Five-star ratings from three years ago probably shouldn’t count as much as three-star ratings left just last week. But it also represents an additional layer of algorithmic secrecy, which can be frustrating for third-party merchants on the ecommerce site. Amazon's seller forums are full of merchants struggling to understand the black box of how their products are ranked and rated.

Star ratings aren’t only influenced by Amazon’s algorithms. They’re also sometimes manipulated by sellers who pay for glowing reviews in order to raise the rank of their products in Amazon’s search results.

CrashPlan has banned a bunch of file formats from its online backup system aimed at small businesses.

Users on the relevant subreddit claimed CrashPlan had deleted files in the those formats with no warning.

"This is the company that has on its home page 'Automatic Data Loss Protection for Your Small Business' and 'Never worry about losing business-critical data again'. They deleted my business critical data. On purpose."

The Jeff Bezos-run Amazon will likely get control of its internet namesake this summer. It intends to run it as a brand business with a small number of domain names that reflect its core businesses.

There are only a handful of companies that have launched on their dot-brands, and a growing number – now over 50 – have simply abandoned the names, formally telling ICANN they are no longer interested.

The Brazilian government also strongly opposed the US government's role in overseeing ICANN and ultimately succeeded in getting the US Department of Commerce to step away from its role and provide the organization with real autonomy.

More than 20,000 Linksys wireless routers are regularly leaking full historic records of every device that has ever connected to them, including devices' unique identifiers, names, and the operating systems they use. The data can be used by snoops or hackers in either targeted or opportunistic attacks.

By combining a historical record of devices that have connected to a public IP addresses, marketers, abusive spouses, and investigators can track the movements of people they want to track.

BinaryAST is a binary representation of the original JavaScript code and associated data structures to speed-up the parsing of the code at the page load time compared to the JavaScript source itself.

Facebook has sued a data analytics company that operated apps on the Facebook platform for nearly a decade, saying the company misused Facebook data to sell advertising and marketing services.

Facebook's lawsuit seeks a court order requiring the company to delete Facebook user data and suggests that Rankwave may have sold the user data to other unidentified entities. Rankwave refused to tell Facebook which entities it sold data to and refused to "[p]rovide a full accounting of Facebook user data in its possession," Facebook says.

"The FTC must set a resounding precedent that is heard by Facebook and any other tech company that disregards the law in a rapacious quest for growth," write Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.). "The commission should pursue deterrent monetary penalties and impose forceful accountability measures on Facebook."

The Republican chairman reportedly favors a fine of around $5 billion and has the backing of the other two Republican commissioners. In its last quarterly earnings statement, Facebook said it was budgeting $3 billion to $5 billion for an expected FTC fine.

But the two Democrats consider this inadequate. They not only want a larger fine, they're also seeking to hold Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally responsible for the company's missteps.

In their letter, Blumenthal and Hawley firmly side with the Democrats in this intra-agency fight. The pair describes a $5 billion fine as a "bargain" for a company with $15 billion in quarterly revenues, and they also argue that "fines alone are insufficient."

Every single web extension, theme, search engine plugin, and language pack had been nuked from netizens' Firefox installations, stripping any data and settings associated with them as they were removed.

For those using the Netflix add-on, there would be no video. For those using HTTPS Everywhere, there would be no enforced privacy. And the situation was similar for users of password management add-ons, content blocking add-ons, and the like.

Hundreds of developers have had had Git source code repositories wiped and replaced with a ransom demand.

The hacker claims all source code has been downloaded and stored on one of their servers, and gives the victim ten days to pay the ransom; otherwise, they'll make the code public.

However, all evidence suggests that the hacker has scanned the entire internet for Git config files, extracted credentials, and then used these logins to access and ransom accounts at Git hosting services.

Facebook is giving social scientists unprecedented access to its data so that they can investigate how social media platforms influence elections and alter democracies.

The scientists will have access to reams of Facebook data such as the URLs that users have shared and demographic information including gender and approximate age.