That the new HMD-made Nokia 3310 was the star of this year’s Mobile World Congress says more about how dull smartphones have become than it does about the appeal of Nokia’s chintzy slab of noughties nostalgia.Despite the retro appeal, the Nokia 3310 (buy here) is little more than a Nokia 150 (a basic feature phone that sells for a mere £20) wrapped up in a curved glossy shell and sold for a millennial-gouging £50. It is, for all intents and purposes, a fashion statement—a phone for the beard-grooming, braces-wearing festival set that think tapping out texts on a T9 keyboard is the ultimate irony.I, on the other hand, do not find writing texts on a T9 keypad via a tiny 2-inch display ironic. Instead, I find it irritating. Really, really irritating.

The rebooted Nokia 3310 has gone on sale, nearly 17 years after the original made its debut.The phone, whoch has a two megapixel camera and relies on 2.5G connectivity to offer only limited internet access, is being sold for £49.99.The battery is claimed to offer up to 22 hours of talk time, and up to a month in standby mode.One expert said its success depended on how much people would be willing to pay for a device that ”oozes nostalgia”.”For someone like me, it’s an exciting day,” commented Ben Wood, from technology consultancy CCS Insight.”If you put this in the hands of a millennial who’s addicted to Snapchat, of course it’s the wrong phone.

Microsoft has agreed to acquire cyber security firm Hexadite for $100 million, Israeli financial news website Calcalist reported on Wednesday.Hexadite, headquartered in Boston with its research and development center in Israel, provides technology to automate responses to cyber attacks that it says increases productivity and reduces costs for businesses.Microsoft officials declined to comment. Officials at Hexadite could not immediately be reach for comment.Investors in Hexadite include Hewlett Packard Ventures, and venture capital firms TenEleven and YL Ventures.

Russia’s postal service was hit by Wannacry ransomware last week and some of its computers are still down, three employees in Moscow said, the latest sign of weaknesses that have made the country a major victim of the global extortion campaign.Wannacry compromised the post office’s automated queue management system, infecting touch-screen terminals whoch run on the outdated Windows XP operating system, one of the workers said. Terminals were still blank in some parts of Moscow this week but it was not clear exactly how many branches had been affected.A spokesman for Russian Post, a state-owned monopoly, said no computers were infected, but some terminals were temporarily switched off as a precaution. ”The virus attack did not touch Russian Post, all systems are working and stable,” he said.Other institutions in Russia have said they were infected by the virus, highlighting Moscow’s readiness to show it too is a frequent victim of cyber crime in the face of allegations from the United States and Europe of state-sponsored hacking.

Den 23 maj lämnade Accumulate AB (”Accumulate”) in en stämningsansökan mot Finansiell ID-Teknik BID AB (”BID”) till Stockholms tingsrätt. Stämningen gäller tjänsten Mobilt BankID. Accumulate begär skadestånd på över sex miljarder kronor för omfattande intrång i bolagets patent, upphovsrätt och företagshemligheter. BID ägs och kontrolleras av Swedbank, Handelsbanken, SEB, Danske Bank, Ikano Bank, Länsförsäkringar Bank och Skandiabanken (”Bankerna”). Efter att ha ingått sekretessavtal med Accumulate fick BID under 8 månaders tid under år 2010 ta del av en lösning för säkra mobila identifieringar och elektroniska underskrifter som Accumulate utvecklat. För att BID skulle kunna utvärdera lösningen i sin helhet fick bolaget under perioden oinskränkt tillgång till Accumulates företagshemligheter och bolagets upphovsrättsskyddade material.

Accumulate stämmer nu BID för att under samarbetet ha kopierat Accumulates lösning utan tillåtelse. Innan lanseringen av Mobilt BankID varnade Accumulate BID för att Mobilt BankID gjorde intrång i Accumulates patent och utnyttjade bolagets företagshemligheter. Accumulate har även låtit externa experter analysera Mobilt BankID, vilket också påvisade patentintrång och utnyttjande av bolagets företagshemligheter. Skadeståndsbeloppet på över sex miljarder kronor avser skälig ersättning för licenser, uteblivna vinster och icke-ekonomiska skador.

One of the most powerful players in the British election is also one of the most opaque. With just over two weeks to go until voters go to the polls, there are two things every election expert agrees on: what happens on social media, and Facebook in particular, will have an enormous effect on how the country votes; and no one has any clue how to measure what’s actually happening there.“Many of us wish we could study Facebook,” said Prof Philip Howard, of the University of Oxford’s Internet Institute, “but we can’t, because they really don’t share anything.” Howard is leading a team of researchers studying “computational propaganda” at the university, attempting to shine a light on the ways automated accounts are used to alter debate online.“I think that there have been several democratic exercises in the last year that have gone off the rails because of large amounts of misinformation in the public sphere,” Howard said. “Brexit and its outcome, and the Trump election and its outcome, are what I think of as ‘mistakes’, in that there were such significant amounts of misinformation out in the public sphere.