Sofia Elizabella Wyciślik-Wilson

Regardless of whether you feel Facebook exhibits disease-like characteristics or not, one thing is for sure -- it can certainly turn into a time-sucker. There's a reason Mark Zuckerberg's social network is blocked in many workplaces you know! Just like many people "underestimate" how much alcohol they drink, particularly when speaking to a doctor ("Oh, not much... just a beer twice a year, doc!") many Facebook users are likely to be surprised -- or perhaps scared -- by just how much time they spend using the site.

If you've ever been curious, but haven’t bothered to sit with a stopwatch every time you log on, a new tool from TIME magazine could be what you've been looking for. The how-much-bloody-time-have-I-really-wasted-reading-other-people's-pointless-crap calculator has been created ahead of Facebook's tenth anniversary. It's on 4 February if you were thinking about getting a card and present, by the way.

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Hackers get a bad rap, but that's usually down to a simple misunderstanding of the term. PayPal is doing what it can to set the record straight with its second annual Hackathon competition, Battle Hacks, where participants are invited to "become the ultimate hacker for good". This is not the type of hacking you see on TV and in movies -- there are no passwords to be broken, no encrypted files to crack. Instead, developers are invited to create something magical and useful based on the PayPal API, or the Braintree and Venmo SDKs, in just 24 hours.

The Hackathon takes place in eleven cities around the world, starting in Tel Aviv on 6 February, and ending in London on 11 October. The world finals take place in San Jose, CA over three days starting 14 November, and the winner will walk away $100,000 richer. Oh, and they get the chance to wield the axe trophy -- "good luck clearing customs," quips PayPal.

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Wikipedia. It's one of the cornerstones of the internet. It's a global resource which has quite a reputation and has spawned numerous copycats and offshoots; the latest addition to the wiki canon is the Wikipedia Voice Intro Project (or WikiVIP). As you may have guessed from the name, this is a project concerned with audio -- voice recordings specifically. The Wikipedia entries for celebrities and notable figures are to be spruced up with the addition of audio clips.

The first name to enter the vocal history books is Stephen Fry, a man known for his love of technology as much as his comedy, general knowledge and general loveliness. This month he recorded a ten second clip ("Hello, my name is Stephen Fry, I was born in London, and I’ve been in the entertainment business, well I suppose since 1981") which now appears on his Wikipedia page.

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Patent litigation seems to have become part and parcel of handset and tablet releases recently, but at least one battle appears to be coming to an end. Samsung and Google have signed a patent agreement, ending years of legal wrangling. An announcement on the Samsung Tomorrow blog goes into little detail about what the deal entails but a global patent cross-license agreement has been signed which covers both existing patents and those filed over the coming decade.

Allen Lo, Deputy General Counsel for Patents at Google said: "We're pleased to enter into a cross-license with our partner Samsung. By working together on agreements like this, companies can reduce the potential for litigation and focus instead on innovation". While both companies will undoubtedly be pleased that a deal has been struck, ultimately it is consumers who will benefit from what should turn into more collaborative ventures in the future, with both side gaining access to the other's technologies.

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Twitter is rarely out of the headlines, but this week two legal cases surrounding the social network slash micro-blogging service brought it to attention for slightly different reasons than normal. On one side of the Atlantic a couple fell foul of the law for using Twitter to make threats to a feminist campaigner, while on the other a celebrity managed to avoid prosecution for libel after managing to plead ignorance about the falsity of a claim made online.

For a court case victory, it was announced in a very restrained, quiet way... particularly when you consider that the victor was none other than Courtney Love. The celebratory tweet reads simply "I can't thank you enough Dongell Lawrence Finney LLP, the most incredible law firm on the planet. We won this epic battle. #justiceprevails", and the decision to use Twitter was slightly ironic considering the fact that the court case stemmed from a previous tweet made by Ms. Love.

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The idea of being monitored, spied upon, surveilled, call it what you will, is something we are gradually becoming used to. CCTV cameras abound, we now know that our private communication could be intercepted at any time, and god only knows what else is going on unbeknownst to us. The plots of Person of Interest look positively tame compared to what is actually happening. Look, a whole introductory paragraph about modern-day surveillance and not one reference to Big Brother, 1984 or George Orwell. Oh ... damn.

But it seems that it is not just potential terrorists, criminals and other ne'er do wells who might feel concerned about who is reading their emails and monitoring their online activity. Hundreds of schools up and down the UK are actively monitoring the online communication of pupils using methods not too far removed from those employed by the NSA on a global scale.

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Handset news aplenty this week. The Nokia Lumia 929 appeared for sale in China, and also showed up on Verizon's US website under the Nokia Lumia Icon name before quietly disappearing. None of this did anything to improve Windows Phone sales for Nokia which were found to be disappointing. Figures released this week showed that phablets are going to become increasingly popular as user look to merge smartphones and tablets in to a single device. It will probably come as little surprise that in the next few years it is predicted that mobile apps will be the most used software. Samsung Galaxy Note 3 owners were disappointed to find that upgrading to KitKat killed their ability to use third party accessories.

