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Infopackets Reader Bill K. writes: " Dear Dennis, Thanks for your excellent and concise explanations regarding VPNs (virtual private networks). I read with interest the latest article, ' Difference Between VPN Server and VPN (Service) ' and also ' ... Do I need a VPN? Are VPNs Safe for Online Banking? '. I was wondering if you could explain the difference between a VPN vs Proxy ? Which one is better? Can I use a Proxy with bit torrent or browsing the web anonymously? " My response: In this case, the term "proxy" refers to a "proxy server", which is a special use server online the Internet that is ... (view more)

If you use Google's Chrome browser, you may have started seeing warnings that a website is not secure. Here's what it means and what's changed. What's the change? Google has changed the way it displays information about websites in the space on the ... left of the address bar at the top of the Chrome display. Originally this space was only used to indicate when a website was secure via a padlock symbol. Later on Google gave this more emphasis, adding the word "Secure" and marking both in green to stand out. Until now, the fact that a website isn't secure hasn't been explicitly stated: it's just ... (view more)

Papua New Guinea is set to ban Facebook for a month. Unlike with bans in more authoritarian countries, it's designed to research cyber crime laws rather than stifle debate - or so the official explanation goes. However, the country's government have ... warned it might need to create a "more conducive" site that meets local laws. The government says its necessary to block access to the site while it investigates if and how Facebook helps users breach the Cyber Crime Act passed in 2016. The act was an attempt to update numerous laws to cover activity that was often already illegal in the "real ... (view more)

Facebook users have been shocked to discover it stores the phone numbers of people who've never signed up to the site, along with the SMS and voice call histories of some users. But Facebook insists that users have explicitly given permission for ... such data storage. The site's data storage and sharing policies came back under the spotlight with the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal, when a journalist revealed that information gathered about users and their friends for a psychological study was shared without permission for use in political ad targeting. Since then, many users have been taking ... (view more)

Visitors to more than 5,000 websites had their computers hijacked to earn money for scammers. But the attack would have earned them less than $25 - and they aren't getting paid anyway. The attack involved compromising screen reader software called ... BrowseAloud. Websites can add the software to their site to make it easier for visitors with vision problems to browse the pages. Because the software is so widely used, compromising it was an effective way to reach a large number of computers - regardless of whether the owners needed to use a screen reader. The software is particularly popular ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader 'Emmy-Lou' writes: " Dear Dennis, I am having trouble accessing eBay. The error message I get is: 'This site can't be reached. The connection was reset.' Other times, it is 'This site can't be reached. eBay unexpectedly closed the ... connection'. On the page with the error message, it says to: 'Try: Checking the connection, checking the proxy and the firewall, and Running Windows Network Diagnostics'. The official error message is ERR_CONNECTION_RESET (but sometimes it is ERR_CONNECTION_CLOSED ). Can you help? " My response: Troubleshooting this error message can be rather ... (view more)

A former Facebook executive says the site is responsible for "ripping apart the social fabric of how society works." Chamath Palihapitiya says the problem isn't restricted to the US. Speaking at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Palihapitiya ... said he felt "tremendous guilt" about his role as Facebook's vice president of user growth. Talking about the way Facebook tried to get users to stick around on the site, he echoed the comments of former colleagues in likening it to psychological manipulation. Social Media Works Like Drug He referred to "dopamine-driven feedback loops", referring ... (view more)

A company that protects websites from online attacks has stopped serving a far right website. But the man who made the decision says he feels uneasy about making such decisions. Cloudflare is designed to protect against denial of service attacks, in ... which people try to bring down a website by flooding it with bogus requests until it's inaccessible to legitimate traffic by real people. It's a tactic often used by hacker groups protesting against the organizations running the site, though it's also been used as a form of cyberwarfare. To combat such attacks, data going to and from ... (view more)

Facebook says it will no longer accept advertisements that link to "low-quality" web pages. It's also going to reduce the likelihood that people see user-posted links to such pages. The system Facebook uses for identifying such pages will be ... automated but is based on guidelines developed from manually reviewing "hundreds of thousands" of pages that Facebook had linked to. After staff decided which of these sites were low quality, its computers looked through those pages to spot patterns of common characteristics. (Source: fb.com ) Toenail Fungus Unwelcome Facebook isn ... (view more)

The man behind Wikipedia is to launch a news service based around the goals of being factual and neutral. Wikitribune will combine elements of Wikipedia and traditional news reporting. Jimmy Wales says the key to the site is that it will neither ... charge a subscription fee nor chase advertising. With the majority of ad revenues based on page views, Wales believes the the big problem now is that reporters deliberately skimp on accuracy for the sake of sensationalism, or provoke readers with inflammatory headlines as they "chase clicks," which in turn creates more page views. (Source: ... (view more)