Google's size does not relieve it from GDPR responsibilities, though, and Brave's claim is that the search giant is not transparent about the purposes for which it collects data.

The privacy officer and his employer consider that Google's privacy policies are "hopelessly vague and unspecific", despite the GDPR requirement for specificity.

Ryan is asking the data protection commissions to require Google to provide "a full and complete list of the purposes for which his data has been collected and processed." He also proposes that Google's processing activities are audited.

Brave's decision comes as online advertisers and analytics firms are moving away from tracking users via cookies to using fingerprints.

For non-technical users or readers who are not familiar with the term, user fingerprints are a collection of technical details about a user and their browser. They include a large spectrum of data, such as platform details and Web API measurements.

The professor found evidence that Chrome, Firefox, and Safari all tagged telemetry data with identifiers that were linked to each browser instance. These identifiers allowed Google, Mozilla, and Apple to track users across browser restarts, but also across browser reinstalls.

The professor said that Edge collected the hardware UUID of the user's computer, an identifier that cannot be easily changed or deleted without altering a computer's hardware.

Similarly, Prof. Leith also found that Yandex transmitted a hash of the hardware serial number and MAC address to its backend servers.

Microsoft has spent the last year begging Windows 7 users to move to a better place. In this case, it appears that the abandoned OS's mewling has gone unheeded by the operators at c2c's Thorpe Bay station, leaving it no choice but to yell at passersby that it is out of support – will somebody just please upgrade it already?

As time goes on, it is becoming increasingly clear that Microsoft is trying to make local accounts a thing of the past and push all new Windows 10 users to a Microsoft account.

A Local Account is one that is tied to the computer, cannot be used to login to other computers, is not integrated into Windows 10 cloud services such as OneDrive and the Microsoft Store, and does not require an email address.

For those affected, the only way to create a local account during setup is to ... disconnect the computer from the Internet.

Yes, that's right, Microsoft now makes you disconnect the computer from the Internet to create a local account during setup!

At the end of August, JavaScript package registry NPM Inc said it intended "to finalize and launch an Open Source funding platform by the end of 2019."

Funding has also been a concern for NPM Inc, which was said last year to be running short on cash. Asked about the financial state of the biz, Schlueter didn't get into specifics but suggested things have been going well.

After eleven months of planning, the npm-distributed request module has been deprecated, meaning the popular JavaScript code library for making HTTP requests is no longer supported and won't receive further updates.

Last March, he presented a plan to stop work on request, an Apache 2.0 licensed open source project that lists 282 contributors in its GitHub repository.

The uproar after the Iowa Democratic Party caucus reporting software failed was a harsh reminder for programmers of how bad things can get. Counting up a few simple votes isn’t as complicated as building an autonomous car, training an AI to recommend movies, or even updating a bank database safely, yet the programmers couldn’t pull this off. One particular damning tweet read, “Hard to believe we put men on the moon.”

The thing is that the comparison to flying to the moon isn’t really fair. Even though guiding the Apollo lander to the moon seems much harder than tabulating a few thousand votes, all of the extra work wrapped around the modern vote tally is what makes it much more complex.

Another banal detail about Shlayer is its previously mentioned infected method. It’s seeded in links that promise pirated versions of commercial software, episodes of TV shows, or live feeds of sports matches. Once users click, they receive a notice that they should install a Flash update. Never mind that Flash has been effectively deprecated for years and that platforms offering warez and pirated content are a known breeding ground for malware.

In any event, Shlayer’s ranking is a good reason for people to remember that Flash is an antiquated browser add-on that presents more risk than benefit for the vast majority of the world.

We already knew this was coming because Microsoft announced the new Edge’s launch date last month, but it wasn’t clear that users would be pushed to the new version. Thankfully it will look mostly the same as the existing Edge browser, with all the same proprietary Microsoft features, except for a slightly more Chrome-esque look.

By developing on the open-source Chromium project, Microsoft is helping to improve Google’s browser, which it uses to collect data for advertising purposes.