On January 23 this year, ISC received a report of a breakdown with .net domains. When it investigated, it discovered crucial A and AAAA records, which glue .net domain names to their IPv4 and IPv6 network addresses, were missing.

ISC quickly figured out – within five minutes, according to its timeline – that the issue lay with internet nodes it operates in partnership with Cloudflare, and escalated the issue to the web infrastructure business.

As one veteran internet engineer, Bill Woodcock, noted on Twitter: “What happens when critical functions of the public Internet are co-opted for private benefit? Transparency and accountability are lost, infrastructural spending cut, things break.”

Firefox will start switching browser users to Cloudflare's encrypted-DNS service today and roll out the change across the United States in the coming weeks.

DNS over HTTPS helps keep eavesdroppers from seeing what DNS lookups your browser is making, potentially making it more difficult for Internet service providers or other third parties to monitor what websites you visit.

Owners of a device designed to release food for pets say their animals were left hungry during a week-long system failure.

Nearly 60% of the 554 customer reviews left on the US site have given the device a rating of either one or two stars.

"Robots and automated systems have hiccups along the way, it's something we need to get used to."

Ever since PayPal moved its bug bounty program to HackerOne, its entire system for supporting bug bounty hunters who identify and report bugs has become more opaque, mired in illogical delays, vague responses, and suspicious behavior.

When we pushed the HackerOne staff for clarification on these issues, they removed points from our Reputation scores, relegating our profiles to a suspicious, spammy level. This happened even when the issue was eventually patched, although we received no bounty, credit, or even a thanks.

Google is indexing invite links to WhatsApp group chats whose administrators may want to be private. This means with a simple search, random people can discover and join a wide range of WhatsApp group chats.

App reverse-engineer Jane Wong added in a tweet that Google has around 470,000 results for a simple search of "chat.whatsapp.com," part of the URL that makes up invites to WhatsApp groups.

Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg has called for more regulation of harmful online content, saying it was not for companies like his to decide what counts as legitimate free speech.

The Facebook founder urged governments to come up with a new regulatory system for social media, suggesting it should be a mix of existing rules for telecoms and media companies.

The extensions were part of a long-running malvertising and ad-fraud scheme that was discovered by independent researcher Jamila Kaya. She and researchers from Cisco-owned Duo Security eventually identified 71 Chrome Web Store extensions that had more than 1.7 million installations.

“This was done in order to connect the browser clients to a command and control architecture, exfiltrate private browsing data without the users’ knowledge, expose the user to risk of exploit through advertising streams, and attempt to evade the Chrome Web Store’s fraud detection mechanisms.”

The discovery of more malicious and fraudulent browser extensions is a reminder that people should be cautious when installing these tools and use them only when they provide true benefit.

Android and iPhone devices which only support outdated operating systems will no longer be able to run the Facebook-owned app.

It is the latest in a series of moves after the messaging app withdrew support for numerous devices in 2016, and then from all Windows phones on 31 December, 2019.

The documents, from a subsidiary of the antivirus giant Avast called Jumpshot, shine new light on the secretive sale and supply chain of peoples' internet browsing histories. They show that the Avast antivirus program installed on a person's computer collects data, and that Jumpshot repackages it into various different products that are then sold to many of the largest companies in the world.

Until recently, Avast was collecting the browsing data of its customers who had installed the company's browser plugin, which is designed to warn users of suspicious websites. Security researcher and AdBlock Plus creator Wladimir Palant published a blog post in October showing that Avast harvest user data with that plugin.

In a blog post on Data Privacy Day, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that its "Off-Facebook Activity" tool -- which lets you manage how Facebook tracks you across the internet -- will finally be launched globally. Zuckerberg had promised this feature since May 2018, when he called it a "Clear History" button.

Along with deleting your history through the tool, the Off-Facebook Activity feature also allows you to turn off future tracking, making sure that your online history isn't a continuous chore that you have to keep cleaning on Facebook.