"Market trends in Western Europe are not looking good for Apple's iPhone. 'Apple's iOS continues to lose ground as market share declined to 20% from 25% in 1Q12 ', IDC said Tuesday. Android, meanwhile, is gaining operating system market share, up 14 percent year-to-year in the first quarter. 'Android continues to dominate the smartphone landscape', according to IDC. In the quarter, Google's OS shipped 21.9 million units and market share increased to 69 percent in the first quarter of 2013 from 55 percent in last years' first quarter." On top of that, Apple got knocked out of the top five in India, where it's also bleeding market share. The America-centred large technology sites that dominate our reporting often fail to spot this huge problem for Apple: the company is only doing well in the US. It's losing everywhere else. And just in case you don't know: 'everywhere else' is 95% of the world, and that's where future growth is to be found. The fact that Apple hasn't addressed this yet is exactly why its shares aren't doing stellar anymore.

Pretty cool stuff: the PlayStation 4 apparently runs on a version of FreeBSD 9.0 modified by Sony and renamed to 'Orbis OS'. Second generation developer kits use GNU GRUB to boot, and allow you to boot into a graphical or a console mode. Not much else is known at this point, but it's a fun bit of information, and perhaps a boon to homebrew developer and hackers.

"Britain's spy agency GCHQ has secretly gained access to the network of cables which carry the world's phone calls and internet traffic and has started to process vast streams of sensitive personal information which it is sharing with its American partner, the National Security Agency. The sheer scale of the agency's ambition is reflected in the titles of its two principal components: Mastering the Internet and Global Telecoms Exploitation, aimed at scooping up as much online and telephone traffic as possible. This is all being carried out without any form of public acknowledgement or debate." Woah.

So, The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Microsoft was very close to take over Nokia, but that the talks eventually broke down, probably beyond repair - at least for now. The reasons the talks broke down illustrate something that I have repeatedly tried to make clear for a long time now: Nokia isn't doing well.

"A snippet of code in the Steam digital distribution platform has revealed that Valve may be planning to let users easily share their games with friends in the future. The Verge has verified the code's authenticity, which was originally spotted by a member of the NeoGAF gaming forum; the code references a 'shared game library' and a notification that would alert a user when their games are currently in use by a borrower." This would change the, uh, game.

"Google asked the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on Tuesday to ease long-standing gag orders over data requests it makes, arguing that the company has a constitutional right to speak about information it's forced to give the government. The legal filing, which cites the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech, is the latest move by the California-based tech giant to protect its reputation in the aftermath of news reports about sweeping National Security Agency surveillance of Internet traffic." Draining the ditch after the cow has drowned in it.