Google is under fire this week for rolling out a new design for its desktop web search results in which advertisements and normal links look almost the same.

At a glance, the ads do not look distinct from the organic results, causing many observers, such as The Graun's technology editor Alex Hern, to note “there is now no visual distinction between ads and results … it’s hard to escape the conclusion that it is supposed to be difficult to spot at a glance where the adverts end.”

Google has announced plans to limit the ability of other companies to track people across the internet and collect information about them, a significant change that has widespread ramifications for online privacy as well as the digital economy.

“We are looking to build a more trustworthy and sustainable web together, and to do that we need your continued engagement,” Schuh wrote.

In a tweet, the celebrity accused the firm's chief Mark Zuckerberg of having valued profit over truthfulness.

By contrast, Twitter opted to ban all political adverts from its platform in October. The company's chief executive Jack Dorsey tweeted that he believed "political message reach should be earned, not bought".

Facebook said it would remove videos if it realised they had been edited in ways that weren't obvious to an average person, or if they misled a viewer into thinking that a person in a video said words they did not actually say.

"There are people who engage in media manipulation in order to mislead," wrote Monika Bickert, vice president of global policy management at Facebook in the blog.

At the start of this year, as Zimbabwe cut off internet access across the country following anti-government protests, the internet pressure group Keep It On warned that such "shutdowns must never be allowed to become the new normal."

An ongoing internet blackout in Indian-controlled Kashmir is now the longest ever in a democracy -- at more than 135 days -- according to Access Now, an advocacy group that tracks internet freedom. Only the autocratic governments of China and junta-era Myanmar have cut off access for longer.

If you want to sign up for Facebook Messenger, you can no longer escape Big Blue — you’ll need an account from now on. The company has stopped allowing new users to join using a phone number.

Facebook is working on unifying its suite of messaging apps including Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp, with the idea being that users will be able to message their friends no matter which app they’re using.

Comparitech partnered with security researcher Bob Diachenko to uncover the Elasticsearch cluster. Diachenko believes the trove of data is most likely the result of an illegal scraping operation or Facebook API abuse by criminals in Vietnam, according to the evidence.

Facebook’s API is used by app developers to add social context to their applications by accessing users’ profiles, friends list, groups, photos, and event data.

Like WhatsApp, Signal has end-to-end encryption baked in, preventing a foreign power or individual from accessing sensitive conversations. In addition, it also includes settings, which, when enabled, self-destructs messages after a period of time.

Unfortunately, Signal doesn't allow group moderators to block individuals from taking screenshots, which would frustrate the process of leaking a conversation to the press.

Bill Wagner, president and CEO at LogMeIn said in a statement that the price reflects the high value of the company and will give stockholders a meaningful return. As you would expect, he also was optimistic that the partnership with Francisco and Evergreen will help the company going forward.

It has a variety of other products, including remote access tools. It raised $30 million in venture funding, according to Crunchbase data, before it went public in 2009.

An ad-hoc group scrambling to archive as much content as possible from Yahoo Groups ahead of the site's final demise next week is running into trouble as more than a hundred volunteer archivists say Yahoo's parent company, Verizon, has banned their accounts.

The Verizon representative said the 128 volunteers from Archiveteam.org, who joined groups with the intent of archiving them, were banned for violating the Verizon Media terms of service and would not be able to have their accounts reinstated.

The Organization for Transformative Works—the nonprofit best known for running the decade-old, Hugo-winning fanfiction site Archive of Our Own—has joined the chorus calling on Verizon to postpone the deletion date by six months, until May 14, 2020, in order to allow volunteers to archive more material.