Ryan Fanshaw / flickr

eBay has settled charges that it agreed to a "no poach" deal with Intuit, in which neither company would hire each others' employees.

Under the deal, first reported by Reuters, eBay will pay $3.75 million to compensate workers who were affected by the deal. The settlement was outlined in May and authorized Tuesday by a San Francisco federal judge.

The settlement (PDF) terms also obligate eBay to not pressure any person to refrain from "hiring, soliciting, cold calling, recruiting, or otherwise competing for employees." For the next five years, the company will have to report to the government annually about any potential hiring violations and will be subject to inspections by the Department of Justice.

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President Barack Obama has vowed the US will not be intimidated, after Islamic State militants released a video showing the beheading of American journalist Steven Sotloff.

Samsung's Unpacked 2014 event invite. Samsung View Liveblog2014-09-03T08:00:00-05:00

It's September, which means that it's time for a never-ending flood of devices from manufacturers hoping that their new gizmo will be the must-have item of the holiday season. The first wave of this smartphone tsunami comes from everyone's favorite first-mover, Samsung.

With even Apple (possibly, maybe) getting into the phablet game, the originator of the giant phone craze will be laying another device on us in just a few hours. On Wednesday, September 3 at 9:00am ET, Samsung will take the wraps off the Galaxy Note 4.

We don't have a lot of details, but the current rumors suggest that the usual strategy of "make all the spec sheet numbers bigger" is on tap. Right now we're expecting a 5.7-inch, 1440p screen; Snapdragon 805 processor; 3GB of RAM; and a 16MP camera.

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Celebrities such as Jessie J and Dan Stevens gave their reaction to the celebrity photo leak that was revealed earlier this week. Around 20 celebrities are thought to have had intimate photographs stolen from the Apple iCloud.

Running Windows applications on Mac with VMware Fusion 7's Unity mode. VMware

VMware today released the seventh version of Fusion, its virtualization software for Macs, with a new feature that lets users access virtual machines running in remote data centers.

The feature is available on VMware Fusion 7 Pro, which is intended for developers and other professionals who need to do more than simply run non-Mac operating systems on OS X.

Fusion Pro 7 is scheduled to become available for download from vmware.com today for $150. A basic version of Fusion 7 that lacks advanced features but allows users to run Windows and other operating systems on OS X costs $70. When Fusion 6 was released a year ago, the prices were $60 and $130, respectively.

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Creative? Big science grants don't want you today. Flickr user: opensource.com

In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a 33-year-old software engineer at Europe’s largest Physics Laboratory (CERN), was frustrated with how the Internet would only enable sharing of information between clients and a single server. Doing anything more required establishing a new connection. To get around this, Berners-Lee had a creative idea—use a hypertext system that would elegantly connect machines and servers across a ‘world wide Web.’

Like any researcher, Berners-Lee had to find support to work on his idea. He wrote up a 14-page proposal and sent it to his boss at CERN, Mike Sendall, who famously scribbled the following on the front-page: “Vague, but exciting….”

We are all very lucky that Berners-Lee was in a time and place that gave the young engineer some latitude to pursue his vague but creative idea, one that would ultimately change the world. If Berners-Lee submitted that idea to government funding agencies for support, who knows where the Internet would be today?

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The popularity of the mobile device market (smartphones and tablets) has opened up an allied opportunity for companies - augmenting the limited storage available in those devices with portable wireless devices while adding extra functionality to make them compelling offerings. Under the 'wireless storage' category, we have already looked at various offerings such as the Kingston Wi-Drive, Seagate GoFlex Satellite, Patriot Gauntlet Node, Buffalo MiniStation Air Wireless Hard Drive and the Seagate Wireless Plus. All these units have a hard drive or flash drive, a Wi-Fi radio and a battery. In conjunction with various mobile apps, they enable a host of interesting use-cases. Given the popularity of this market category, it is surprising that Western Digital has not had any play in it. Things are changing today with the launch of the My Passport Wireless Wi-Fi Mobile Storage lineup.

Even though the device is a late entry into this market, it brings along some interesting features that are not common in other competing devices. These include:

• Presence of a SD card slot with one-touch / automatic backup capabilities from the SD card to the internal storage
• Usage of a 2x2 802.11n MIMO-capable Wi-Fi chipset
• Reuse of Western Digital's excellent My Cloud app (which has traditionally been used in conjunction with Western Digital's NAS units) with a redesigned user interface to support the functionalities offered by the My Passport Wireless.

Western Digital claims that the device allows up to 8 different devices at the same time (with a maximum of four simultaneous HD video streams). The rechargeable battery is rated for 6 hours of video streaming and 20 hours of standby. The USB 3.0 device port allows it to be used as a DAS. Western Digital has also added a Wi-Fi hub feature to the device so that moble devices connecting to it can still access the Internet through the My Passport Wireless while also enjoying access to the huge storage capacity. In addition to access through the mobile apps, there is also a web dashboard for configuration through any standard web browser.

