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By Caroline Copley HANOVER, Germany (Reuters) – It's not just computers and mobile phones that are vulnerable to cyber attack, according to software firm Trend Micro. As more devices are hooked up to the Internet, it could be anything from medical equipment to industrial machinery – and even sex toys. To illustrate the point, Trend Micro spokesman Udo Schneider surprised journalists at a news conference this week by placing a large, neon-pink vibrator on the desk in front of him and then bringing it to life by typing out a few lines of code on his laptop.

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BEIJING/SHANGHAI (Reuters) – The logistics arm of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd has completed a funding round, China's biggest e-commerce company said on Monday. Investors in the funding round of Cainiao include Singapore's Temasek Holdings [TEM.UL] and GIC Pte Ltd [GIC.UL], Malaysia's Khazanah Nasional Bhd [KHAZA.UL], and China's Primavera Capital, Alibaba said in a statement. Alibaba did not disclose details of how much money Cainiao raised, whether it issued equity shares, or at how much the logistics unit is now valued. …

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Britain said it will begin trialing driverless cars on motorways for the first time in 2017, as it moves toward its goal of allowing autonomous cars to take to the streets by 2020. The government said last year there were no legal barriers to the technology being tested and gave the go-ahead for vehicle trials to start on some local roads. Finance minister George Osborne will announce plans on Wednesday to test vehicles on motorways and say the government will bring forward proposals to remove regulatory barriers to the technology, the Treasury said.

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The U.S. Justice Department on Thursday said Apple Inc's rhetoric was “false” in a high-profile fight over the government's bid to unlock an encrypted iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino shooters. Last month, the Federal Bureau of Investigation obtained a court order requiring Apple to write new software and take other measures to disable passcode protection and allow access to shooter Rizwan Farook's iPhone. Apple has not complied.

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FRANKFURT (Reuters) – Facebook's “Like” button violates German and European privacy laws in a case brought by a consumer group against an online shopping site which relied on the user recommendation feature, a Dusseldorf regional court said on Wednesday. The ruling followed a complaint by the Nordrhein-Westfalen Consumer Association against a shopping site owned by German department store chain Peek & Cloppenburg KG Duesseldorf, for using the Facebook feature without appropriate user consent. (Reporting By Eric Auchard and Harro ten Wolde in Frankfurt; Editing by Edward Taylor)

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By Julia Edwards WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Justice Department on Monday sought to overturn a ruling which protects Apple from unlocking an iPhone in a New York drug case. A magistrate judge in Brooklyn last week ruled that the Justice Department could not compel the tech giant to unlock the phone. Prosecutors are relying on the same law in its fight against Apple in a California court, where a judge ordered Apple to unlock an encrypted phone belonging to one of the San Bernardino shooters.

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“We will return the option for full-disk encryption with a Fire OS update coming this spring,” company spokeswoman Robin Handaly told Reuters via email on Saturday. Amazon's decision to drop encryption from the Fire operating system came to light late this week. On-device encryption scrambles data so that the device can be accessed only if the user enters the correct password.

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Some criminals have switched to new iPhones as their “device of choice” to commit wrongdoing due to strong encryption Apple Inc has placed on their products, three law enforcement groups said in a court filing. The groups told a judge overseeing Apple's battle with the U.S. Department of Justice on Thursday that, among other things, they were aware of “numerous instances” in which criminals who previously used so-called throwaway burner phones have now switched to iPhones. The brief by the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association and two other also cited a jailhouse phone call intercepted by New York authorities in 2015, in which the inmate called Apple's encrypted operating system “another gift from God.” The government obtained a court order last month requiring Apple to write new software to disable passcode protection and allow access to an iPhone used by one of the shooters in the December killings in San Bernardino, California.

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By Alexandria Sage and Paul Lienert SAN FRANCISCO/DETROIT(Reuters) – Google's self-driving car team is expanding and hiring more people with automotive industry expertise, underscoring the company's determination to move the division past the experimental stage. The operation now employs at least 170 workers, according to a Reuters review of their profiles on LinkedIn, the business-oriented social network. Many are software and systems engineers, and some come from other departments at Google.

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By Julia Harte and Julia Edwards WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey told a congressional panel on Tuesday that a court order forcing Apple Inc to give the FBI data from an iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino shooters would be “potentially precedential” in other cases where the agency might request similar cooperation from technology companies. The remarks are a slight change to Comey's statement last week that forcing Apple to unlock the phone was “unlikely to be a trailblazer” for setting a precedent for other cases. The issue of precedent is central in the public fight between Apple and the U.S. government over the shooter's iPhone, which Apple has cast as a pivotal case that could lead to loss of privacy for all its customers and should be decided by Congress rather than a court.