Ahead of the release of Update 1 to the operating system, Microsoft finally got around to releasing a guide to mastering Windows 8.1. So keen is Microsoft for you to learn more about Windows 8.1, a second batch of guides was released later in the week. And while you're becoming an expert Windows 8.1 user, Microsoft would like you to take a second look at Internet Explorer and rethink its web browser.

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Today is a day of celebration. Entering one's 30s is something of a milestone. It’s a time to look back at achievements, gather thoughts and see where the future is going to take you. 1984 was a big year. It's a year that will be permanently associated with George Orwell, the birth of my sister (happy birthday for today, by the way! Oh, and apologies for revealing your age!) and the first Mac. Three decades ago today, as my mum and dad were welcoming their daughter into the world, the technology world was welcoming the arrival of the Macintosh.

The Apple homepage has been taken over by a birthday message to the company's baby. Click through and there's a special mini-site that features a timeline of Mac evolution over the years. The intro page is both celebratory, forward-facing and a call to arms:

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Facebook has been in the news over the past few days after a report suggested that the social network is spreading in a similar way to a virus. Like all epidemics, the report suggests, the rate of infection will ultimately drop off, leading to the suggestion that by 2017 the social network will have shed 80 percent of its users. To which I -- and many others of reasonably sound mind -- cry "nonsense!" The catchily titled "Epidemiological modeling of online social network dynamics" paper published by, of all places, Princeton University puts forward the idea that Facebook users are set to abandon the social network in droves in the coming years.

Things don’t get off to a good start. In explaining the methodology, authors John Cannarella and Joshua A. Spechler say they will use "epidemiological models to explain user adoption and abandonment of OSNs [online social networks], where adoption is analogous to infection and abandonment is analogous to recovery". The abstract gets off on the wrong foot by suggesting that Facebook "is just beginning to show the onset of an abandonment phase" -- a wonderfully vapid term with no grounding in, well, anything really. It's easy to pick holes in papers that have slight flaws, but right from the start it is almost too easy here.

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In trial run by BT (British Telecom) and Alcatel-Lucent in London, UK, a data transfer rate of 1.4Tb/s has been achieved. This certainly sounds fast, and Alcatel-Lucent is claiming that it is the highest data transfer speed ever achieved using commercial-grade hardware.

What could you do with an internet connection of this speed? If you felt so inclined you would be able to download no less than 44 HD quality movies in a single second. One. Single. Second.

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You would think that the rollout of an Android update would cause mass delight. There are usually ripples of excitement as a new device receives the latest version of Google's mobile operating system, and this has certainly been the case with KitKat. But some owners of the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 are finding that the update has a rather unfortunate side-effect -- third-party accessories no longer function.

There are various threads popping up on XDA with users complaining that cases, such as those from Spigen, are no longer working correctly. Specifically, the S-View feature appears to have stopped working for many people -- this is the feature that makes it possible to view a portion of the handset's screen through an aperture in the protective case so it is possible to keep an eye on notifications without having to open up the cover.

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Need a free remote access tool? Any day now your number of choices drops by one as the free version of LogMeIn will soon be no more. In a statement posted to the management section of its website, LogMeIn announces that LogMeIn Free is "going away".

Like a gentle parent euphemistically softening the blow about a departed pet or loved one having "gone to sleep", LogMeIn is using this terminology to usher in the news that if you want to keep using its products, you're going to have to pay.

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What's that? Another music streaming service? Another one?! You could be forgiven for having this reaction to the news that Dr Dre's Beats Music is now available for iOS and Android; this is a market that is already rather saturated, and music lovers are not exactly short of options when it comes to picking a service to satiate their audio needs. So any new service vying for attention has to have something rather unique to offer if it is going to stand out from the competition.

Beats Music does have a unique selling point. It is a service that is about more than just streaming music, it aims to deliver the right music according to the time of day, what you are doing and where you are. Is this sort of stream tailoring enough to win over music fans? Only time will tell, but Beats Music certainly has a fight on its hands if it is to wrestle users away from the existing services that have been established for some time.

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The phablet. It's a device with a silly name, but it's a market that is gaining massive momentum. Analysis by Juniper Research suggests that the number of larger-screened devices that ship will rocket by 600 percent by 2018. Projected figures show shipments jumping from around 20 million devices in 2013, to 120 million five years later. But taking into account the loose definition of a phablet it is possible that the figures could be even higher.

In fact there is no "official" definition of a phablet, at least in terms of the size of screen a device must sport in order to qualify for the title. Juniper Research acknowledges that phones with very large screens are increasingly common, with many high-end handsets featuring 5 inch - 5.5 inch displays. For the purposes of its report, Juniper Research uses the term phablet to refer to handsets that have a screen size between 5.6 inches and 6.9 inches.

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As data theft goes, it has to go down as one of the largest and most audacious acts in history. The numbers may not be the highest -- although it's still a very hefty figure -- but looked at in terms of percentage of population, it is staggering.

The work of a single person led to the credit card details of an incredible 20 million South Koreans, or almost half of the country's population, being stolen and sold onto marketing companies.

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