to have sunk by more than 12 million since the start of August, to just over 30 million said to be playing Pokémon Go. Further decline is expected, as downloads, engagement, and the time users spend on the app have all also visibly flopped, according to data provided by Sensor Tower, SurveyMonkey, and Apptopia.

Bloomberg, which saw the raw data, reported that other major apps such as Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat "can breathe a sigh of relief" that Pokémon Go is finally wobbling, as the game's popularity had apparently been costing them considerable amounts of users.

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Japan might just have stolen the show at the closing ceremony of the Rio 2016 Olympic Games on Sunday night, after its prime minister Shinzo Abe made a surprise appearance during the handover—dressed as Mario.

It's traditional, at the end of each Olympics, for the departing host nation to give space for the next city to strut its stuff, and with Tokyo to host in 2020, people might have expected a spectacle, but not this.

Abe, the country's buttoned-down and conservative leader, made his cameo in the Rio arena, appearing from one of the Mario games' iconic green warp pipes, dressed in the blue overalls and red shirt and cap (though these quickly fell away to reveal a suit, presumably to maintain some shred of dignity for the leader of the country with the third-largest GDP in the world).

Cisco Systems is reportedly considering shedding its global workforce by nearly 20 percent with the lose of up to 14,000 jobs.

According to multiple rumours, it's been claimed that the network kit giant is preparing to announce cuts to between 9,000 and 14,000 employees within the next few weeks, while early retirement packages are apparently already being offered to many staff.

It comes as Cisco is expected to report its fourth quarter financial results on Wednesday.

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Few grounds in the battle over the meaning of truth are as hotly contested as the edit wars which people wage on Wikipedia's biographies of living people. As you'd expect, the edit histories of polarising figures like Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are an eternal clustershag of counterclaims and counter-counterclaims, but almost every sufficiently famous public figure has their detractors, no matter how benign they seem.

Even those rare ones who somehow manage to avoid upsetting anyone still attract vandals trying to insert whimsical libel into their articles for the lulz (who could remember the laughs we had way back in 2006 when someone asserted David Beckham was Chinese?), while there are dozens of examples of lies plucked unknowingly from the site being reported as fact in the newspapers, which is a battle without end in itself for libel lawyers.

However, at the other end of the endless struggle waged by keyboard warriors to prove that popular celebrities are all ultimately problematic, there's the fight fought by the marginally famous for recognition and notability. Who decides who is famous enough for their own entry on the encyclopedia of everything? It's inevitably a matter of degrees, of lines drawn in the sand. But where do we draw them?