Someone took control of the Twitter account of Dmitry Medvedev on Thursday morning, sending out a flurry of tweets suggesting that the Russian prime minister was fed up with President Putin and that he was quitting to become a freelance photographer. The Russian-language account was hacked shortly after 10am local time, the Moscow Times suggested. Medvedev's English-language account was unaffected, and by the time of writing, a few hours after the hack, the tweets had been deleted.

Last year's NSA revelations sparked a great deal of interest in secure messaging apps, from Threema to Telegram to TextSecure, particularly in German-speaking countries where people and businesses are highly sensitive about surveillance. Now you can add another one to the list - and this one comes from the German postal service itself.

The combination of camera phones and social media has provided an unprecedented stream of images and video around breaking news events in recent years. However, the phenomenon raises serious ethical and legal questions in terms of the content, context, rights ownership and verification of such media. In May, the Tow Center for Digital Journalism published a report which examined the use of user-generated content by news organisations. Now, the authors of the report have received $60,000 (GBP35,925) in funding from social media newswire Storyful to investigate the area further.

Spotify has added a new way for musicians to make money from its streaming music service, through a partnership with US company BandPage. The pair have teamed up to enable artists to sell "VIP experiences" to fans from their Spotify profile pages, including access to exclusive concerts, meet 'n' greets, Skype conversations and limited-edition merchandise. Country artist Miranda Lambert, pop singer Ariana Grande and dance star Porter Robinson are among the first musicians to take advantage of the new feature, which will sit alongside existing ticket and merchandise sales on their profile pages.

Company magazine is to cease print publication. Its owner, Hearst Magazines, is to turn it into a digital-only publication from October 2014. The final print issue of the monthly magazine, which was launched in 1978, will go on sale on 5 September. According to a press release by Hearst, "the move will allow Company to focus its editorial efforts on supporting the desires of its 16-24-year-old female audience through its award-winning digital properties."

The Sun's former journalist Ben Ashford has been found 'not guilty' on two charges relating to his use of a stolen mobile phone by a jury at London's Old Bailey. Ashford, 35, faced two charges in relation to obtaining and accessing information from a mobile phone stolen in 2009 from a Manchester nightclub.

There are a host of issues with a real-time, massively-networked information source like Twitter when there's a breaking news event like the death of actor and comedian Robin Williams - fake reports, inappropriate sponsored tweets, the release of potentially dangerous details about the method of death, and so on. As with any other rapidly unfolding situation that takes place on the internet, there is a certain amount of chaos and questionable behavior. But social media also has many positive aspects to it in those kinds of situations.

Two variants of the GameOver Zeus (GOZeuS) trojan have been spotted in the wild by security firm Bitdefender. While one is mostly targeting the US, the other is based primarily in Ukraine and Belarus, based on the number of infected IP addresses contacting the company's sinkholes. Bitdefender said: "Although there have been multiple domains registered for the botnet targeting US lately, we found none for the botnet targeting Ukraine and Belarus, meaning that no-one is using the bots at this moment.

Social media has accelerated the pace of the 24/7 news cycle, according to Chris Hamilton, head of social media at BBC News, who himself was a reporter before he turned to social. "Social media is a tool that integrates with traditional reporting, both in terms of news gathering - finding stories, contacts, and content - and getting our content to audiences," he said.

One in five calls made by Vodafone customers in rural areas are failing, according to official figures by the telecoms regulator which lay bare the poor service suffered by customers in some parts of the country. Research by Ofcom found that while overall levels of consumer satisfaction with mobile networks are high - 76% report themselves as happy - only two thirds of those living in rural areas say they enjoy a good mobile service.