Wakey wakey: All the news in 30 seconds

Ah Tuesday, how you mock us all with your distance from the weekend and the lost sense of shared misery that Monday brings. Still, there’s plenty of tech news to catch up on that may lighten the misery and distract you from the rain.

Let’s start off with a subject not often discussed on the pages of TechRadar – namely Big Brother.

This year’s version is all set to kick off, and with England sadly missing from the European Championships the Television airwaves are likely to be dominated by the increasingly dull histrionics of desperados.

But the internet will be even more barren, following Channel 4’s decision to can the 24 hour streaming footage that has been a feature in past shows, but was missing from the oddity that was Big Brother Celebrity Hijack in the winter.

"The feed was dropped during Hijack when we upgraded the website," said a C4 spokeswoman. "We moved the focus more onto video clips... [which were] vastly more popular than the streaming."

Needless to say that forums across the interweb are humming with outraged viewers who will now be forced to miss out on hours of people sleeping, the cutaways when something ‘interesting’ happens and the birdsong that they stick over any dialogue.

Yahoo had snubbed Google before MS bid

Another day and another chapter to the Microsoft/Yahoo/Google battle for our hearta and our minds (and our souls).

Documents have revealed that just a day before Microsoft’s jaw-dropping bid for control of Yahoo, the latter had decided against a search-advertising deal with Google because of anti-trust concerns.

“Short-term analysis of the revenue potential of outsourcing monetization may not take into account the longer term impact on the competitive market if search becomes an effective monopoly," an excerpt from the company document said.

You could be reading this twice as fast in London

In a survey that probably won’t surprise you in the slightest, Thinkbroadband.com found that the speed of the average internet connection in London was, on average, twice that in rural Wales and Northern Ireland.

The survey – commissioned by the BBC - showed that more homes have broadband outside of the big cities but that their access was limited.

"It's a combination of telephone line length and the lack of access to cable and other options from BT's rivals," explained Andrew Ferguson, editor of thinkbroadband.com.

You don’t say.