Internet

Yahoo has blocked users from automatically forwarding incoming emails to an account with a rival provider. Many are interpreting it as an attempt to stop users jumping ship after revelations of a major security breach. The forwarding feature is ... pretty much a standard feature across the webmail industry, and means users can change from one account to another without having to worry about missing out on an important message during the switchover. Officially Yahoo says the feature is only temporarily disabled. It says the move was planned in advance and is to allow it to work on a range of ... (view more)

North Korea has just 28 websites, an audit has revealed. It includes sites for education, travel and cookery. What information was already known about the secretive country showed that it has its own Intranet: a restricted, internal network that ... appears to be the only information accessible to the few North Koreans with access to computers. However, the country does have a few sites on the worldwide Internet, all with addresses ending in .kp in the same way that many Canadian sites often end in .ca. Until now, nobody was sure exactly how many such sites existed. Full Domains List Exposed Like ... (view more)

Facebook users in the US may be able to find out if the site thinks they are conservative- or liberal-leaning. It's a side-effect of a new tool that makes it easier to influence advertisements which appear on the users' newsfeed. As reported ... recently, Facebook recently added new options which allow users to indicate that they don't want to see advertisements in the news feed related to specific topics. The new changes come as Facebook also prepares to roll out additional measures to prevent ad-blocking software from working on the site. To view the settings, users can visit their ... (view more)

Facebook says it will stop ad-blocking software from working on its website. It says ads are a core part of using Facebook, but will give users more control over which ads they see. Andrew Bosworth, who heads up Facebook's advertising division, ... announced the move in a blog post and followed up with comments to the Wall Street Journal. In the post, he accused the makers of ad-blocking tools of accepting money from advertisers to let their ads through, rather than block them. According to Bosworth, that's a sign ad-blocker makers don't always have the user's best interests at ... (view more)

Amazon is testing video advertisements that are specifically created to meet the viewer's interests. They may prove effective, but will also raise privacy concerns. The ads will appear on non-Amazon website and, as often happens with third-party ... ads, will be based on what the system knows about the user. This often involves using cookie files stored on a user's computer to track the websites they visit and deduce their interests. Several companies already run video ads that are tailored to a user's interests, but this generally involves picking a subject and then selecting a pre- ... (view more)

Facebook is to let users send messages which cannot be read by anyone other than the recipient. It's also continuing to work on a feature that allows users to send temporary messages which self-destruct. The new feature is referred to as end-to-end ... encryption . That means it's set up in a way that, even if the message is intercepted, it can't be read by anyone other than the recipient. This is done by maintaining the encryption from the sending device to the receiving device, regardless of the route it takes across the Internet. Secure Shell (SSH) , which is commonly used to connect a ... (view more)

Facebook says it will give more priority to posts from users' friends and families rather than content from businesses, news sites and other organizations. But the precise details of the changes remain unclear. The change is to the news feed, which ... is the default view when somebody logs into Facebook. Rather than show all the posts the user's friend have made in chronological order, Facebook attempts to rank them by how important and relevant the user will find them. Facebook says this is necessary because there's too much content for most users to read through in its entirety. It ... (view more)

Facebook is reportedly planning to offer encryption on its messaging tools, which means that neither Facebook, nor governments could read the contents. It's also working on an option to integrate standard text messaging into its Messenger app. The ... idea is to offer end-to-end encryption, meaning that if a message is intercepted at any point between leaving the sender's device and arriving at the recipient's device, it would be unreadable. As well as being a selling point to users who worry about snooping, the tool could also mean Facebook would have a simple answer if law ... (view more)

Facebook has rejected claims that its staff manually 'suppressed' conservative-slanted news stories in its trending topics feature. That hasn't satisfied a Senate committee which has now demanded more information about how the feature works. The ... feature is the list of news articles that appears on the Facebook web page when users are logged in. It's presented as a list of the news topics and stories that users are most sharing and talking about on the site, with the impression being that its a purely objective ranking based on raw numbers. Trending Topics is separate to the ... (view more)

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has unveiled a standardized way for broadband providers to give details on pricing and other contract terms. The "consumer broadband labels" resemble, and are based on, the nutritional information labels ... seen on packaged food. The labels were developed with the input of both broadband providers and consumer groups. Although providers won't legally be required to use the labels, it is very much in their interests to do so. Companies which do use the labels will, assuming they have been honest and accurate with the information, ... (view more)