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Microsoft is to give its non-executive staff a $1,500 (£1,080) bonus for their work during the pandemic.

The company told the BBC it was a symbol of appreciation “during a uniquely challenging year”.

It added: “We are proud to recognise our employees with a one-time monetary gift.”

In the first quarter of 2021 Microsoft’s profits rose 38% on the same period last year.

The Verge reported that employees below vice-president level who joined no later than 31 March 2021 would receive the payment, including part-time workers.

The big tech firms have done well during the pandemic and Microsoft is not the only firm to have made bonus payments to staff.

In March 2020, Facebook gave employees a $1,000 (£720) bonus to help them with increased expenses caused by the pandemic, such as those associated with setting up a home office.

Google made a similar $1,000 payment in May 2020.

In December, Amazon gave front-line employees a $300 (£216) dollar bonus with part-time workers receiving $150.

Amazon’s revenue rose by 38% in 2020 to $386bn (£279bn).

Former US president Donald Trump has filed a lawsuit against tech giants Google, Twitter and Facebook, claiming that he is the victim of censorship.

The class action lawsuit also targets the three companies’ CEOs.

Mr Trump was suspended from his social accounts in January over public safety concerns in the wake of the Capitol riots, led by his supporters.

On Wednesday, Mr Trump called the lawsuit “a very beautiful development for our freedom of speech”.

In a news conference from his golf resort in Bedminster, New Jersey, Mr Trump railed against social media companies and Democrats, who he accused of espousing misinformation.

“We are demanding an end to the shadow-banning, a stop to the silencing, and a stop to the blacklisting, banishing, and cancelling that you know so well,” he said.

The suit requests a court order to end alleged censorship. Mr Trump added if they could ban a president, “they can do it to anyone”.

None of the tech companies named have yet responded to the lawsuit, which was filed to a federal court in Florida.

Mr Trump was joined at the announcement by former Trump officials who have since created the not-for-profit America First Policy Institute.

The former president called the post that got him banned from Twitter, “the most loving sentence”.

According to Twitter, the tweets that resulted in Mr Trump’s ban for “glorification of violence” were from 8 January, two days after the rioting in the nation’s capital. The riot followed his repeated claims, without evidence, that the election was rigged in Joe Biden’s favour.

He wrote that the “great patriots” who voted for him will have “a giant voice” and “will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form”, and in another post said he would not attend President Joe Biden’s inauguration.

Big Tech: Between a rock and a hard place
The 65 days that led to chaos at the Capitol
At the same time on Wednesday, Mr Trump’s Republican allies in Congress released a memo describing their plan “to take on Big Tech”.

The agenda calls for antitrust measures to “break up” the companies, and a revamping of a law known as Section 230.

Section 230, which Mr Trump tried to repeal as president, essentially stops companies like Facebook and Twitter from being liable for the things that users post. It gives the companies “platform” rather than “publisher” status.

“It’s a liability protection the likes of which nobody in the history of our country has ever received,” Mr Trump said, criticising the law on Wednesday.

He added that the law invalidates the companies’ statuses as private companies.

The lawsuit has been criticised by legal experts, who pointed to Mr Trump’s habit of issuing lawsuits for media attention but not aggressively defending the claims in court. His argument of free speech infringement has also been questioned by analysts, as the companies he accuses have those same First Amendment protections in determining content on their sites.

Trump struggles to be heardDonald Trump’s muzzling on social media has been extremely effective.

His megaphone removed, Trump has struggled to be heard at times.

His plans for his own social media platform have so far come to nothing.

This lawsuit illustrates, if it were needed, just how important the big social media companies are to him.

A key strategy of Trumpism is being able to speak directly to voters – bypassing traditional media.

Facebook proved particularly important to Trump – giving him access to millions of Americans at the click of a button.

Experts believe the lawsuits are unlikely to succeed.

Mr Trump will argue that his First Amendment rights have been violated. But tech companies will say that, as private companies, they have the right to decide who uses their platform – an argument that is likely to succeed.

House Republicans, too, want to introduce legislation that will “break up” Big Tech. However, without a majority in either house they will struggle to do so.

Trump desperately wants to get back into your newsfeed, but that may not be likely to happen anytime soon.

Chinese gaming giant Tencent is rolling out facial recognition to stop children playing between 22:00 and 08:00.

