Internet

Facebook is to deliberately slow down the Internet connections of its employees on Tuesdays. It's not designed to deter web use, but rather to help staff think about the needs of users across the world. The program will only affect visits to the ... Facebook site itself, rather than access to the entire Internet. It will also be voluntary: the first time an employee logs on to Facebook on a Tuesday, they'll get a pop-up menu asking them if they want to take the "2G Tuesday option." Site Will Run At One-Hundredth 'Normal' Speed If an employee agrees, then all their use of ... (view more)

Facebook is tweaking a feature which shows old posts on anniversary dates. The change is designed to let users filter out unwanted or uncomfortable memories. The feature concerned is known as "On This Day" and involves an entry appearing in the ... user's news feed. The entry won't appear for anyone else, unless the user actively decides to share it. It's also possible to access the page directly using a bookmark on the Facebook site or via a dedicated page at facebook.com/onthisday. Users can also sign up so that several such memories are guaranteed to show up in their news ... (view more)

Facebook is to tweak the way it selects and displays content in user news feeds. The idea is to make life easier for users on slow, inconsistent, or wireless Internet connections. Part of the changes affect how the content will be shown; for ... example, users on a slow connection will see more text-based content such as status updates, rather than showing more videos. There will also be a change affecting how media content is downloaded as a priority. Facebook has already switched to an image format known as Progressive JPEG that displays low quality images first, then gradually downloads into a ... (view more)

Hackers who stole data from a website promoting extra-marital affairs say they did so to promote misleading claims. The Ashley Madison site has responded by dropping a controversial fee to delete user accounts. The site openly promotes itself as ... appealing to people who want to arrange dates online where at least one party is already in a relationship. Not surprisingly, that setup brings added interest in keeping client details confidential. Earlier this week attackers claimed to have breached security and got access to the records of a supposed 33 million members around the world. They've ... (view more)

According to security firm Symantec, the proportion of spam emails has fallen to their lowest levels in 12 years. It's the first time since 2003 that the majority of emails are not spam. While the figures are compiled from a variety of sources, the ... main source comes from customers using Symantec security products containing some form of email filtering. That could mean the report is slightly distorted towards those who find spam especially problematic, and thus overstate their level of spam. Overall, Symantec estimates that 49.7 percent of email messages contain spam. This covers all email ... (view more)

The proportion of people getting their news from social media sites continues to rise. That's prompted debate about who decides what news is most important. In 2013, the Pew Research Center reported that 52 percent of Twitter users get their news ... from Twitter, with the figure being 47 percent for Facebook users. In a follow-up survey this year, the figure is now 63 percent for both sites. In both surveys, the question defined news as "information about events and issues beyond just your friends and family." (Source: journalism.org ) Between the increasing proportions and the ... (view more)

Amazon will have to go to court to defend claims that the search tool on its site misleads customers about the products it stocks. Watchmaker Multi Time Machines (MTM) wants Amazon to make it clearer that it doesn't sell its watches. MTM specializes ... in selling expensive watches which are particularly sturdy and water resistant. They are designed to display the time in a way that's easy to read with very little light used; however, some models also have an option to switch on an extremely bright light. Although sold to the public, many of the watches are designed for and used by the ... (view more)

British news agency BBC has published a list of its articles which are no longer linked to through Google, due to a controversial European law. The move means that the people who requested the pages be removed may have actually made things worse. ... The situation involves the " right to be forgotten ", a policy introduced last year by the European Court of Justice . It rules on those laws that apply across the 26 countries that are part of the European Union. The policy applies in cases where people want pages with embarrassing, outdated or privacy-threatening information about them ... (view more)

Amazon is reportedly exploring the idea of paying members of the public to deliver packages to their neighbors. It appears to be a bare bones idea that may not lead to anything. According to sources quoted by the Wall Street Journal, the project is ... codenamed On My Way. The basic idea is for Amazon to pay retail stores to act as a delivery hub for their neighborhood, working either on a flat rate for a certain time period, or a per-delivery fee. (Source: wsj.com ) The stores would then hold the parcel until a local citizen using a dedicated app saw there was a parcel available in their area ... (view more)

President Obama has signed a law that will limit the government's power to collect data from the public's online and telephone activities. The USA Freedom Act should make it harder for officials to simply collect data in bulk. The Act replaces the ... measures in the 2001 Patriot Act , which extended the government's surveillance powers as a response to the September 11 attacks . That led to the National Security Agency launching a program by which it effectively collected as much data as possible and held on to it so that it could then look back for details on particular individuals ... (view more)