Smartphone users have seen an explosion of malware in the past year, dominated by schemes targeting Google's Android operating system, a survey showed Wednesday.

The attacks are also starting to hit corporate networks, possibly as part of broader espionage efforts, according to the Juniper Networks Mobile survey.

The startup behind a Snapchat application for sharing self-destructing smartphone photos and messages got a dizzying valuation on Monday in a new funding round.

Reports that the company launched in late 2011 had raised $60 million from investors, giving it a market value of about $800 million, hit the Internet along with word that people are sharing more than 200 million 'snaps' daily.

Looking for a safe password? You can give HQbgbiZVu9AWcqoSZmChwgtMYTrM7HE3ObVWGepMeOsJf4iHMyNXMT1BrySA4d7 a try. Good luck memorizing it.

Sixty-three random alpha-numeric characters -- in this case, generated by an online password generator -- are as good as it gets when it comes to securing your virtual life.

Tired of checking your smartphone every few minutes for new emails, likes or retweets? Do you spend more time looking at your device than chatting to your date? Are you close to a digital burn-out?

Fear not, an increasing number of options are available for those seeking to detox from technology, from wallpaper that blocks wi-fi to Internet-free holidays and software that forces you off addictive sites.

As a schoolboy, Akihiro Matsumura spent hundreds of hours learning the intricate Chinese characters that make up a part of written Japanese. Now, the graduate student can rely on his smartphone, tablet and laptop to remember them for him.

"Sometimes I don't even bother to take notes in seminars. I just take out my tablet to shoot pictures of what instructors write on blackboards," he told Agence France Presse.

Phone numbers and email addresses belonging to some 6 million Facebook users have been improperly shared due to a software bug, the social network said Friday.

But no financial or other information was revealed to others, and there was "no evidence that this bug has been exploited maliciously," Facebook said in a security note, adding it was "upset and embarrassed" by the glitch.

British authorities on Friday gave Internet giant Google 35 days to delete any remaining data "mistakenly collected" by its Street View cars when taking city snapshots for its map service.

The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has issued Google with an enforcement notice demanding that it destroy four discs containing information it obtained from unsecured wireless networks.

Facebook on Thursday added smartphone video-sharing to its Instagram photo-based social network, in a move challenging Twitter's popular Vine service.

"We need to do to video what we did to photos," Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom said while unveiling Video On Instagram at a press event at Facebook's headquarters in the Silicon Valley city of Menlo Park.

Apple on Thursday dismissed allegations it conspired to raise the price of e-books and said the U.S. government's antitrust case against it would deter new entrants to concentrated markets.

The two sides delivered closing arguments at the three-week trial, which has shed an uncomfortable light on the technology icon and the clubby world of high-stakes publishing. A decision is expected in the next couple of months.

France is giving Google three months to be more upfront about the data it collects from users — or be fined.

The legal action accelerates a Europe-wide fight against Google over its use of personal data. While the fines threatened are small by the standards of one of the world's richest companies, the move puts new pressure on Google as it smarts from recent criticism over providing customer data to U.S. government surveillance efforts.