The “midnight-patrol” technology will stop “tricks” circumventing the government curfew, introduced in 2019 with a cap on what young gamers could spend on in-game transactions, it says.

The bans require gamers to register with their official IDs, linked to a national database.

But children have reportedly been using adults’ IDs instead of their own.

And now, anyone playing for a certain length of time will require a facial scan to prove they are an adult.

China imposes video game curfew for minors
Gaming addiction classified as disorder
What is Tencent?
Tencent started testing the system in 2018 – but it will now cover more than 60 games from the world’s biggest game company.

It announced the expansion on China’s QQ messaging service, calling it “zero-hours cruising”, which China news site Sixth Tone translated as “midnight patrol”.

Many of Tencent’s top titles, such as Honour of Kings and Game for Peace, are for phones – mobile gaming is far more popular in China than the West.

Facial recognition is easier to implement using a phone’s camera than on a computer or games console.

And age checks using cameras are already being suggested to verify users’ age for online sales of adult products.

The World Health Organization formally recognised gaming addiction in 2018.

And the following year, the NHS adopted treatment plans for what is seen as a rare disorder affecting only a small proportion of hardcore gamers.

But in China, video games have often been accused of having a negative impact on young people, including near-sightedness in children.

And in a bid to tackle what China considers “problem” gaming, all new titles must be approved by a regulator, which in 2018 “froze” releases and has since appeared to limit the number.

Audio-edit software Audacity has denied accusations its new privacy policy has transformed it into “possible spyware”.

The open-source free tool, with 100 million users worldwide, is popular with podcast and music editors.

Its updated policy says data can be shared with its Russia-based infrastructure company, WSM, as well as regional law enforcement.

Audacity says the only data it exchanges with its users is software updates and error reports.

But since the updated policy was published last week, there have been angry calls from concerned users to uninstall the product or revert to an older version.

And technology website Fosspost described the most recent version as “possible spyware”.

“One would not expect an offline desktop application to be collecting such data, phoning home and then handing that data to governments around the world whenever they see fit,” it wrote.

Alert users
Audacity was bought by the Cyprus-based firm Muse Group in April 2021.

Muse head of strategy Daniel Ray told BBC News: “We don’t know anything about our users.

“We don’t want users’ personal information – that doesn’t help us.”

The company, which bought Audacity in April, intended to release more frequent updates and wanted to alert users, Mr Ray said.

And the policy, “written by lawyers, to be understood by lawyers rather than the average person”, was a requirement for any software that sent any form of information back to its creators.

It also stated under-13s could no longer use the Audacity app, to comply with data laws, Mr Ray said

But anyone of any age could still use the product in its offline mode.

The policy says Audacity collects “very limited data” about users – no “direct identifiers” such as names or contact details – and an account profile is not required.

But it may share the personal data it does gather with:

staff members
law enforcement, government agencies and regulators
auditors, advisers and legal representatives of the company
potential buyers of the business
And while European user data is stored in Europe, it may “occasionally” share data with its headquarters in Russia.

This was to monitor signs of potential distributed-denial-of-service (DDOS), when a platform is deliberately flooded with data requests intended to knock it offline, Mr Ray said.

And individual Internet Protocol (IP) addresses were scrambled, using an encryption technique called hashing.

The company was not seeking to monetise the 21-year-old product, Mr Ray said, but it was seeking to “modernise” it.

“Previously, updates were every few years,” he said, “we want to do them every few weeks.

“If you don’t have ways of informing users about updates they might miss, then you put the burden on the user to keep up with the pace of change”.

About 200 US businesses have been hit by a “colossal” ransomware attack, according to a cyber-security firm.

Huntress Labs said the hack targeted Florida-based IT company Kaseya before spreading through corporate networks that use its software.

Kaseya said in a statement on its own website that it was investigating a “potential attack”.

Huntress Labs said it believed the Russia-linked REvil ransomware gang was responsible.

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency, a federal agency, said in a statement that it was taking action to address the attack.

The cyber-breach emerged on Friday afternoon as companies across the US were clocking off for the long Independence Day weekend.

Kaseya said one of its applications that runs corporate servers, desktop computers and network devices might have been compromised.

The company said it was urging customers that use its VSA tool to immediately shut down their servers.

Kaseya said in its statement that a “small number” of companies had been affected, though Huntress Labs said the number is already about 200 and counting.

It is not clear what specific companies have been affected – a Kaseya representative contacted by the BBC declined to give details.

