Top 10 Stories

Arstechnica: Twitter has a 200-million-strong and ever-growing user base that broadcasts 500 million updates daily. It has been lauded for its ability to unsettle repressive political regimes, bring much-needed accountability to corporations that mistreat their customers, and combat other societal ills (whether such characterizations are, in fact, accurate). Now, the company has taken aim at disrupting another important sphere of human society: the scientific research community.  

The Register: China is ramping up its war of words with the USA over online espionage, releasing areport by its Internet Media Research Center that – surprise! - concludes Uncle Sam does a lot of spying online. “As a superpower, the United States takes advantage of its political, economic, military and technological hegemony to unscrupulously monitor other countries, including its allies. The United States' spying operations have gone far beyond the legal rationale of "anti-terrorism"...

BBC: Music-streaming service Spotify has become the latest high-profile technology company to be hit by a security breach. The Swedish firm said no financial data had been accessed, and there was no "increased risk". A portion of its 40 million users will need to re-enter, but not change, their log-in credentials. The Swedish firm said no financial data had been accessed, and there was no "increased risk".

ZDNet:China's banks are being urged by the country's government to remove high-end servers made by IBM in favour of servers made by a local brand, according to a report by US news outlet, Bloomberg.   According to Bloomberg sources, the People's Bank of China and other government agencies, including the Ministry of Finance, are reviewing whether the country's commercial banks' use of high-end IBM servers compromise China's financial security.  

The Hacker News: Microsoft ended its support for Windows XP officially more than a month ago on April 8, 2014. This made a large number of users to switch to the latest version of Windows, but still a wide portion of users are using Microsoft oldest and most widely used operating system, despite not receiving security updates.

The Next Web: Google today announced the release of VirusTotal Uploader for OS X, allowing Mac users to upload suspicious files for scanning. You can download it now directly for OS X 10.8 and 10.9 from VirusTotal (8.52MB).   For those who don’t know, VirusTotal Uploader for Windows is a popular tool for submitting suspicious files to the online scanning service VirusTotal. The process is as simple as right-clicking any file and selecting the relevant option...

Arstechnica: Memo to anyone who logs in to a WordPress-hosted blog from a public Wi-Fi connection or other unsecured network: It's trivial for the script kiddie a few tables down to hijack your site even if it's protected by two-factor authentication. Yan Zhu, a staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, came to that determination after noticing that WordPress servers send a key browser cookie in plain text, rather than encrypting it, as long mandated...

The Register: Researchers have plucked privacy holes in Microsoft's Outlook Android app that expose user data when user security setting screws were not tightened. New York-based Include Security pointed out that Redmond's app, which has chalked up tens of millions of downloads, stored user data on the removable SD card that could be read by other applications.  

Reuters: Beijing accused the United States on Monday of "unscrupulous" cyber surveillance that included large-scale computer attacks against the Chinese government and Chinese companies.   "America's spying operations have gone far beyond the legal rationale of "anti-terrorism" and have exposed the ugly face of its pursuit of self-interest in complete disregard for moral integrity," concluded a report prepared by the China Academy of Cyber space.

BBC: The former "leader" of hacking group LulzSec has helped the FBI stop more than 300 cyber attacks since his arrest on hacking charges in 2011. The co-operation of Hector Xavier Monsegur has helped to prevent losses of millions of dollars, according to court documents filed by prosecutors.