Despite repeated assertions to the contrary, Facebook finally admitted Wednesday that its youngest users really are losing interest in the social network.

Facebook, Ebersman said, doesn't have an entirely accurate way to measure teen activity as the audience is known to fudge birth dates, but the company has developed internal metrics to look at teen usage.

The Wikimedia Foundation's executive director has confirmed that Wikipedia editors are actively engaged in a wide-ranging battle against those PR firms. Over the past couple weeks, those editors have isolated several hundred user accounts linked to people 'paid to write articles on Wikipedia promoting organizations or products,' according to Sue Gardner.

Some 250 suspicious user accounts have already been nuked.

Britain's Prime Minister has slammed Facebook after the social network appeared to have lifted its ban on users posting videos of beheadings – although nudity is still forbidden.

Crucially, the Mark Zuckerberg-run company does not want to be viewed as a publisher, like other media outfits, because with that tag comes responsibility about the type of material that can be posted on such sites, including thorny issues such as libel.

Facebook is binning a feature that lets people retain their anonymity on the social network.

As Facebook is a for-profit ad-backed company whose revenue growth depends on its users sharing as much data as possible with one another, the company's main motivation is to eradicate user privacy over time. The removal of this search setting goes hand-in-hand with the global roll out of Graph Search, which makes it more complicated than ever before for a user to keep their interactions on the network hidden from the Eye-of-Sauron-gaze of Zuckerberg & Co.

The "dark web" services used by criminals will continue to evolve in an attempt to evade authorities, the UK's cybercrime boss has warned.

"We have to continually probe and identify those forums and then seek to infiltrate them and use other tools."

Unbeknownst to many people in the world, late last week one of the largest attacks in the history of the Internet was taking place—a massive nine-hour barrage that leveled an unrelenting 100 Gigabits of traffic at its peak.

"The most outstanding thing about this attack is that it did not use any amplification, which means that they had 100 Gigabits of available bandwidth on their own," Gaffan said. "The attack lasted nine hours, and that type of bandwidth is not cheap or readily available."

While Incapsula was able to repel this most recent attack, Gaffan cautions that the attack could have been much bigger and there have been some key takeaways from the experience.

Tom Simonite reports at MIT Technology News that a new research group within Facebook is working on an emerging and powerful approach to artificial intelligence known as deep learning, which uses simulated networks of brain cells to process data. Applying this method to data shared on Facebook could allow for novel features, and perhaps boost the company's ad targeting.

Facebook's chief technology officer, Mike Schroepfer, says that one obvious place to use deep learning is to improve the news feed, the personalized list of recent updates he calls Facebook's 'killer app.'

We already noted that the first "punch" of the legacy entertainment industry's new attacks on Google was a silly and self-contradictory study from the MPAA blaming Google for leading susceptible people straight to infringing content.

The second "punch" also is pretty weak, and comes in the form of RIAA boss Cary Sherman testifying before the House Judiciary Committee's IP subcommittee.

We've been running around seeing the RIAA and MPAA do the same damn thing for a decade and a half now. It's always about blaming others for their own failures to give consumers what they want.

BlueJay allows users to enter a set of Twitter accounts, keywords, and locations to scan for within 25-mile geofences (BlueJay users can create up to five such fences), then it returns all matching tweets in real-time. If the tweets come with GPS locations, they are plotted on a map. The product can also export databases of up to 100,000 matching tweets at a time.

BrightPlanet also offers GeoTime, a separate data visualization tool that can take exported BlueJay data and mine it to show where and when the target travels, what he tweets about at various locations, and where his phone resides at night.

Aside from targeting Petrobras, Fantastico revealed that in a May 2012 presentation reportedly used by the agency to train new recruits how to infiltrate private computer networks, Google is listed as a target.

Further afield, the NSA has apparently targeted the computer networks of Saudi Arabia’s Riyad Bank and Chinese technology company Huawei for surveillance, the documents show.