Kaseya’s website says it has a presence in over 10 countries and more than 10,000 customers.”This is a colossal and devastating supply chain attack,” Huntress Labs’ senior security researcher John Hammond said in an email to Reuters news agency.

At a summit in Geneva last month, US President Joe Biden said he told Russian President Vladimir Putin he had a responsibility to rein in such cyber-attacks.

Mr Biden said he gave Mr Putin a list of 16 critical infrastructure sectors, from energy to water, that should not be subject of hacking.

REvil – also known as Sodinokibi – is one of the most prolific and profitable cyber-criminal groups in the world.

The gang was blamed by the FBI for a hack in May that paralysed operations at JBS – the world’s largest meat supplier.

FBI accuses Russia-linked hackers of attack on JBS
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The group sometimes threatens to post stolen documents on its website – known as the “Happy Blog” – if victims don’t comply with its demands.

REvil was also linked to a co-ordinated attack on nearly two dozen local governments in Texas in 2019.

Sir Richard Branson has named the date he’ll fly to the edge of space. It will be 11 July, or very soon after.

He’ll be a passenger in the back of the Unity rocket plane his Virgin Galactic company has been developing in the US for the better part of two decades.

The vehicle can climb to an altitude of 90km (295,000ft), giving those onboard a few minutes of weightlessness and a view of the curvature of the Earth.

Sir Richard’s intention is to introduce a commercial spaceflight service.

Some 600 individuals have already lodged deposits to take the ride.

Witnessing the British entrepreneur do it means those customers are now getting extremely close to having to hand over the full ticket price, which in some cases will be $250,000 (£180,000).

Sir Richard Branson said: “I truly believe that space belongs to all of us. After 17 years of research, engineering and innovation, the new commercial space industry is poised to open the Universe to humankind and change the world for good.

“It’s one thing to have a dream of making space more accessible to all; it’s another for an incredible team to collectively turn that dream into reality.”

Branson gains licence for commercial spaceflights
Virgin rocket plane flies to edge of space

Absolutely key to Virgin Galactic moving forward with its business was the granting last week of a commercial spaceflight licence by the Federal Aviation Administration.

Sunday 11 July is the opening of what’s termed a flight “window”. The Galactic team will aim to make the ascent on that day, but it could of course be delayed because of unfavourable weather conditions or perhaps a technical issue.

If the mission does indeed go ahead on that Sunday, it would mean Sir Richard stealing a march on his rival in sub-orbital space tourism, fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos.

The founder of the online retail empire Amazon.com has sunk a fortune into his hobby of building rockets and has announced his own trip to the edge of space on 20 July.

He’s invited three individuals to join him in his New Shepard booster and capsule system: his brother Mark; a mystery person who paid $28m (£20m) at auction for a seat; and the famed female aviator Wally Funk.

Eighty-two-year old Funk trained to be an astronaut in the 1960s and will become the oldest ever spacefarer when she rockets to an altitude of 100km with Mr Bezos.

The Amazon man has yet to detail how he’ll sell tickets more generally for New Shepard, but this is his plan.

Sir Richard has clearly moved his first flight up in response to Mr Bezos naming the date for his inaugural mission.

The original schedule for the next Unity flight called for four Virgin Galactic employees to ride as passengers to test the cabin experience for future tourists. Only after that outing was Sir Richard supposed to strap himself in.

He’ll now be one of the four testers – alongside Beth Moses, Galactic’s chief astronaut instructor; Colin Bennett, lead operations engineer; and Sirisha Bandla, vice president of government affairs.

The two pilots up front will be Dave Mackay and Michael “Sooch” Masucci.

Space tourism is a sector being rekindled after a decade’s hiatus.

Throughout the 2000s, seven wealthy individuals paid to visit the International Space Station (ISS). But this adventurism, organised under the patronage of the Russian space agency, ceased in 2009.

Now, new initiatives abound, and some of these will be aiming much higher than the sub-orbital flights from Sir Richard and Jeff Bezos.

California tech entrepreneur Elon Musk has already lined up several private missions in his Dragon capsules. These vehicles reach several hundred km above the Earth and will stay up for days.

The Russians, too, are reprising their commercial flights to the ISS, and there are even those who want to launch private space stations for people to visit. Among these is Axiom, a company started by a former Nasa ISS programme manager.

