Internet

Facebook is to ditch some tools which tracked a user's location. It seems to be more about the tools being little used than a sudden interest in boosting privacy. The tools all involved tracking a user's location in real time and using the ... information to provide some sort of service. Perhaps the best known was "Nearby Friends" which lived up to its name, telling users if anyone they knew on Facebook (or at least anyone who also had the feature switched on) was in the area, allowing for semi-spontaneous meet-ups. The tools also included localized weather alerts. In both cases, many users ... (view more)

Twenty US Internet providers have agreed to offer low-cost Internet plans to people on lower incomes. The deal combines with government subsidies to mean many people will get free broadband. Following the recent infrastructure bill passing, the ... federal government now offers a subsidy of $30 taken off broadband bills for around 48 million households. The Affordable Connectivity Program covers low income households, plus those with people eligible for public programs such as Medicaid and veterans pensions. More than 11.5 million people have already claimed the subsidy. (Source: yahoo.com ) The ... (view more)

Google is making it easier for people to remove web pages with their personal contact details from search results. It won't remove them from web pages, but may make it less likely people will come across them. The policy makes information less ... visible in two ways. Firstly, it stops it appearing on the search results page through the extracts from the relevant pages. Secondly, it may make it less likely the page that hosts the content will appear in a search result. While Google is legally required to remove some personal information from search results under European privacy laws, it goes a ... (view more)

Microsoft Edge is getting what looks suspiciously like a virtual private network (VPN). It comes with a catch and requires some serious trust in Microsoft. The "Secure Network" feature is now mentioned in a support document and has also shown up in ... Edge for some users who've signed up for early access to in-development features. It appears to be a variant of a VPN, which involves routing internet connection through a VPN provider. The data traveling back and forth between the provider and the user is encrypted in a setup likened to a "tunnel" that stops it being accessible ... (view more)

For the first time, more than five billion people use the Internet. That means the proportion of the world who are online will soon reach two-thirds. The figures come from Data Reportal, which gathers together information from multiple sources to ... produce a global estimate. (Source: datareportal.com ) Its headline figures include five billion people using the Internet, meaning 63 percent of the world's population. It also says 5.32 billion people have a mobile phone (67 percent of the population), with around 80 percent of those handsets being smartphones. (Source: bdaily.co.uk ) The report ... (view more)

Are you being blackmailed online? Are blackmailers threatening to expose you through Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn? If so, you've come to the right place. You may Contact me here using the contact form now, or keep reading to learn how I can ... help. IMPORTANT: If you paid the scammers anything at all, they will simply turn around and ask for more . This is how this scam goes 100% of the time. Don't be fooled into thinking a one-time payment will be the end - IT NEVER IS! -- In this article, you will find answers to the following questions: Do blackmailers follow through? Do blackmailers go ... (view more)

Police in Germany have shut down a major underground website used mainly for illegal drug deals and money laundering. But the people behind Hydra remain at large. The shutdown was an international effort which included the assistance of the US ... Treasury. Despite its physical location in Germany, most of the users and operators of Hydra appear to have been from Russia and other former Soviet Union nations. Hydra has been described as a darknet marketplace. Darknet usually means the site is only accessible through special software that makes it much harder to track who has visited it. Darknet ... (view more)

Major browser developers are preparing to mitigate a quirky bug that could make some websites unavailable. It's a low key version of the Y2K/Millennium Bug problems of 1999. By something of a coincidence, Google's Chrome, Mozilla's Firefox and ... Microsoft's Edge browsers will all be hitting version 100 in the coming months. While it's good to know they've continued to improve the browsers and fix bugs, that milestone brings its own problems. Many websites include code to check the version number of the visitor's browser. They will then block the site from opening on older browsers which won't ... (view more)

Californian laws requiring "net neutrality" have been found lawful by an appeals court. As so often on the topic, the legal argument is as much about who has the power to make laws as it is the legal measures themselves. While precise definitions ... vary between people with different viewpoints, the most common definition of net neutrality is the principle that all Internet traffic (except that carrying illegal material) should be treated equally. One of the key issues for that principle in practice is whether Internet carriers can give priority to connections to specific sites or intentionally ... (view more)

Facebook and Google have been fined a total of $237 million for the way they ask users for permission to issue cookies. French regulators said the companies breached rules that say refusing cookies must be as simple as accepting them. The fines came ... from the CNIL, France's primary data privacy regulator. It found the companies had breached France's Data Protection Act. In both cases, the companies breached rules on cookies that took effect last year with a deadline of March 31st for compliance. (Source: cnil.fr ) Unfair Choice Facebook was fined approximately $68 million USD while Google was ... (view more)