Google boss hits back at Jobs

Google Android chief Andy Rubin has responded to Steve Jobs' extended rant against Google's mobile OS, unloading a cagey tweet meant to defend claims of Android “openness”, notes The Register.

During a surprise appearance on Apple's quarterly earnings call, Jobs took aim at Mountain View's repeated claims that Google is “open” while Apple is “closed”. The Apple cult leader dubbed such Google talk “disingenuous” and a “smokescreen” meant to hide the “real” differences between companies' mobile OSes: Android and iOS.

About seven hours after the Apple call, Google's Andy Rubin posted to Twitter for the first - and, so far, only - time, answering Jobs' attack with a none-too-subtle tweet meant to rally the world's developers.

Xhead = UK earmarks £650m for cyber security

Britain is to spend £650 million on a new cyber security programme, as part of sweeping reforms to the UK's defence capabilities, reveals Computing.

Prime minister David Cameron revealed the spend in a speech in the commons. He said: "This money will significantly enhance our ability to detect and defend against cyber attacks and fix shortfalls in the critical cyber infrastructure on which the whole country now depends."

The Strategic Defence and Security Review published promises to transform the UK's cyber capabilities by establishing a UK Defence Cyber Operations Group as part of a transformative cross-government approach.

Google's accidental collection of personal data as part of its Street View project has been branded a “serious violation” of privacy laws, reports the BBC.

The Canadian privacy commissioner found the incident was the result of “an engineer's careless error”, which saw rogue code accidentally added to Street View software.

It has called on Google to tighten up its privacy rules by February or face further action. Google has apologised for the error. "We are profoundly sorry for having mistakenly collected payload data from unencrypted networks," Google said in a statement.

The total number of users on the Internet is set to surpass two billion by the end of the year, writes V3.

A report from the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) estimates that global usage of the Internet will reach the milestone some time during 2010.

The ITU reports that in 2009, 1.4 billion users were online. By the beginning of 2010, that figure had grown to 1.6 billion and now the group believes the two billion mark will fall by the end of the year.