A fungus - genetically enhanced to produce spider toxin - can rapidly kill huge numbers of the mosquitoes that spread malaria, a study suggests.

A 6,500-sq-ft fake village - complete with plants, huts, water sources and food for the mosquitoes - was set up in Burkina Faso. It was surrounded by a double layer of mosquito netting to prevent anything escaping.

"The transgenic fungus quickly collapsed the mosquito population in just two generations," said Dr Brian Lovett, from the University of Maryland.

With the Manifest V3 proposal, Google deprecates the webRequest API’s ability to block a particular request before it’s loaded.

Google is essentially saying that Chrome will still have the capability to block unwanted content, but this will be restricted to only paid, enterprise users of Chrome. This is likely to allow enterprise customers to develop in-house Chrome extensions, not for ad blocking usage.

For the rest of us, Google hasn’t budged on their changes to content blockers, meaning that ad blockers will need to switch to a less effective, rules-based system, called “declarativeNetRequest.”

The artwork titled The Persistence of Chaos was a joint project between artist Guo O Dong and cyber-security company Deep Instinct.

Because the sale of malware is restricted in the US, whoever purchases the laptop will receive it only once its ports and internet capabilities have been "functionally disabled", according to the auction web page.

Government officials in Germany are reportedly mulling a law to force chat app providers to hand over end-to-end encrypted conversations in plain text on demand.

True and strong end-to-end encrypted conversations can only be decrypted by those participating in the discussion, so the proposed rules would require app makers to deliberately knacker or backdoor their code in order to comply.

For nearly three weeks, Baltimore has struggled with a cyberattack by digital extortionists that has frozen thousands of computers, shut down email and disrupted real estate sales, water bills, health alerts and many other services.

The N.S.A. connection to the attacks on American cities has not been previously reported, in part because the agency has refused to discuss or even acknowledge the loss of its cyberweapon, dumped online in April 2017 by a still-unidentified group calling itself the Shadow Brokers.

Five-star ratings from three years ago probably shouldn’t count as much as three-star ratings left just last week. But it also represents an additional layer of algorithmic secrecy, which can be frustrating for third-party merchants on the ecommerce site. Amazon's seller forums are full of merchants struggling to understand the black box of how their products are ranked and rated.

Star ratings aren’t only influenced by Amazon’s algorithms. They’re also sometimes manipulated by sellers who pay for glowing reviews in order to raise the rank of their products in Amazon’s search results.

Software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based applications are now the lifeblood of most organizations, but they’re certainly not foolproof. Breaks in performance (speed, availability, reachability) are occurring more frequently for popular applications.

Enterprise users have become so reliant on SaaS apps that when these slow down or become unavailable altogether, key departments—and in some cases, an organization’s entire revenue-generating engine—go idle.

CrashPlan has banned a bunch of file formats from its online backup system aimed at small businesses.

Users on the relevant subreddit claimed CrashPlan had deleted files in the those formats with no warning.

"This is the company that has on its home page 'Automatic Data Loss Protection for Your Small Business' and 'Never worry about losing business-critical data again'. They deleted my business critical data. On purpose."

The Jeff Bezos-run Amazon will likely get control of its internet namesake this summer. It intends to run it as a brand business with a small number of domain names that reflect its core businesses.

There are only a handful of companies that have launched on their dot-brands, and a growing number – now over 50 – have simply abandoned the names, formally telling ICANN they are no longer interested.

The Brazilian government also strongly opposed the US government's role in overseeing ICANN and ultimately succeeded in getting the US Department of Commerce to step away from its role and provide the organization with real autonomy.

Unlike previous attempts to popularise 3D-printed guns, this operation is entirely decentralised. There’s no headquarters, no trademarks, and no real leader. The people behind it reckon that this means they can’t be stopped by governments.

There is no way to stop the anonymous file sharing of 3D-printed guns online. Whether they’re just pretending to be doing this for reasons of liberty or otherwise, their message is clear: it’s already too late to stop.