The founder of Huawei, Ren Zhengfei, has hit back against Trump's ban on the use of his company's hardware because of concerns about Chinese espionage, saying "there's no way the US can crush us". The US has been trying to encourage other countries to follow its lead in shunning Huawei, but the UK has said it will not stop the company -- which is due to launch its P30 range of smartphones next month -- from getting involved in the rollout of 5G networks.

Ren also lashed out at the US, saying that the arrest of his daughter and Huawei CFO, Meng Wanzhou, was politically motivated.

Australia's three main political parties -- Liberals, Labor and Nationals -- as well as the country's parliament have all been hit by a security breach which Prime Minister Scott Morrison says was carried out by a "sophisticated state actor".

Although the country is due to hold elections in the coming months, Morrison says there is "no evidence of any electoral interference". While it is not currently known who is responsible for the attack, various potential culprits have been suggested, including China, the US, Israel and Russia.

A detailed report about fake news by a parliamentary committee in the UK has accused Facebook of being a "digital gangster" that has deliberately broken privacy and competition laws. The report by the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee calls for the social network to be subject to statutory regulation.

The report comes after an 18-month investigation, and it is damning of Facebook and its executives in general, and Mark Zuckerberg in particular. Criticism is levelled at the lack of action taken against fake news and misinformation on the social network, and there is concern that current election laws were not enough to prevent sites such as Facebook being used by hostile foreign agents to interfere with the democratic process.

In recent years it seems that there has been an astonishing increase in the number of Flat Earthers -- people who believe that the Earth is flat, and anything that suggests otherwise is a conspiracy. The thinking is that, for some reason, NASA, international government, scientists and so on are all desperate to convince people that the Earth is round when it is in fact flat.

While Flat Earther numbers are still relatively small, the increasing membership of this school of thought in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary is both confusing and worrying. So just what is going on? The rise in internet usage has been blamed for the spread of fake news, conspiracy theories and all manner of bizarre ideas, and a new study has concluded that one particular site is responsible for the increasing support for the Flat Earth theory. That site is YouTube.

With concerns about Chinese spying, the US has been embarked on a campaign to prevent Huawei from operating in the country. In addition to banning officials from spending money on Huawei equipment, the US government has been trying to convince other countries to follow its lead and shun the company.

Despite US pressure -- and similar moves by New Zealand and Australia -- the UK says that it has no plans to cut Huawei technology out of 5G networks. The National Cyber Security Centre says that there are ways to mitigate against any potential risk posed by Huawei equipment.

When you delete a direct message on Twitter, it is gone forever, right? From a user's point of view, this is true -- a deleted message vanishes. But a security researcher has discovered that Twitter is actually hanging onto these messages.

Karan Saini found that he was able to see messages he deleted years ago when he downloaded an archive of his Twitter data from the site.

When hackers hit Marriott's Starwood Hotel database last year, it was first thought that half a billion customers might be affected. This estimate was later downgraded to 383 million guests, but this is still a very large number, and it is understandable that many people are concerned that their data may have been accessed.

There was particular concern about whether passport numbers had been accessed, and this is what a new checking tool lets you check. Marriott has teamed up with security firm OneTrust to enable customers to check if their data was included in the security breach.

The marriage between Linux and Windows is getting stronger. Having embraced Linux with WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux), Microsoft is now doing what users have been begging for: Windows 10 April 2019 Update makes it possible to access Linux files from Windows.

As well as enabling you to open Linux files from within Explorer, Windows 10 version 1903 gives you the option of editing Linux files from Windows.

Samsung may be on the verge of officially unveiling its Galaxy S10 range of phones, but ahead of this the company announces its Galaxy Tab S5e tablet.

Being thin and light, there's a strong focus on portability here, and the display makes it perfect for movie watching. This is a 10.5-inch Super AMOLED screen with a 16:10 aspect ratio, and the bezels have been stripped right back. The tablet is driven by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 670 processor, comes with up to 6GB of RAM, and pricing starts at $400 -- which compares well with Apple's iPad.

OpenAI -- a company backed by Elon Musk -- has created an artificial intelligence system called GPT2 that's capable of writing fake news. The system is also capable of generating works of fiction, and it has been described as being so dangerous that it may not be publicly released.

The stories written by GPT2 have been called "deepfakes for text" and can be generated by feeding the system just a few words. The style is far more sophisticated than most AI-generated text, and the news stories it can generate are so convincing that there are serious concerns about the potential for misuse.

The battle Facebook wages against the spread of fake news and misinformation could be set to expand to include removing anti-vaccination content from the social network.

The anti-vaxxer movement has long been fairly vocal, and it has found a home on Facebook. The viral spread of anti-vaccine groups on the social network has been blamed -- at least partly -- for outbreaks of measles in the US. Facing pressure to block the spread of dangerously misleading information, Facebook has said that it could demote anti-vaxxer content and remove it from recommendations.

We won’t get a proper look at iOS 13 until Apple reveals it later in the year, but that isn’t going to stop people from coming up with some ideas of how the mobile operating system should look.

Just a couple of weeks ago we saw one iOS 13 concept video, and now another has surfaced. A collaboration between AppleiDesigner and Skyline News, this latest concept is packed with ideas to get excited about for iPhone and iPad users alike -- a redesigned status bar, system-wide dark mode, some great-looking wallpapers, and customizable lock screen elements.

Chromebooks have fared far better than many people would have first thought when they first appeared on the market, and Google's Chrome OS is going from strength to strength. While not yet ready to topple either Windows or macOS, the operating system continues to gain features that make it increasingly appealing.

One addition that is on the horizon and likely to please many users and potential users alike is virtual desktops. This is something we have heard about before in relation to Chrome OS, but a recent commit to the Chromium Gerrit shows that "virtual desks" are being worked on -- and there's even a video showing off the feature.

In an attempt to bring aging copyright laws up to date for the digital age, the European Parliament and European Commission have agreed the final text of the EU Copyright Directive.

After several rounds of intense negotiations, it was decided to retain the controversial Article 13 which can be used to block the uploading of content, and Article 11 which has been described as the "link tax". The directive will place the onus on the likes of Google and Facebook to ensure that users do not upload copyrighted content, leading to fears that this could mean the introduction of restrictive upload filters and make life difficult for smaller companies.

A security researcher has discovered a vulnerability in Canonical's snapd package which could be exploited to gain administrator privileges and root access to affected Linux systems. The security issue has been dubbed Dirty_Sock and assigned the code CVE-2019-7304.

Chris Moberly found a privilege escalation vulnerability in the snapd API. This is installed by default in Ubuntu -- under which proofs of concept have been tested and found to work "100% of the time on fresh, default installations of Ubuntu Server and Desktop" -- but may also be present in numerous other Linux distros.