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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)

A major news organization says Facebook doesn't do enough to remove images that exploit children. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) says the site removed just 18 out of 100 images that it reported as part of an investigation. The test was ... part of a follow-up to a report last year about people using members-only groups on the site to share inappropriate images of children. At the time, Facebook said it was improving its moderation system. To see if that was the case, the BBC used Facebook's formal reporting button to report 100 images that appeared to breach the site's ... (view more)

Controversial file sharing site owner Kim Dotcom has come another step closer to being extradited to the United States. It comes despite a New Zealand court agreeing with one of Dotcom's key arguments against extradition. Dotcom, who changed his ... name from Kim Schmitz, was the man behind one of the biggest alleged piracy websites, "Megaupload." It was a site where users could upload files, either as a form of back-up, or as a way to share files with other people. Not surprisingly, many users found that Megaupload was an excellent way to illegally share copies of copyrighted music ... (view more)

Google has tweaked its search algorithm after discovering holocaust denial sites were topping the results for some queries. The incident may have highlighted a difference in the way Google and other search engines rank pages. The issue came to light ... when a newspaper reporter experimented with searches for the phrase "did the Holocaust happen" and discovered that the top result returned by Google was a site specifically dedicated to denying the Holocaust. Other journalists checked up potentially controversial queries and found unsettling top results, such as a search for "are ... (view more)

Lately we've been posting a lot of articles about websites and services that have been hacked . One of the primary recommendations we have also repeated is that users should use unique and hard-to-guess passwords for each site, as this will help to ... prevent any further breaches. The reasoning is that if user account data is stolen on one site ( Yahoo is a good example ), the same username and passwords may also be valid on other sites - but only if users are using the same account names, passwords or password hints. Unfortunately this is often the case, because using the same passwords on ... (view more)