UK-based space start-up OneWeb has received a cash injection of $500m (£361m) from Indian firm Bharti Global.

The deal means Bharti will now take a 39% stake, making it the biggest shareholder in the satellite provider.

The UK government is also a major shareholder after it and Bharti put in $1bn to buy OneWeb out of bankruptcy last year.

The new investment will help OneWeb launch more commercial satellites into space later this year.

OneWeb is building a network of low Earth orbit satellites to deliver broadband connections around the world.

The deal is expected to complete in the second half of this year.

“In just a year and during a global pandemic, together we have transformed OneWeb, bringing the operation back to full-scale. With this round of financing, we complete the funding requirements,” Bharti Global’s Managing Director Shravin Mittal said in a statement.

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In total, the company has secured $2.4bn of funding to deliver on its ambitions. Paris-based Eutelsat took a stake in OneWeb with a $550m investment in April.

Japanese technology giant SoftBank is also a major investor.

Under the deal, the UK government, Eutelsat and SoftBank will each own 19.3% of the firm.

UK Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng said the deal is a vote of confidence in the company: “It’s clear that investors see a strong future for this incredible, cutting-edge company and a robust commercial case for investment.”

The British government had been criticised for using UK taxpayer money to rescue a bankrupt company at the time of the bailout.

Earlier this week, OneWeb signed a deal with BT to explore ways to provide broadband internet to remote parts of the UK and people at sea.

The two companies said they will look at how to improve the speed that people can access data in remote areas, and how to improve the signal people can get on their phone, including how to stop it cutting out so much.

The UK government has also launched ‘Project Gigabit’, which aims to improve rural broadband coverage across the country.

OneWeb competes with providers such as Jeff Bezos’ Project Kuiper as well as Elon Musk’s Starlink, which was recently granted a license by the UK regulator to operate.

Starlink began a UK trial of its services in January after Ofcom granted it a licence in November.

OneWeb says it currently has 218 satellites, and is due to launch a further 36 on Thursday.

Three council workers have been suspended over “insensitive and disrespectful” TikTok videos filmed at a cemetery.

Derby City Council said it was “extremely disappointed” by the videos, filmed at Nottingham Road Cemetery.

The clips, viewed thousands of times, show two men dancing while carrying a coffin and another joking around near an open grave.

The council has apologised “for the offence caused”.

In one of the clips, a man can be heard jokingly singing in a graveyard, before the camera pans to reveal a recently dug grave with a casket and flowers inside.

Another clip shows two men dancing while carrying a coffin on their shoulders.

‘Acted swiftly’
The videos – which have since been deleted – dated back to 2020.

A council spokesperson said: “Having viewed the footage, we were extremely disappointed to identify three members of our staff.

“We have acted swiftly and suspended them with immediate effect while we carry out a full investigation.

“No one currently working at the cemetery has been involved in these videos.

“We do not condone this kind of behaviour and we are sorry for the offence caused by these videos, which have now been deleted.”

Flows of personal data from the EU to the UK will continue, after the European Commission adopted two “data adequacy” decisions.

The decisions include a sunset clause, which runs out after four years.

They will be renewed only if the UK ensures an adequate level of data protection, the commission said.

UK firms had been facing making costly alternative plans with EU counterparts to keep data flowing once a post-Brexit transition period expires this month.

The agreement also covers data from countries in the wider European Economic Area.

Didier Reynders, Commissioner for Justice, said the adequacy agreement was, “important for smooth trade and the effective fight against crime”.

Welcoming the decision, the UK government said it “plans to promote the free flow of personal data globally and across borders”.

“All future decisions will be based on what maximises innovation and keeps up with evolving tech,” it added.

John Foster, CBI director of policy, called the agreement a breakthrough. “The free flow of data is the bedrock of the modern economy and essential for firms across all sectors,” he wrote.

No deviation
The commission said in a press release that it reached its decision in part because: “The UK’s data protection system continues to be based on the same rules that were applicable when the UK was a member state of the EU.”

However, it added that it would “intervene” at any point if the UK deviates from the level of protection presently in place.

Some UK politicians have recently argued for changes to UK data protection law.

A report, commissioned by the prime minister, from The Taskforce on Innovation, Growth and Regulatory Reform chaired by Sir Iain Duncan Smith, said: “GDPR is already out of date and needs to be revised for AI and growth sectors if we want to enable innovation in the UK.”

