In a report this month by Qrator Labs, researchers dug into what they are calling national internet reliability: the ability of a country's internet to handle a loss of connectivity from one or more ISPs.

The report notes that in 86 per cent of countries, IPv4 connectivity is significantly more reliable than with IPv6. IPv6 is, of course, supposed to be the internet's next-generation technology. There is nothing wrong with the protocol: it's triggering disputes between connectivity providers.

IRC (Internet Relay Chat) was born at the Department of Information Processing Science of the University of Oulu 30 years ago. Jarkko Oikarinen developed the internet chat system back in 1988 in addition to his summer job. Today, people are still using IRC.

Jauhiainen likes to use IRC because it’s a versatile media of communication and can be customized. “IRC is not dependent on any device. You can use it on your phone, computer or even video game console, if you like. Of course also tradition has it’s effect,” he says.

The tech firm says it has been developed to help handle reports of false news on its platform, but it has declined to reveal how the score is calculated or the limits of its use.

"This is yet another example of Facebook using people's data in ways they would not expect their data to be used, which further undermines people's trust in Facebook," said Ailidh Callander, a solicitor at Privacy International.

Google promotes the Gmail feature as a way to protect sensitive information by allowing users to set an expiration date for individual messages or revoke access to messages already sent.

The feature also prevents recipients from forwarding, copying, printing or downloading its content and allows users to require recipients to enter a one-time code sent via SMS to view the email.

Its main criticism is that Gmail isn't an end-to-end encrypted service, so Google could read your email.

"Based on a combination of publicly available research and Plaintiffs' own analysis, among 18-34 years-olds in Chicago, for example, Facebook asserted its Potential Reach was approximately 4 times (400 per cent) higher than the number of real 18-34 year-olds with Facebook accounts in Chicago," the complaint states.

What's more, the court filing contends that former Facebook employees, described as confidential witnesses, have acknowledged that Facebook is fine with inflated numbers.

A second former Facebook employee is said to have observed that "Facebook does not care about the accuracy of information related to the number of users so long as advertising revenue is not negatively affected."

The Appellate Court pointed out that ICANN could hardly claim it would suffer "irreparable harm" if it were not granted an injunction forcing EPAG to gather the additional data. If necessary, ICANN could collect that information at a later date, without any serious consequences. ICANN's case was further undermined by the fact that gathering administrative and technical contacts in the past had always been on a voluntary basis, so not doing so could hardly cause great damage.

Maybe it's time for ICANN to comply with the EU law like everybody else, and for it to stop wasting money in its forlorn attempts to get EU courts to grant it a special exemption from the GDPR's rules.

Users would have to sign up for an account—scanning their driver’s license and taking a photo—in order to download the browser, which would sit “on top” of the Internet, said Chris Ciabarra, Authenticated Reality’s co-founder, in an interview last year. “Everybody knows who everybody is,” he said.

In addition to the personal visits, Ciabarra said, the company received “hundreds” of harassing e-mails, all of which he said was reported to law enforcement. Ciabarra said the company returned nearly all of the $1 million it had raised to its investors. “I just realized we have to turn it off,” he said.

The move will allow its owner, Facebook, to make money from WhatsApp, which has lacked a revenue stream since dropping subscription fees.

The messages are set to cost between 0.5 cents to 9 cents (0.3p to 7p) a message depending on the country the user is based in. They can be automated or provided by human customer assistants.

Facebook paid $19bn to buy WhatsApp in 2014 and there has long been speculation about how Facebook intended to make money from it.

Eight states announced Monday that they plan to ask a federal judge in Seattle to immediately issue a temporary restraining order against Defense Distributed, a Texas-based group that has already begun making 3D-printer gun files available on its DEFCAD website after a recent legal settlement with the US State Department.

Within months of publication, Defense Distributed received a letter from the United States Department of State's Office of Defense Trade Controls Compliance stating that 10 files, including the designs of the Liberator, were in violation of the ITAR. This is despite the fact that these files had already been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times and continue to circulate online.

Any site that doesn't load with green padlock or a "secure" message in the browser's address bar will be flagged -- and shamed -- as insecure.

That green padlock means any data sent from your computer or device to that website and vice versa is transmitted securely and can't be intercepted by an attacker.

Just overnight, several HTTP-only sites made the switch to HTTPS to escape being named and shamed by the browser.