The proposed law would mandate that Google has commercial agreements with every news organisation - or enter forced arbitration, something Google says is "unworkable".

It's possible that Google could redirect Australian Google users to the US (or another) country's version of Google. That would likely strip out localised search results, but keep the service accessible.

But it may also be that Google would block Australian users based on their geographic location as determined by an IP (internet) address.

There has been a growing movement away from social media giants such as Facebook and Twitter recently.

Users are getting fed up with relentless privacy violations, surveillance capitalism, political bias, targeting, and newsfeed manipulation by these companies.

Users are becoming disillusioned by the data gathering from platforms such as Facebook. MeWe gives users total control over their data along with privacy no ads, no targeting, no facial recognition, no data mining, and no newsfeed manipulation.

The achievement comes after a period of sustained growth the company has been seeing for the past two years, and especially since August 2020, when the search engine began seeing more than 2 billion search queries a month on a regular basis. The numbers are small in comparison to Google's 5 billion daily search queries but it's a positive sign that users are looking for alternatives.

The Australian government has urged Google to focus on paying for Australian content instead of blocking it.

After media reports said Australian news websites were not showing up in searches, Google confirmed it was blocking the sites for a small number of users.

“The digital giants should focus on paying for original content, not blocking it. That’s my message to those digital giants,” said Australian Treasurer Josh Frydenberg.

On Thursday, however, the National Security Agency said in some cases Fortune 500 companies, large government agencies, and other enterprise users are better off not using it. The reason: the same encryption that thwarts malicious third parties can hamper engineers’ efforts to secure their networks.

“DoH provides the benefit of encrypted DNS transactions, but it can also bring issues to enterprises, including a false sense of security, bypassing of DNS monitoring and protections, concerns for internal network configurations and information, and exploitation of upstream DNS traffic,” NSA officials wrote in published recommendations.

The tweets seem to have been prompted by a recent change to Facebook’s privacy policy. As reported by The Hacker News, the new updates allow more sharing of data between Facebook and its partner company WhatsApp, including the sharing of phone numbers, interactions on the platform, information about mobile devices used to access the service, and IP addresses. If WhatsApp users do not agree to the data sharing, their accounts are disabled.

Signal, an encrypted messaging app that competes with other services including Facebook’s WhatsApp, said Thursday that verification codes used to create new accounts were delayed because of a flood of new users.

The surge came just hours after Elon Musk endorsed the service and amid reported changes to WhatsApp’s terms of service.

WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned messenger that claims to have privacy coded into its DNA, is giving its 2 billion plus users an ultimatum: agree to share their personal data with the social network or delete their accounts.

In 2016, WhatsApp gave users a one-time ability to opt out of having account data turned over to Facebook. Now, an updated privacy policy is changing that. Come next month, users will no longer have that choice.

Game developer Zynga announced in September it would shut down the game on Dec. 31, a victim of Adobe's decision to stop distributing and updating its Flash Player for web browsers, which in turn led Facebook to announce an end to support for Flash games on its platform.

The manufacturer had tricked Amazon into displaying thousands of reviews for an unrelated product below its drone, helping the drone to unfairly rise to the top of Amazon's search results.

This kind of review bait-and-switch is not a new problem. More than two years ago, Buzzfeed's Nicole Nguyen wrote about other online sellers using the same scam. For example, she found that many of the five-star reviews for a highly-rated iPhone charging dock were actually reviews for a culinary torch.