The EU excluded from the adequacy agreements transfers of data to be used for “immigration control”.

A recent Court of Appeal ruling found that some UK data rules relating to immigration were incompatible with GDPR.

Microsoft has officially announced Windows 11, its new operating system which will replace the current version over the next few years.

Among all the new features are two seemingly small but related things that jumped out.

First – Microsoft Teams, the video-calling app which saw a boom during 2020’s pandemic, will be integrated into Windows 11 by default.

And second – Skype will not be, for the first time in years.

That seems to suggest that Teams is the new favourite child, and many pundits think this is the beginning of the end for what was once the king of calling apps.

“Looks like Microsoft is killing off Skype,” wrote the Irish & Sunday Independent tech editor Adrian Weckler. “Bye bye Skype,” added Future Publishing’s content director Jeremy Kaplan. “RIP Skype,” was the immediate reaction from The Verge’s Tom Warren.

Yet the reality is that Skype has been losing relevance for a long time.

‘The future’
Microsoft bought Skype 10 years ago for $8.5bn (£6.1bn). At the time, it was the tech giant’s biggest-ever acquisition, and there were questions over whether it was over-paying.

But Microsoft was buying into an app that had been downloaded one billion times and had hundreds of millions of users.

“Together we will create the future of real-time communications,” Microsoft chief Steve Balmer projected.

It seemed to work – the app came bundled with every new computer, and user numbers were strong.

But by the middle of the decade, internet forums were full of posts asking “why is Skype so bad?” and complaining about updates. Many pointed to poor performance and questionable design choices.

At the same time, mobile messaging apps – such as WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger – were exploding in popularity and started to introduce video calls, one of Skype’s main attractions.

The first version of Skype was launched in 2003, and despite frequent updates, it was starting to show its age.

Meanwhile, Microsoft was cooking up its business chat app, Teams, based on more modern tech, which launched in 2017.

“Microsoft has been moving beyond Skype for several years now, with Teams being its strategic voice and video technology for the new era,” explained Angela Ashenden, an analyst at CCS Insight.

Teams for all
Under the hood, she said, Teams actually used Skype’s technology for a while. It was designed to compete with business app Slack, as a work tool.

But then the pandemic happened.

Zoom, previously a little-known business solution, became a household name overnight. And Microsoft Teams was one of only a handful of competitors ready to take it on.

“As Teams’ adoption skyrocketed in the last year, this really sealed Skype’s status as a legacy technology for Microsoft,” Ms Ashenden said. That has only been reinforced by the launch of a personal version, which could directly compete with Skype.

With that kind of sudden success, it was “inevitable” that Teams would be the Windows default, she added.

“The removal of Skype as a pre-installed app helps reinforce Teams as the preferred solution from Microsoft’s perspective, emphasising that this is where its investment will be moving forward.”

Microsoft unveils Windows 11
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The writing has been on the wall for a while.

Last September, Microsoft-owned LinkedIn announced it was bringing video meetings to its chat feature using Teams and not Skype, with Zoom and another popular system, BlueJeans, as other options.

In October, senior Microsoft executive Jim Gaynor told CNBC: “If Skype was going to become bigger, this year was the time for it.”

“What happened right now was the perfect storm, the perfect set of circumstances for any online communications product. If you cannot significantly grow and make your product flourish and thrive now, forget about it, you’re too late now.”

‘The right solution’
Skype did see growth during the pandemic – reportedly a 70% jump to about 40 million people a day.

But that is still not as big a growth as its competitors. At a time when the entire world needed a calling app, people chose other options.

“There is definitely an argument that the Teams experience is far too complicated for the less-technical non-business user,” Ms Ashenden said.

“But if Skype was the right solution for that, we certainly would have seen its usage soaring more over the last year, and we didn’t.”Instead, Teams is likely to evolve to make things simpler for personal users -particularly on mobile devices, she added.

But Skype is not being killed off entirely – it will continue to be offered as a download in the Microsoft Store for those who want it in Windows 11.

It won’t be alone.

Alongside the announcement of Skype’s relegation to the store, Microsoft also announced that some other much-maligned apps were being downplayed or removed.

Its ill-fated Cortana virtual assistant will no longer be pinned to the taskbar; Internet Explorer is disabled by default in favour of the more modern Edge browser; and tools such as OneNote, Paint 3D, and Windows’ 3D viewer app are getting the Skype treatment and becoming optional store downloads.