GCHQ files dating between 2008 and 2010 explicitly state that a surveillance program codenamed Optic Nerve collected still images of Yahoo webcam chats in bulk and saved them to agency databases, regardless of whether individual users were an intelligence target or not.

The document estimates that between 3% and 11% of the Yahoo webcam imagery harvested by GCHQ contains "undesirable nudity". Discussing efforts to make the interface "safer to use", it noted that current "naïve" pornography detectors assessed the amount of flesh in any given shot, and so attracted lots of false positives by incorrectly tagging shots of people's faces as pornography.

The team behind the instant messaging service blamed "server issues" for the crash.

Speaking after Wednesday's take over, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg described WhatsApp's services as "incredibly valuable".

Five years after launch, WhatsApp is among the world's most popular and profitable phone apps—and one which Facebook has just acquired for $16 billion, plus $3 billion for its founders and small staff.

"People need to differentiate us from companies like Yahoo! and Facebook that collect your data and have it sitting on their servers. We want to know as little about our users as possible. We don't know your name, your gender… We designed our system to be as anonymous as possible. We're not advertisement-driven so we don't need personal databases."

Microsoft is hoping that OneDrive will be the place where you store your photos, and the company is working on technology that will eventually sort all of the photos you take based on how important and meaningful they are.

Google Drive has the benefit of a built-in office suite, where you can edit documents, spreadsheets and presentations, even if you created the document in another program. The service also a large collection of extras, such as third-party apps that can send faxes or sign documents.

Comcast is already the nation's largest fixed-line broadband company, largest cable TV provider, and third largest fixed-line phone company -- and that's before you include the company's NBC or other assets.

As for "growing" national telephone competitors, both AT&T and Verizon are in the process of gutting regulations across dozens of states so they can begin hanging up on unwanted DSL and phone customers they don't want to upgrade.

As the world celebrates Data Privacy Day while reeling from the latest revelations about the NSA using smartphone apps to monitor everything from your name to your sexual orientation - it may not be the best time for Facebook's Android app to request permission to read your text messages.

While people typically click Accept when presented with the permissions an app needs, in the current climate of heightened tension about privacy, people may begin to questions these permissions.

Princeton PhD students Joshua Spechler and Johan Cannarella used epidemiological modelling, traditionally employed to track the growth patterns of infectious diseases, to predict Facebook's imminent demise, citing the way that MySpace peaked in 2008 and then rapidly disappeared in three years.

“If the disease model holds, it suggests that Facebook will need to evolve/mutate in order to begin another curve or it will die out. It has to overcome the immunisation cycle,” he added.

Snapchat’s security troubles continue as a security researcher has managed to hack its account registration CAPTCHA system with a program of less than 100 lines that took 30 minutes to develop.

Hickson has detailed the basics of the logic he implemented to develop the program through a blog post. “With very little effort, my code was able to “find the ghost” in the above example with 100% accuracy”, noted Hickson.

There appears to be no end in sight for just how bad the unprecedented hack attack at Target was last holiday season.

Now Reuters is reporting that cyberintelligence firm IntelCrawler has unearthed evidence pointing toward at least six ongoing schemes at U.S. merchants with credit card processing systems plagued by the same type of malicious software.

According to IntelCrawler's sources, the malware has been tested out and infected point-of-sale hardware across Australia and Canada as well as the United States.

An alarming percentage of mobile banking applications for iOS fail to implement basic protections that would safeguard against man-in-the-middle attacks, session hijacking, memory corruption, and credential theft.

Sanchez said 90 percent of the applications he looked at sent users to a number of links that were not encrypted with SSL, while close to half of the apps did not validate the SSL certificates presented, putting customers at risk to man-in-the-middle attacks where an attacker could inject malicious javascript or HTML code as part of a phishing scam, for example.