Melbourne penetration tester Thiebauld Weksteen is warning system administrators that robots.txt files can give attackers valuable information on potential targets by giving them clues about directories their owners are trying to protect.

Admins would be best excluding assets based on general terms and not through absolute references.

The company was been being sued by a slew of record companies, including a $15 billion suit from Universal Music Group.

They must also wipe clean any records of copyrighted material, hand over their online and mobile platforms, and surrender their patents and intellectual property.

Home and small-office routers from manufacturers including Trendnet and D-Link are vulnerable to attacks that allow attackers anywhere in the world to execute malicious code on the devices, according to an advisory issued over the weekend.

ZDI officials went on to recommend the use of a firewall to block outside connections. Other researchers said that turning off a router's universal plug and play may also prevent exploits.

Pandora has revealed that its royalty payments to SoundExchange, the US licensing body which collects performance royalties on behalf of record labels and artists, have just increased by 8%.

An 8% rise in SoundExchange royalties might sound impressive, but in per-stream terms, it’s a micro-increase: up $0.0001 from $0.0013 (ad-funded) and $0.0023 (premium) in 2014.

The search giant has added a feature to Google accounts that allows users to download a copy of their past searches. The feature, which was discovered over the weekend by an unofficial Google blog, exports all of a person's Google searches to Google Drive and then allows them to be downloaded from there. The searches are saved in a ZIP archive with files that are categorized by year and quarter.

By bringing HTTPS support to all ad-serving platforms, Google wants to protect users from ad-borne security threats when watching videos or opening mobile apps.

By the end of June, most mobile, video and desktop display advertisements served to the Google Display Network, AdMob and DoubleClick publishers will also be fully encrypted.

Five popular French web hosting providers, including Gandi and OVH, said on Thursday that the new French intelligence bill might push them to leave the country in order not to lose their customers. The five companies are protesting against the "real-time capture of data connection" and their analysis by the intelligence services using "+black boxes+ with blurred lines".

"These are thousands of jobs (...) that startups and large companies will also create elsewhere," they add. The press release was addressed to the French Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, and was co-signed by Gandu, OVH, IDS, Ikoula and Lomaco.

The Official Gmail Blog just announced that, starting today, an “All Inboxes” option will show up in the Gmail for Android navigation drawer (presumably, this requires an app update). The new option will display all your incoming mail from all your accounts in a single list.

Third-party mail (Exchange, Outlook, Yahoo, etc.) stays on a third-party server, and Gmail on Android just downloads the mail to your device and displays it.

Hidden areas of the internet and encrypted communications make it harder to monitor terror suspects, warns Europol's Rob Wainwright.

"It's become perhaps the biggest problem for the police and the security service authorities in dealing with the threats from terrorism," he explained.

Mr Wainwright acknowledged this was a result of the revelations by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, who exposed how security services were conducting widespread surveillance of emails and messages.

Following intense pressure from the Australian government, ISPs were warned that they had to come up with a solution to online piracy or face a legislative response.

Not only should they be pro-active when it comes to monitoring and warning subscribers, ISPs should also use technology to actively block access to infringing content on other levels.