Mirai, the botnet that threatened the Internet as we knew it last year with record-setting denial-of-service attacks, is facing an existential threat of its own: A competing botnet known as Hajime has infected at least 10,000 home routers, network-connected cameras, and other so-called Internet of Things devices.

The bottom line is that thanks to aggressive, poorly designed or downright hostile ads, many consumers quite justly now feel that ad blockers are an essential part of their privacy and security.

Princeton and Stanford researchers say they've developed a new method of blocking advertisements that detects ads the same way human beings do -- by simply looking at things like container sizes, graphical layout, and words like "Sponsored" (usually mandated by regulations or voluntary, cross-industry commitments).

The technology was developed in response to Facebook's decision to integrate ads that look like regular posts in the user's news feed, something systems like AdBlock haven't been able to detect.

He's convinced Apple, Google and Facebook will be bigger in 2075, the theme of next weekend's Silicon Valley Comic Con (SVCC), “The Future of Humanity: Where Will We Be in 2075?”

"Apple will be around a long time, like IBM (which was founded in 1911)," Wozniak said in an interview on Friday. "Look at Apple's cash ($246.1 billion, as of the end of its last fiscal quarter). It can invest in anything. It would be ridiculous to not expect them to be around (in 2075). The same goes for Google and Facebook."

Virgin Media has admitted it was responsible for a fault that that prevented some of its broadband customers from being able to access Facebook.

"This was due to an interconnect router going down on Virgin Media's network meaning that some of our DNS [domain name system] requests were not able to contact Facebook servers.

Internet monitoring allows GM to order parts when it detects they’re wearing out instead of having to store them at the factory. That reduces inventory and saves money, Franks said.

Hooking robots to the internet for preventive maintenance is just the start of a spurt of new robotics technology, Franks said. GM is using robots that can work safely alongside humans in the factory that produces the Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid, he said.

The €100bn project will focus on bandwidth, security and response times, minister for transport and digital infrastructure Alexander Dobrindt said.

The network will use "the most advanced technologies, such as fibre and the future 5G mobile communications standard", he said.

The number of Dark web services has gone down significantly following the Freedom Hosting II hack that took place at the start of February, and is only around 4,400 services, according to a recently published OnionScan report.

Overall, despite its allure, the Dark Web has shrunk tremendously during the past year and is riddled with misconfigured servers. It is no surprise that Sigaint, a very popular email provider operating from the Dark Web, went down ten days after the Freedom Hosting II hack, and has yet to return.

The database contains more than 1.37 billion email addresses, and for some records there are additional details such as names, real-world addresses, and IP addresses. It's a situation that's described as "a tangible threat to online privacy and security."

It remains to be seen quite what impact this will have on River City Media's operations, and whether there will be an immediate reduction in the amount of spam flying to inboxes around the world.

The union representing the employees, University Professional and Technical Employees CWA Local 9119, says it's the first time a public university has offshored American IT jobs.

Audrey Hatten-Milholin, who earned $127,000 at her job, says other replacements were around for two weeks. "What was shocking is that the system is so complex there’s no way you can learn it in two weeks," she said.

The world's largest and busiest cloud infrastructure provider, Amazon Web Services, was hit by a widespread service interruption Feb. 28 at its northern Virginia data center that took down much of the company's S3 storage and a long list of services with it for several hours.

"Right now they need to wait it out, which is frustrating," Maislos said. "In the future they'd need to replicate the data to multiple regions and multiple cloud providers and it greatly impacts costs and operating complexity.

"Everyone affected should re-evaluate how current their backups are, where they are stored, and how to switch over to alternative locations automatically when an S3 issue is detected in the future."