Snapchat, a mobile photo-messaging app created for wiping out traces of the messages for privacy reasons, this week was hit with a major breach of its users' privacy that exposed names and phone numbers of some 4.6 million of its customers. The data dump came after security researchers published a proof-of-concept for a weakness associated with the "Find Friends" feature.

Anthropologist Daniel Miller has been studying British teens, and he has a dire message for Facebook: The social network is “dead and buried” to Britain’s 16-to-18-year-olds because they’re “embarrassed even to be associated with it.”

Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has been telling people for years that he wants to turn the service into a global utility, akin to the power grid or the water supply — something that feeds everything else you do.

Amazon has explained to me that Disney can pull their content at any time and 'at this time they've pulled that show for exclusivity on their own channel.' In other words, Amazon sold me a Christmas special my kids can't watch during the run up to Christmas.

Yes, Disney is stupid and evil for doing this. But when Amazon decided that it would offer studios the right to revoke access to purchased videos, they set the stage for this.

Among the patents granted to Facebook this week by the USPTO is one for Inferring Household Income for Users of a Social Networking System. 'For example,' Facebook explains, 'an assumption might be made about a user that reads CNN.com and nytimes.com every day that the user is in a higher income bracket.

Adblock Plus, the most popular adblocking program on the market, has been downloaded 250 million times, and has around 60 million active users.

"Advertising has become even more aggressive," says Sean Blanchfield, chief executive of Pagefair, a firm that monitors how often advertising is blocked on websites.

Anti-spam outfit, Spamhaus, has called on the UK government to fine those who are running internet infrastructure that could be exploited by criminals.

"Once they know it can be used for attacks and fraud, that should be an offence," Cox said. "You should be subject to something like a parking ticket... where the fine is greater than the cost of fixing it.

A post at the YouTube Creators’ blog late Monday has acknowledged that YouTube commenters, never ones for productive discussion, have turned the site’s Google+ integration changeover to their advantage.

To compound the problem (just as we predicted at the time of the change rollout), Google greatly underestimated the ability of YouTube commenters to produce what qualifies as “engaged conversation” while managing to be also disgusting, offensive, NSFW, irrelevant, or all of the above. And that appears to be the heart of the issue.

The trouble is that the company’s attempts to quiet the story just draw more attention to it. The latest attempt came on Friday when Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg said that Facebook’s challenges with some teens have been “blown out of proportion” and that “teen usage of Facebook remains stable.”

Facebook’s popularity with teens is important because young adult buyers are especially coveted by advertisers, and there’s a worry among some investors that if younger teenagers stop using the service in high school, they’ll use it less frequently in college, too.

Lavabit's founder has claimed other secure webmail providers who threatened to shut themselves down in the wake of the NSA spying revelations had received court orders forcing them to stay up.

DoJ attorneys also dismissed Lavabit's argument that disclosing its encryption keys was incompatible with offering a secure email service. Marketing a business as a "secure" service to consumers provides no legal obstacle to court orders, US government lawyers state in the conclusion to their argument.

Snapchat is a mobile app that that lets users, mostly teenagers—mostly girls—add captions to photos or videos and share them with friends, and then make the content disappear. Photos can only be sent in the moment—no uploading later. Young girls take pictures of themselves making silly faces, Carlos Danger types maybe send more lascivious content, and then poof! Gone. Unless the recipient grabs a screenshot.