Two DMCA subpoenas obtained against Cloudflare and Namecheap require the companies to hand over all information they hold on more than 40 torrent sites, streaming portals and YouTube-ripping services. Also included in the mix are several file-hosting platforms.

User growth in the United States in Canada — the company’s most lucrative ad market — has declined, Facebook reported as part of its third-quarter earnings.

“In the fourth quarter of 2020, we expect this trend to continue and that the number of DAUs and MAUs in the US & Canada will be flat or slightly down compared to the third quarter of 2020.”

Hugo Xu, developer of the Nano Adblocker and Nano Defender extensions, said 17 days ago that he no longer had the time to maintain the project and had sold the rights to the versions available in Google’s Chrome Web Store.

The most obvious change end users noticed was that infected browsers were automatically issuing likes for large numbers of Instagram posts, with no input from users.

Evidence collected to date shows that the extensions are covertly uploading user data and gaining unauthorized access to at least one website, in violation of Google terms of service and quite possibly applicable laws.

A hacking group that has yet to identify itself found and stole more than 3 TB of private video from around the world — mainly collected from Singapore — and shared it on porn sites, according to reports from local media like The New Paper.

Case in point: Amazon-owned Ring, which faced a slew of security scandals in the last year or so. Hackers have harassed people using Ring cameras; users’ passwords have leaked on the dark web; and the system’s Android app was found to have been letting Facebook and other third parties track users.

After the launch of iOS 14 in September, users discovered a work-around that let them completely redesign their homescreens, changing app icons to whatever they liked.

It inspired Traf to share a screenshot of his own minimalistic monochrome design on Twitter.

It was an instant hit, with users describing it as "clean", "slick" and a "dream aesthetic". For many, it was a first taste of smartphone customisation.

Since there was "no notion of what an iOS icon set should be priced at", he decided to charge $28 (£22) for the set.

While Google remains the most popular search engine, DuckDuckGo has gained a great deal of traction in recent months as more and more users have begun to value their privacy on the internet.

Even though DuckDuckGo is growing rapidly, it still controls less than 2 percent of all search volume in the United States. However, DuckDuckGo's growth trend has continued throughout the year, mainly due to Google and other companies' privacy scandal.

Unlike Google, DuckDuckGo is more privacy-oriented, and they don't track what users are searching for.

One month after the program formally launched, some TikTok influencers say they’re disappointed with how the Creator Fund has panned out. Creators have complained on social media that they’re earning only a few dollars a day, even if their videos rack up tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of views. TikTok has not explained exactly how it calculates payouts.

Lukiman says that any decrease in views creators have noticed since joining the Creator Fund is purely coincidental and not a result of their participation. TikTok also denied that creators in the program are held to a different standard of content moderation, another theory that was shared with WIRED. One influencer, who has roughly 100,000 followers, says that TikTok recently took down a video of an innocuous painting for unclear reasons; the company does not currently tell users which guidelines they violated.

Nominet is fully aware that the .uk names it is pushing were never ordered by people in the first place. When dot-uk was opened up several years ago so that you could register things like mycompany.uk as well as mycompany.co.uk, domain registrars had a brainwave: if a customer owned, say, blablahblah.co.uk, blablahblah.uk would be registered automatically for them. Now those freebie domains are expiring, and no one's renewing them – because people didn't want them in the first place, hence this latest pressure campaign.

Email service provider Sendgrid is grappling with an unusually large number of customer accounts whose passwords have been cracked, sold to spammers, and abused for sending phishing and email malware attacks.

To make matters worse, links included in emails sent through Sendgrid are obfuscated (mainly for tracking deliverability and other metrics), so it is not immediately clear to recipients where on the Internet they will be taken when they click.

In an open letter, the firm warned that its YouTube and Search features could be "dramatically worse" if new rules were brought in.

Over the past few months, the Australian government has been preparing legislation which will make Google and Facebook pay local publishers for their content.