The free-content ad network sparked anger when it emerged its data scientist Adam Kramer gave a green light to trick-cyclists to filter out positive and negative posts seen by 700,000 people to see how they would react.

The Mark Zuckerberg-run company appeared to be suggesting that its experiments with Facebook users were less ethically ropey than they had been in the past.

Half the major publishers in Germany have started a process of arbitration — which, no doubt, will lead to suits — to demand that Google pay them for quoting from and thus linking to their content. And now we know how much they think they deserve: 11% of Google’s revenue related to their snippets.

Google is never going to pay for the right to quote and link to content. That would ruin not only its business but also the infrastructure of knowledge online.

In an attempt to tame the beast that is Twitter lingo, one such agency, the FBI, has compiled a “Twitter Shorthand” Guide.

Presented with this bizarre list, we thought we’d take the opportunity to highlight a few of the entries we found particularly strange, obscure, or just plain silly.

Researchers at MIT's Decentralized Information Group (DIG) are developing a new protocol they call "HTTP with Accountability,” or HTTPA, designed to fight the "inadvertent misuse" of data by people authorized to access it.

Every time the server transmitted a piece of sensitive data, it would also send a description of the restrictions on the data’s use. And it would also log the transaction, using the URI, in a network of encrypted servers.

You can’t easily encrypt documents using the net’s biggest file sharing services, including those from Google, Microsoft, and Dropbox.

For the truly paranoid, the best solutions is to use open-source software to encrypt the file on your computer before it’s uploaded to Google or Microsoft’s networks. That way, if someone — the NSA perhaps — compromises Google’s network, it still can’t read your stuff.

Imagine Google Drive with no search capabilities, or Dropbox with no preview. None of those features would work with encrypted files, because they’d be unreadable by Google and Dropbox’s server software.

A few weeks ago, Twitter shares plummeted and wiped out more than $4 billion in market value, as insiders and early investors started to sell the company’s stock after the six-month “lock-up” period expired.

Twitter has already lost more than half its market value, a staggering $18 billion, since late December. Users are abandoning the service, growth has been stagnant and social media pundits wonder if Twitter is heading toward irrelevance.

Snowshoe spammers spread their message over many different IP addresses, each used in low volume, to send the message.

"Bypassing filters is a big money-making effort for snowshoe advertisers, and as long as you’re facing off against intelligent adversaries who have a financial incentive to keep trying until they get through, they will keep coming up with advances in spam warfare techniques," Wosotowsky said.

Google has made an online form and process available for people in the European Union who want to have information about them removed from searches. The move complies with a recent court order in the EU that search providers such as Google must have such a process to "forget" things about people if they make removal requests.

Users who want to make a removal request will have to provide their full name, a copy of a valid photo ID and other related information.

Memo to anyone who logs in to a WordPress-hosted blog from a public Wi-Fi connection or other unsecured network: It's trivial for the script kiddie a few tables down to hijack your site even if it's protected by two-factor authentication.

The cookie, which carries the tag "wordpress_logged_in," is set once an end user has entered a valid WordPress user name and password.

The move by WordPress engineers to allow the cookie to be transmitted unencrypted makes them susceptible to interception in many cases.

Microsoft is paying Brazilian users US$2 in Skype vouchers to set Bing as their default search engine and MSN as their default home page.

The current value of the voucher is $2.00. [One claimed], the voucher will appear in your Skype account.