A Saudi prince, a disappearing share bloc and an upset voting result has produced the first serious threat to the Murdoch family’s future control of News Corporation and 21st Century Fox. ... So what happened to the missing shares in the proposal to abolish the two classes? .

The 87.6 million shares voted against the proposal was 4.3 million shares short of the Murdoch/Alwaleed total. The result was a terrifyingly close margin for a family that has not faced a serious threat to its control in 60 years. .

Two theories have emerged in the confusing aftermath of the annual meeting to explain the missing shares..

First, that it was a stuff up. Prince Alwaleed’s executives ticked the Approve box on every proposal and didn’t realise they needed to oppose the share classes resolution. Implausibly, this means News Corp executives who knew the proxy numbers didn’t pick up the phone to call their firmest supporter to ask what was going on. The result was a shambles..

Alternatively, Prince Alwaleed split his vote, with a majority supporting the Murdochs, with whom he could still say he had kept faith in, but a significant stake opposing them..

Whatever the reason, there is no mistaking the message from shareholders.

Excluding the Murdoch and Alwaleed stock, less than 24 per cent of shareholders voted for Rupert Murdoch to remain on the News board, part of an across-the-board vote against directors by institutions.

Back in October we launched a competition to get #StopDataRetention memes in front of as much of the Australian internet as possible, with the slightly awkward offer of dinner at Parliament House as an additional incentive to get creative..

Instead of one concept going viral and making for an easy winner, something more interesting happened: hundreds of people got busy and sent this crazy assortment of memes and ideas out into the wilds of the internets, raising hell right when we needed it most. We've shortlisted the sharpest and most-shared ones: now we need you to choose the winner.

Whichever of these fine images gets the most shares/retweets/upvotes by 9am AEDT Wednesday morning November 26 will win — and yes, in the process, a bunch of this work will get in front of hundreds of thousands more eyeballs.

The extent of the "calibration issues" is unclear. Virginia Department of Elections Commissioner Edgardo Cortes said 32 of Virginia Beach's 820 AccuVote TSX machines were pulled from service by 3:30 p.m. Another four were discontinued in Newport News, where most votes were recorded on paper ballots. ... Gov. Terry McAuliffe said at a party for Sen. Mark Warner in Arlington that the voting machines need to be examined. ... "I've always had a concern as it relates to these machines," he said. "I've talked about it for years and years. We gotta make sure that our votes, when they're cast, are accurately counted.

Silicon Valley’s giant companies have been quiet lately on the question of whether the government should protect an open Internet, which they’ve previously argued is vital to innovation. Don’t count on them staking out a stronger position even though President Obama has stepped into the fray, and Washington looks to be gearing up for an epic battle over the rules that govern the Internet. ...

... In another era, the White House’s position might have elicited squeals of joy from the technology giants, which have long maintained that the future of innovation online depends on such strict net neutrality rules. But Google, which was once the industry’s most ardent supporter of net neutrality, and Facebook, which could mobilize millions of supporters through its service, both declined to comment on Mr. Obama’s position. Instead, they joined a supportive statement put out by the Internet Association, a trade group that represents a coalition of technology companies, including Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, Twitter and PayPal.

Recently, Verizon was caught tampering with its customer's web requests to inject a tracking super-cookie. Another network-tampering threat to user safety has come to light from other providers: email encryption downgrade attacks. In recent months, researchers have reported ISPs in the US and Thailand intercepting their customers' data to strip a security flag—called STARTTLS—from email traffic. The STARTTLS flag is an essential security and privacy protection used by an email server to request encryption when talking to another server or client.1

By stripping out this flag, these ISPs prevent the email servers from successfully encrypting their conversation, and by default the servers will proceed to send email unencrypted. Some firewalls, including Cisco's PIX/ASA firewall do this in order to monitor for spam originating from within their network and prevent it from being sent. Unfortunately, this causes collateral damage: the sending server will proceed to transmit plaintext email over the public Internet, where it is subject to eavesdropping and interception.

More than two-thirds of the money Apple’s iTunes makes outside North America goes through the group’s Luxembourg holding company where it is not taxable, thanks to an intra-group fees agreement signed in 2008, tax documents obtained by The Australian Financial Review show.

While Apple pays less than 1 per cent tax in Ireland on sales of its iPhones, iPads and computers, most of its revenues from the sale of music and films outside the US flow to a Luxembourg company, iTunes Sàrl.