About a month after buying all that engagement, the research team looked at the status of all those fake accounts and found that about 80 percent were still active. So they reported a sample selection of those accounts to the platforms as fraudulent. Then came the most damning statistic: three weeks after being reported as fake, 95 percent of the fake accounts were still active.

Tron: Evolution, a tie-in game for the 2010 Tron: Legacy film , used SecurRom, a form of digital rights management (DRM), and publisher Disney hasn’t paid its bill. This means Disney can no longer authenticate purchases and "unlock" copies of the game that people bought but haven't used yet.

Often, the people most affected by DRM are people who purchase the game legitimately and experience performance issues tied to the extra software running or, as is the case with Tron: Evolution, suddenly can’t play the game at all.

TikTok, the fast-growing social network from China, has used unusual measures to protect supposedly vulnerable users. The platform instructed its moderators to mark videos of people with disabilities and limit their reach. Queer and fat people also ended up on a list of „special users“.

Moderators were instructed to mark people with disabilities as „Risk 4“. This means that a video is only visible in the country where it was uploaded.

Asking for a date of birth would help the company to avoid targeting ads for age-restricted products at children, the Reuters news agency reported.

"Asking for this information will help prevent underage people from joining Instagram, help us keep young people safer and enable more age-appropriate experiences overall," the company said in a blog post.

Up to 97 percent of all online traffic to retailer login pages this holiday shopping week comes from bots, largely operated by organized gangs of cybercriminals, according to estimates by cybersecurity firm Radware.

The bots fill out online forms and navigate retail sites faster than a real person can, and try to swiftly purchase limited supply gifts before you’ve even filled up your cart. The items are then sold for a higher price on third-party sites.

On a normal shopping day, humans outnumber bots on login pages by two to one. On the days leading up to Black Friday and Cyber Monday, bots outnumber humans by 20 to 1.

The artwork depicts Batman throwing a Molotov cocktail against a backdrop of hot-pink words spelling out the new comic book’s tagline, “the future is young.” It was posted on DC Comics’ Twitter and Instagram accounts; both platforms are blocked in mainland China.

In the meantime, DC Comics’ Instagram has been flooded with criticism from people who support the Hong Kong protests or are angry that the company appears to have given in to Chinese political pressure.

“So now Batman loves money more than justice?” asked one commenter.

The joint call by the group ratchets up pressure on European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager to take further action against Google, the world’s most popular internet search engine, two years after she ordered it to stop favoring its own price comparison shopping service (CSS).

“We are approaching you (Vestager) because companies like ours are endangered by Google, which is artfully avoiding compliance with the law,” the companies wrote.

The region, which has a Russian-speaking majority, is now shown as Russian territory on Apple Maps and its Weather app, when viewed from Russia.

But the apps do not show it as part of any country when viewed elsewhere.

Vasily Piskaryov, chairman of the Duma security and anti-corruption committee, said Apple had complied with the Russian constitution.

Google, which also produces a popular Maps app, also shows Crimea as belonging to Russia when viewed from the country. The changes happened in March.

Tensions have increased as Google has cracked down on what had long been a freewheeling work culture that encouraged employees to speak out. Google recently canceled a regular series of companywide meetings that allowed workers to pose questions to senior executives and began working with a consulting firm that has helped companies quell unionization efforts.

The Tech Workers Coalition, an advocacy group, said on Twitter on Monday that the four employees had been fired for “organizing at work” and encouraged workers at Google to “speak out against this draconian act.”

The fact that there wasn’t a discussion outside the confines of the boards of ISOC and PIR – the outfit that manages the registry and is wholly owned by ISOC – was very deliberate, many feel. If there had been a discussion, they argue, the internet community would never have allowed it to happen.

Then came the news that ISOC had decided to sell the registry to Ethos Capital, an unknown private equity firm that had been established only months earlier.

It quickly became apparent that Ethos Capital was likely the brainchild of a former CEO of ICANN, Fadi Chehade, who had been largely responsible for pushing free-market economics into the internet registry market and now appeared to be using that knowledge to profit from one of its oldest institutions.