This nasty piece of mobile malware cleverly hides itself on Android devices while serving up a host of advertisements: full-page ads, ads delivered when opening the default browser, ads in the notifications, and even ads via home screen widget. All while, ironically, posing as an ad blocker vaguely named Ads Blocker.

Ads Blocker is inordinately hard to find on the mobile device once installed. To start, there is no icon for Ads Blocker. However, there are some hints of its existence, for example, a small key icon status bar.

An experimental feature silently rolled out to the stable Chrome release on Tuesday caused chaos for IT admins this week after users complained of facing white, featureless tabs on Google's massively popular browser.

Irate IT admins posting on the Chromium dev blog pointed out the problem didn't only affect Citrix, though with its wide adoption it was the highest-profile casualty.

As one IT pro put it not one hour ago: "I don't think we should stop making noise about this. The issue now is that Google has gotten so big that they aren't concerned at all about what they have done because they know we will keep using their software."

Instagram tells TechCrunch the hidden Likes test is expanding to a subset of people globally. Users will have to decide for themselves if something is worth Liking rather than judging by the herd.

The expansion raises concerns that the test could hurt influencers and creators after a study by HypeAuditor found many of them of various levels of popularity lost 3% to 15% of their Likes in countries where Instagram hid the counts.

One of the signature works of the public domain class of 1923 was the song Yes! We Have No Bananas by composers Irving Cohn and Frank Silver. As of January 1st, anyone was free to make use of that song.

Glenn Fleishman had posted a video of the song to YouTube in celebration of it entering the public domain earlier this year.

However, that video has now been "claimed" by Universal Music and various subsidiaries, meaning that they could "monetize" it or force it offline, despite them literally having no rights to speak of.

Instagram also has the U.S. government on its side for a change. While its parent company Facebook is being investigated for antitrust and privacy violations, TikTok is also under scrutiny.

Chinese tech giant ByteDance’s $1 billion 2017 acquisition of Musical.ly, another Chinese app similar to TikTok but with traction in the U.S., is under review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.

He downplayed the murder of an innocent man, calling it a “mistake”, then compared it directly to his own company’s “mistake” when it ran down and killed a pedestrian in a self-driving car. He then argued that everyone should be forgiven, and defended the Saudi government’s investment in Uber - all while being given multiple opportunities to backtrack.

It was an unbelievably bad response and one that makes you think about an oft quoted study by Australia’s Bond University and a researcher from the University of San Diego that found 21 per cent of senior professionals in the US had a “clinically significant” level of psychopathic traits. Which is roughly the same percentage as professional criminals.

Whether mainstream or obscure manufacturer, the fact that pretty much all of them are made in the same area denote a similar approach to soldering batteries in.

This leads to one conclusion, planned obsolescence.If you want your laptop to still be mobile when the battery fizzles out, forget about it. Buy new instead. Pick your manufacturer, even those famed for building 'tank' laptops that last forever, all you need is a fresh battery, upgrade the RAM, and a new HD or SSD and away you go.

The piles of leaked documents, which directly reference the company's questionable position on competition, are likely to be extremely helpful to the dozens of entities currently investigating Facebook on antitrust grounds.

The documents seem to confirm two long-held, popular suspicious about Facebook. First, it treats user privacy as an afterthought at best. And second, it works hard to prevent competitors from getting too powerful.

It has been revealed that Adobe's Experience Platform mobile SDKs, used to create apps that interact with the company's cloud services, until recently contained sample configuration files that created insecure default settings.

Developers creating apps that utilize those files as templates or examples could find that their apps have been sending data over the network without SSL protection, making it vulnerable to interception and alteration.

Some politicians are worried the app's Chinese owner, Bytedance, poses a risk to national security.

Others worry about the fact China requires its social-media apps to provide the state access to users' information.