From about 4pm US West Coast time on Sunday (2300 UTC), the website has been stuttering and spluttering. Specifically, the site is still up and serving pages – it's just intermittently serving out-of-date files, and ignoring submitted Gists, bug reports, pushes, and posts.

Right now, we're seeing scores of complaints about the site being down on Twitter – including quite a few upset coders in Japan, where at time of writing is late Monday morning. Nice start to the week.

The privacy risks associated with web tracking, however, persist, and now it appears there's yet another mechanism for following people online. Blame researchers from the University of Hamburg in Germany for the latest expansion of the privacy attack surface.

They note that Facebook and Google, due to their behavioral ad businesses, specify longer session resumption ticket lifetimes than most. Facebook's lifetime hint setting of 48 hours is higher than 99.99 per cent of all session ticket hints found. Google's 28 hour value exceeds 97.13 per cent of Alexa's top million websites.

The Internet Engineering Task Force has been considering when to hold the funeral of TLS 1.0, which will be 20 years old in January 2019, as well as a burial for TLS 1.1, since June this year. Its Internet-Draft on the matter is expected to formalize the 'net standards body's “die die die” recommendation later this year. When the draft progresses to standard status, the IETF will no longer fix new protocol vulnerabilities in TLS 1.0 and 1.1.

DE-CIX said it received orders from the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) to allow it to access data at its internet exchange in Frankfurt. The BND has in recent years received a mirror image of the traffic as part of its counter-terrorism and cyber-security efforts.

In Germany, the right to privacy of correspondence, posts and telecommunications is protected by Art. 10 of the constitution. This is restricted by a law that allows federal and state spy agencies to tap such communications, subject to review by a control commission on which lawmakers sit.

Facebook confessed today that buggy code potentially exposed all of its users' accounts to hackers over the past 14 months. It reckons miscreants snooped on least 50 million people's private profiles, and perhaps as much as 90 million.

In effect, any Facebook user account was wide open to being hacked, although the Silicon Valley goliath estimated that "only" 50 million accounts were, in the words of a spokesperson, "directly affected." A further 40 million had their accounts "looked up."

Facebook spotted the hole after it noted a suspicious "spike" in user activity on Tuesday. The attack was "fairly large scale," it admitted, and when it investigated the cause, it discovered hackers were using the site's API to automate the process of grabbing users' profile information

The Better Business Bureau reports that 69 percent of scam victims are under the age of 45. Young adults heading off to college are especially gullible, the group says.

This statistic is incredibly shocking, as many assume internet scams prey on the elderly. However, new technology and evolving scam methods put everyone at risk. BBB says that 78 percent of scam victims hold a college or graduate degree.

GOOGLE has admitted that, even though it has stopped scanning your Gmail accounts for ad-targeting, it still lets third-parties at them.

The news follows an earlier report that shows that third parties are allowed to scan mail for services such as Google Trips, which helps create itineraries for your travel, based on your email content.

A new report from The Wall Street Journal today indicates that Facebook also saw its Messenger platform as a siphon for the sensitive financial data of its users, information it would not otherwise have access to unless a customer interacted with, say, a banking institution over chat.

In some cases, companies like PayPal and Western Union negotiated special contracts that would let them offer many detailed and useful services like money transfers, the WSJ reports. But by and large, big banks in the US have reportedly shied away from working with Facebook due to how aggressively it pushed for access to customer data.

"People have a really hard time understanding URLs," says Adrienne Porter Felt, Chrome's engineering manager. "They’re hard to read, it’s hard to know which part of them is supposed to be trusted, and in general I don’t think URLs are working as a good way to convey site identity. So we want to move toward a place where web identity is understandable by everyone—they know who they’re talking to when they’re using a website and they can reason about whether they can trust them. But this will mean big changes in how and when Chrome displays URLs. We want to challenge how URLs should be displayed and question it as we’re figuring out the right way to convey identity."

The company, the world's largest digital advertiser, is being criticized more and more for its vast data-collection practices, which feed its powerful ad targeting. Misinformation runs rampant on YouTube. Employees are raising ethical concerns about the company's work in developing artificial intelligence for the US military and its reported efforts to create a censored search engine in China.