Leila is a sex worker. She goes to great lengths to keep separate identities for ordinary life and for sex work, to avoid stigma, arrest, professional blowback, or clients who might be stalkers (or worse).

Despite the fact that she’d only given Facebook information from her vanilla identity, the company had somehow discerned her real-world connection to these people—and, even more horrifyingly, her account was potentially being presented to them as a friend suggestion too, outing her regular identity to them.

It’s not a question that Facebook is willing to answer. The company is not forthcoming about how “People You May Know,” known internally as PYMK, makes its recommendations.

Mozilla has decided to experiment on its German users by opting-in around one per cent of them to a search recommendations service that slurps their browsing histories.

Mozilla's German language blog styles the idea as an “experiment” and explains that “the surfing activities of those users who receive a Firefox version with Cliqz are sent to the Cliqz servers; including the URLs of the pages they visit.”

A survey of almost 5,000 students, mainly aged between 14 and 16, found a growing backlash against social media - with even more pupils (71%) admitting to taking digital detoxes to escape it.

Chris King, chair of the HMC and Headmaster of Leicester Grammar School, said the findings were among "the first indications of a rebellion against social media".

Linode attributed the outage to both "hardware and software failures" happening at the same time to its two internet-facing routers.

The "undocumented forwarding table forwarding bug" it had referred to earlier also affected its redundant routers.

The company announced Monday that every customer—including those who only use its free services—will receive a new feature called Unmetered Mitigation, which protects against every DDoS attack, regardless of its size.

Prince agreed that Unmetered Mitigation has the power to render DDoS an activist tool of the past. It "will make DDoSing people not an effective protest mechanism," he told me.

"These customers live outside of areas where Verizon operates our own network," Verizon said. "Many of the affected consumer lines use a substantial amount of data while roaming on other providers’ networks and the roaming costs generated by these lines exceed what these consumers pay us each month."

One customer, who contacted Ars this week about being disconnected, said her family never used more than 50GB of data across four lines despite having an "unlimited" data plan.

"The only good news? Verizon wants to disconnect customers so badly, they are willing to forgive the remaining owed balances for any devices financed through Verizon."

The biggest advertising organizations say Apple will “sabotage” the current economic model of the internet with plans to integrate cookie-blocking technology into the new version of Safari.

The groups say the feature also hurts user experience by making advertising more “generic and less timely and useful.”

The product for sale isn't a good or a service. It's a little blue check designated for public figures, celebrities, and brands on Instagram. It grants users a prime spot in search as well as access to special features.

James, whose day job is running an internet startup, has sold five badges since he started earlier this year with the help of his friend who works at Instagram. His contact at Instagram charges $1,200 per blue checkmark, and then James will tack on another fee based on the user's apparent interest or other needs.

Code42, the company behind the popular Crashplan online backup service has announced that will be discontinuing all of its personal and family backup plan offerings to focus on business backup service plans only.

Crashplan personal and family services were one of the best (and most affordable) options available for online backup, providing features that other rivals do not, including backup options for cloud, external local drives, and to other friends/family member's drives (trusted offsite).

A single threat actor has aggressively bombarded Android users with more than 4,000 spyware apps since February, and in at least three cases the actor snuck the apps into Google's official Play Market, security researchers said Thursday.

The report from Lookout is the latest reminder about the risks of installing apps from third-party markets, but they also make clear that limiting sources to Google Play are no guarantee an app is safe.