Cisco is fighting its own side's lawyers to get a bigger share of a component price-fixing payout, in the latest unedifying class-action legal battle in tech land.

The networking equipment giant wants $192m of apparently over-priced capacitor purchases it made to be considered when calculating how much of a giant pot of settlement money it should be given. Cisco has been joined by Aptiv Services, which wants $199m included.

In other words, there's a pot of compensation for organizations that bought the alleged over-priced capacitors, and Cisco and Aptiv want a greater share of it based on the caps they

Russia is reportedly preparing to turn its internet into a nationwide intranet to thwart hacking attacks and similar aggression from the West.

The rather odd decision by Vladimir Putin's country to temporarily shut off internet links with the outside world as and when necessary comes amid the emergence of what news agency RosBiznesKonsalting* (RBK) described as a new draft law "on a sustainable Runet".

The official Duma news feed (translated from Russian) said the proposed law on a sovereign Runet (the Russian term for the internet within Russia's borders) would isolate the country from the global network in the event

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says his department may punish countries that purchase hardware from Chinese telecoms giant Huawei.

Speaking at a press conference in Budapest, Hungary, on Monday, Pompeo suggested that companies who do business with Huawei could be stopped from working with US agencies or companies out of security concerns.

The fear, said Pompeo, was that countries who rely heavily on Huawei gear are likely to be bugged by Chinese intelligence services. This would, in turn, lead to the US keeping those nations at arms length when handling sensitive information.

"We have seen this all around the

Eric Xu, one of three rotating chairmen at Huawei, has said the company is "naked" before the British security services with whom it shares its most intimate secrets: its source code.

" HCSEC has access to Huawei's source code, so they can easily tell whether those source codes are written in a way that's readable, easy to modify, and whether the code base is robust. We are like 'naked' in front of CSEC," he told media in Shenzhen, China.

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The Huawei Cyber Security Evaluation Centre (HCSEC) in Oxfordshire is owned by the Chinese giant but run by a

Little news is good news for networking giant Cisco.

On Wednesday, Switchzilla boasted another three months of steady, if unspectacular, profit growth in its second quarter of fiscal 2019. For the quarter (PDF), ending January 26:

• Revenues of $12.4bn were up 5 per cent from $11.9bn in Q2 2018.
• Net income was $2.8bn compared to a loss of $8.8bn last year when US-headquartered Cisco took a $12bn tax hit to repatriate cash it had stashed overseas. A more apt comparison might be net income before taxes, which was $3.3bn this year compared to $3.2bn last.
• Earnings per share were $0.73