In addition to targeting users with multiple mobile devices in the family, the My Passport Wireless also presents a valid use-case for a team of photographers or videographers on the go. Thanks to the SD card slot, users can quickly upload photographs and share it with the rest of the team easily. The unit also has FTP functionality to allow Wi-Fi enabled cameras to directly upload content to the My Passport Wireless.

The My Passport Wireless comes in three capacities, 500 GB, 1 TB and 2 TB. They are priced at $130, $180 and $220 respectively.

Today, Broadcom is announcing a new WiFi/BT combo chip that succeeds the BCM4354. According to Broadcom, the key features of this new chipset are enhanced WiFi/BT coexistence performance, integrated PA/LNA/TR switch, transmit beamforming and low density parity check codes, and angle of arrival direction finding technology. According to Dino Bekis, VP of mobile wireless connectivity, the biggest difference between this chipset and BCM4354 would be the improved coexistence performance.

This chipset is now in production and should make its way into mobile devices in Q3 2014.

Traditionally Samsung's enterprise SSDs have only been available to large server OEMs (e.g. Dell, EMC, and IBM). In other words, unless you were buying tens of thousands of drives, Samsung would not sell you any. However, back in June Samsung made a change in its strategy and released the 845DC EVO, Samsung's first enterprise SSD for the channel. The 845DC EVO was accompanied by the 845DC PRO a month later and today we have a performance preview of both SSDs, along with a glimpse of our new enterprise test suite.

Justin Bieber has been arrested and charged with assault and dangerous driving following an incident in Ontario, Canada.

Imran Khan, who heads the opposition Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf party, has spoken to the BBC about the protests in Islamabad.

The parents of Ashya King, Brett and Naghemeh King, have spoken exclusively to the BBC's Jon Kay about their longing to see and care for their son in hospital, following their release from a Spanish prison.

Toshiba's Chromebook 2 will get you a very nice screen, provided you spring for the more expensive model. Toshiba

Most Chromebook hardware can be described as "only OK." The need to compete with others requires OEMs to cut costs, and this leads to laptops with only OK processors, or only OK keyboards, or only OK screens. The aging Chromebook Pixel hit most of the right notes, but had a price tag that was hard to swallow (and at this point, it doesn't look like Google has a Haswell update planned to improve its mediocre battery life). The quest continues for a Chromebook that does better than OK in multiple areas without being compromised in other areas.

Toshiba's Chromebook 2 may come close. The entry-level $249.99 model falls more into the "only OK" camp, with a 13.3-inch 1366×768 display and 2GB of RAM—it's mostly a streamlined version of the Haswell Chromebook Toshiba released earlier this year, processor aside. The $329.99 model is the interesting one: it bumps your RAM to 4GB and uses a good-looking 1080p IPS display, increasing your pixel density and your panel quality drastically. Chromebooks have offered 13.3-inch, 1080p screens before, but those display panels have been non-IPS versions with inferior colors, contrast, and viewing angles.

The only downside is that Toshiba's Chromebook 2 doesn't use one of Intel's Haswell chips, as its predecessor did. It steps sideways to a dual-core Bay Trail-based Atom chip, the Celeron N2840, which should be adequate for most basic tasks but includes a weaker GPU and can execute fewer instructions-per-clock than Haswell. Hopefully the higher 2.16GHz (2.58GHz Turbo) clock speed can close the performance gap, and in any case the laptop should feel a fair bit faster than older ARM-based systems like the original Samsung Chromebook and the HP Chromebook 11. Battery life is rated by Toshiba at about 11 hours.

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Nato will be asked to pay over $5 billion dollars a year to help fund the country's armed forces

Ukraine's defence minister has accused Russia of launching a "great war" that could claim tens of thousands of lives.

Ukraine's army has seen several losses in recent days, after pro-Russian rebels launched offensives in both the Luhansk and Donetsk regions. Richard Galpin reports.

Net Market Share

After a couple of months that saw Windows 8.x stop growing and even lose some usage share, August was quite a turnaround. Both Microsoft's operating system and its browser saw usage increase. Firefox, which has been on a downward spiral for almost a year now, also had a good month, picking up a few points.

Net Market Share Net Market Share

Internet Explorer was up 0.45 points, Firefox gained 0.15 points, and Safari's presence also grew, up 0.16 points. Chrome, however, lost out, dropping a hefty 0.76 points in the month. For both Firefox and Chrome, this marked the end of a ten month run of losses and gains, respectively.

Net Market Share Net Market Share

Chrome's mobile performance is more assured, with Google's browser gaining 1.63 points in August. Chrome's sort-of predecessor, Android Browser, fell sharply, dropping 1.35 points, though overall this still represents a gain by Google's mobile browsers. Safari was up a little, growing by 0.24 points. Internet Explorer grew for the second month in a row, up 0.20 points.

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Pakistan's parliament in an emergency session over the country's political crisis, as anti-corruption protests continue.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has completed his first 100 days as leader of the country.

A giant Archimedes screw is lowered into place as part of Lancashire community project to generate power.