The indomitable empire of Facebook is being assailed by a volley of arrows from Europe. The latest struck on Thursday: a £94m fine from the European commission for providing misleading information in 2014 when the commission was doing a merger review on Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp.In August 2014, Facebook said it was unable to reliably match Facebook and WhatsApp user accounts. But in August 2016, it started doing just that. This fine recognises that Facebook lied about its technical capacities in 2014, a point the company seems to have accepted. The acquisition also allowed it to get a further identifier on its users: their phone number. Extremely valuable as today your phone number is your primary key.

AKAMAI HAS WARNED that, while the volume of DDoS attacks has so far declined in 2017, a proliferation of Mirai-style hack on IoT devices means that bigger attacks could be just around the corner. The content distribution company, whoch accounts for as much as 30 per cent of all online traffic, made the claims in its latest State of the Internet (PDF) report.Like any product, DDoS attack tools follow a ’hype cycle’, it suggested, but it is typically much faster than consumer technologies as the relatively small community working with botnets is very open to change.Mirai is currently working its way through the so-called malware hype cycle, although its popularity has hampered it somewhat; contention for insecure IoT devices, whoch Mirai targets, has reduced the size of attacks considerably.

The world’s largest private equity fund, backed by Japan’s Softbank Group and Saudi Arabia’s main sovereign wealth fund, said on Saturday it had raised over $93 billion to invest in technology sectors such as artificial intelligence and robotics.”The next stage of the Information Revolution is under way, and building the businesses that will make this possible will require unprecedented large-scale, long-term investment,” the Softbank Vision Fund said in a statement.Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son, chairman of Softbank, a telecommunications and tech investment group, revealed plans for the fund last October and since then it has obtained commitments from some of the world’s most deep-pocketed investors.In addition to Softbank and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), the new fund’s investors include Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala Investment, whoch has committed $15 billion, Apple Inc, Qualcomm, Taiwan’s Foxconn Technology and Japan’s Sharp Corp.

Hur hade det varit om 1600-tals personligheterna på tavlorna log lite mer? Nu vet vi. Med hjälp av en applikation till telefonen har de gamla målningarna fått en lite gladare uppsyn – och även svenska kungar har fått ett leende på läpparna.Engelsmannen Olly Gibbs har under en tid ägnat sig åt något många turister känner igen – att gå på museum, ta bilder och posta dem på sociala medier. Men Olly Gibbs bilder skiljer sig lite från mängden.Med hjälp av telefonapplikationen Faceapp, som förändrar minen på ansiktet på bilden, har han gett de gamla målningarna och skulpturerna ett stort leende. Resultatet? Förvånansvärt realistiskt.

MOZILLA HAS taken another big step on the road to finally eradicating that puss-oozing skank Flash from the face of the earth.As planned, from Firefox 55, the malevolent has-been plug-in will be ”Ask to Activate” meaning that each instance of Flash content will require authorisation to play. So, you know, just… don’t.Flash, created by Adobe who continue to maintain it for security reasons until such time as they can kill it off, has been slowly dropped by the major browser makers. It’s now completely gone from Google Chrome (unless you fiddle under the hood) and Opera, is Click to Play in Internet Explorer, and never existed in Microsoft Edge. Not that anyone cares about Edge.Flash was spared the chopping block when other NPAPI (Netscape heritage) plug-ins were blocked last year, but now the time has come for the bloated corpse of web animation past to receive yet more marching orders.The move will also mean that, de facto, Firefox will now automatically favour HTML5 content, bringing it into line with its rivals.

NHS trusts are experiencing disruption one week after a cyber-attack caused havoc in more than 150 countries.The unprecedented ransomware breach froze computers across the health service last Friday, with hackers threatening to delete files unless a ransom was paid.Shadow Brokers threaten to unleash more hacking tools Read moreOperations and clinic appointments were cancelled and patients were still being diverted from accident and emergency departments on Thursday.However, NHS England confirmed on Friday that ambulances were no longer being diverted to unaffected hospitals.Dr Anne Rainsberry, the regional director for London at NHS England, said: “There is still some disruption in a small number of areas but most patients are being treated normally. We are grateful for the hard work of staff at trusts and GP practices who are still suffering IT issues but have found ways to work around this, as well as the patience of people who have been affected.”A pre-inquest review on Friday into hearings on the deaths of the perpetrator and the victims of the Westminster terrorist attack in March heard Barts Health NHS trust, the health service’s largest trust, was still unable to access data.