Poor old Apple isn’t having a great time of it right now. Isn’t that sad? First, the Chinese government announced plans/gave orders for officials to stop using iPhones over security concerns – and now France has ordered the tax-shy US firm to stop selling the iPhone 12 because the things emit too much radiation.

Earlier this week, the ANFR, Frances’s radio frequency watchdog, told Apple to sort its devices out – going as far as demanding the company recalls every single iPhone 12 it’s sold in the country if it can’t fix things.

Apple, naturally, isn’t taking any of this lying down and is challenging the ANFR’s stance, claiming it’s provided lab results to the regulator that prove everything’s tiptop.

No doubt to Apple’s delight, the World Health Organization states on its website that there’s no evidence to suggest that low levels of electromagnetic radiation are harmful.

However, this has little to no mustard cut with digital minister Jean-Noel Barrot, who’s been telling all who will listen that the iPhone 12’s radiation-emitting levels are unacceptable. Furthermore, he’s announced that Apple has two weeks to respond.

Should the world’s richest company fail…well. M Barrot: “If they fail to do so, I am prepared to order a recall of all iPhone 12s in circulation. The rule is the same for everyone, including the digital giants.”

Is this the end of Apple? Based on a long history of seemingly irredeemable controversies that subsequently always led to a happy outcome, probably not.

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Vast, kind and honest internet search firm Google has rejected accusations that it’s attained its position of almost total global dominance via chicanery.

US regulators/prosecutors, who seem to have recently cottoned on to Google’s existence, have claimed that the case is about “the future of the internet” – which would have been a silly thing to say 15 years ago, wouldn’t it?

The government has centred its attempt to bring the tech giant to heel around the heaps of monies Google has handed to the likes of Samsung and Apple to have its search engine pre-installed as the default on the billions of devices that the world now stares into on a 24-hour basis.

According to the government, Google forks out over $10 billion a year to keep tech producers on side in the default search engine department.

Google has an answer for this: a lawyer defending the company in court – where it’s being asked if it’s a monopoly or not (!) – claimed it’s as easy as making “literally four taps” to switch to another search engine.

But it seems the Department of Justice has an answer to that. Speaking to the court, lawyer Kenneth Dintzer said: “Are there other distribution channels? Other ways of distributing search? Yes…. Are these powerful as defaults? No. The best testimony for that, for the importance of defaults, your Honour, is Google’s cheque book.”

According to put-upon Google, it had to deal with strong competition from the likes of Bing (which currently has a 3.02% global market share against Google’s 91.85%), and search systems tailored to specific things, like holidays, eateries and, I dunno, celebrity-autographed roof insulation.

Google lawyer John Schmidtlein sniffed: “There are lots of ways users access the web, other than through default search engines, and people use them all the time.” Well, duh.

And what will happen if the government wins? Well, it could mean the break-up of the company, but don’t by any means hold your breath.

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Hurrah! It’s yet another miraculous-new-battery-tech-that-will-change-the-world-forever-story! It’s been a while.

This time researchers from the University of Cincinnati have declared that their lithium-based redox-flow battery is the vital component needed for wind and solar schemes, in which industrially-sized batteries are required to release energy when it’s cloudy or windless and hoard it when it’s very sunny or very windy.

Head researcher Jimmy Jiang gushed: “Energy generation and energy consumption is always mismatched.”

Right enough. So, is this a true breakthrough, or yet another wild press release that’s only true use is as filler on the Independent’s tech page? We’ll have to wait and see, but it’d be nice if it did work, wouldn’t it?