Hackers strung together zero-day vulnerabilities in Flash and Internet Explorer and then compromised Forbes.com so that the attacks would compromise financial services and defense contractor employees visiting the site, researchers said.

"Given the highly trafficked Forbes.com website, the exploit could have been used to infect massive numbers of visitors." Instead, only visitors from US Defense and financial services firms were hacked.

According to documents seen by The Register, the network-builder is once again finding its Interim Satellite Service effectively DDoSed by its popularity.

The Register notes that while media are told the limit is 50 GB per month, it's actually calculated on a rolling four-week average. In other words, a user consuming 25 GB in the last week of their billing period, and another 25 GB in the first week of the next, would find themselves in breach of the policy.

AdBlock Plus Communications Manager Ben Williams wrote that currently, the browser extension has granted a pass to "over 300 sites/entities" out of "over 1,500 applicants" to the company's whitelist.

On Sunday, the Financial Times confirmed paid deals between Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and ad-serving company Taboola with AdBlock Plus.

First released to registered pre-alpha users in July, Bleep was then in Windows versions only. Now it's gone to release, the organisation has added Android and Mac versions.

By eliminating servers between communicating devices and encrypting conversations end-to-end, Bleep hopes to offer better privacy than chat applications from the big names – or, for that matter, than SMS which gets stored and forwarded by telcos.

The firm said in a blog post on Friday that it would begin slurping the data from inside a number of apps for its Google Now service – a creepy, predictive search tech that Mountain View first unveiled in 2012.

Terms of the financial deals struck with the likes of Airbnb, Lyft, Duolingo, Pandora and the Guardian newspaper were kept secret.

"We're now defaulting to the HTML5 player on the Web," said YouTube engineering manager Richard Leider in a blog post Tuesday.

Google has long been pushing for adoption of its own VP8 and now VP9 codec, but the industry has preferred another, H.264/AVC, and seems poised to shift gradually to its successor, H.265/HEVC.

Internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom has released an encrypted chat service, called MegaChat, to compete with the Microsoft-owned Skype.

Earlier this month, Mr Cameron said he wanted internet firms to allow the government to view encrypted messages in order to aid the security services.

Netflix is starting to block subscribers who access its service using VPN services and other tools that bypass geolocation restrictions. The changes, which may also affect legitimate users, have been requested by the movie studios who want full control over what people can see in their respective countries.

Netflix is not the only streaming service that’s targeting VPN and proxy users. A few months ago Hulu implemented similar restrictions. This made the site unusable for location “pirates,” but also U.S. based paying customers who used a VPN for privacy reasons.

Both Xbox Live and PlayStation Network, the online services for Microsoft's and Sony's game consoles, have been intermittently down on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, according to tweets and status sites.

The PlayStation Network status page shows the service as currently being offline. Three tweets from @AskPlayStation over the past 20 hours, including one three hours ago, have all noted "issues accessing PSN."

Photo-sharing app Instagram has removed millions of accounts believed to be posting spam, angering many legitimate users.

Rapper Ma$e, who lost more than a million followers, deleted his account after he was accused of paying for more followers, while video blogger Jamie Curry tweeted: "I lost 30k followers on instagram omg.