When many Facebook users logged on to their accounts on Friday afternoon, they discovered the social network had declared them to be deceased.

While Friday’s wave of Facebook fatalities was clearly a bug or a hoax of some sort, the social network does offer a function that allows people to turn the profile pages of loved ones into a “Memorial.”

Russia wouldn't be the only country to block a US social media company, China has notoriously banned Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus. Russia and China have some of the world's largest populations and those users are important to social networking companies. LinkedIn, which was bought by Microsoft for $26.2 billion in June, said this decision could hurt its Russian users.

This legal debacle started in October when Russian telecom regulator Roskomnadzor sued LinkedIn. Roskomnadzor said that under a September 2015 law on personal data, LinkedIn could only store citizens' data on servers located in Russia.

Last week, an investigative report by journalists at the Hamburg-based German television broadcaster, Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR), revealed that Web of Trust Services (WoT) had been harvesting netizens' web browsing histories through its browser add-on and then selling them to third parties.

Although surveillance may be a feature of WoT's add-on, the risk it poses to users' security may be greater. An analysis of its code posted to GitHub by Rob Wu revealed that the add-on was able to execute arbitrary code on any page, including privileged browser pages, although such a functionality had not been abused at the time of Wu's analysis.

This week, another Mirai botnet, known as Botnet 14, began targeting a small, little-known African country, sending it almost entirely offline each time.

The attacks were targeting Liberia, a small west African country with basic and spotty internet coverage, which has a single fiber internet cable off its shores providing internet to the country.

The "firstcarquote" service was launched by Admiral on Wednesday and is intended to offer new drivers the ability to save money on their insurance by downloading an app and allowing the company to review their social media posts.

"Protecting the privacy of the people on Facebook is of utmost importance to us," said a spokesperson with a straight face. "We have clear guidelines that prevent information being obtained from Facebook from being used to make decisions about eligibility."

Facebook's concern over its users' privacy will come as a surprise to many, given the web giant's long history of playing around with privacy settings, not to mention the fact that its entire business model is based on getting people to share as much information about themselves as possible so that their details can be used to offer targeted advertising to third parties.

He found a ‘widespread movement’ to reduce the contrast between the words and the background, with tech giants Apple, Google and Twitter all altering their typography.

The rise in LCD technology and high definition screens has also allowed designers to use increasingly thinner fonts, which, while working on desktops, can be virtually impossible to read on smartphones or tablets.

Compromised machines, following orders from as-yet unknown masterminds, threw massive amounts of junk traffic at servers operated by US-based Dyn, which provides DNS services for websites large and small.

Particularly China-based XiongMai Technologies, which produces vulnerable software and hardware used in easily hijacked IP cameras, digital video recorders and network-attached video recorders. These crappy devices were at the core of today's attacks, according to Flashpoint.

The emotional roller coaster that is Twitter’s future seems to have hit a new low today as Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff tells the Financial Times his company has “walked away” from making a bid to buy it.

That’s going to put even more pressure on Twitter to figure out a way to restart user growth, which has ranged from “stalled” to “slow” over the past year. Twitter’s revenue has also been growing slowly, and it’s unclear if its new embrace of live video — like streaming NFL games and the presidential debates — has been helping.

The news agency says that the software scanned for a string of characters within all incoming emails, but adds that it was unable to determine what information was handed over or if other internet companies had received a similar demand.

The whistleblower Edward Snowden, who previously revealed details about the US's cyber-spying efforts, has tweeted in response to the unverified allegations: "Use @Yahoo? They secretly scanned everything you ever wrote... close your account today."

Based on the languages the Tweets anguishing over the Netflix blackout were written in, it appeared the service was down across much of the globe, including South America, France, Italy, Portugal and Germany.

Others were able to get to the main Netflix entry page, but when they attempted to click on a show to watch, the message "Whoops, something went wrong..." came up, followed by "There was an unexpected error. Please reload the page and try again."