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One of the most important services on the Internet went down for around an hour this week, causing widespread problems on other sites. The glitch is a reminder of how fragile some aspects of the Internet are. Cloudflare is a website that offers ... several free and paid services designed to make websites more efficient. Two of its main services are traffic filtering and web caching. The former involves web traffic between a user and a website going through Cloudflare. During this process, the client machine is checked for signs of malicious activity. This can involve attempted hacking, but also ... (view more)

Firefox is to stop websites from playing videos automatically when a user visits a page. By default, autoplay will only be allowed if the sound is muted. The move by developers Mozilla is designed to tackle the problem of unwanted noise when ... somebody is simply expecting to read an article. This is a particular problem with sites that carry video ads or news sites that automatically play a video report, even if it isn't related to the story the user was expecting to read. The new default takes effect in version 66 of Firefox, which is getting a public release this week. The videos will still ... (view more)

Google's Chrome browser will soon block all ads on sites that have "abusive experiences" for users. It's designed as a way to put financial pressure on scammers. It's a new step following on from an existing attempt to protect users against ... misleading websites. 'Misleading' has a couple of meanings in this context. One is sites that carry pop-up or other ads that falsely claim to be system warnings, such as those which state the user's computer has malware. In this case, the user either downloads (and pays for) fake security software to "fix" the "problem", or is directed ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader Sam G. writes: " Dear Dennis, I get emails from hackers a few times a week saying that they have cracked my email account. As proof, they have supplied me with the correct password for the account. The message goes on to say that ... they have planted a Trojan on my computer which allows them to spy on me. Here's where it gets interesting. The hackers say I have been visiting websites of people in the buff. They are demanding I pay them bitcoin (worth $831) to keep this quiet, otherwise they will send images from the purported site I've visited and also a picture of me on my ... (view more)

An 11-year-old boy hacked a replica of a Florida election website in just 10 minutes. Officials have downplayed the incident saying it's not an accurate recreation of how such hacking could work. The hack took place at DefCon, an annual conference ... for people interested in computer security. It often has competitions and demonstrations of security vulnerability - and certainly isn't a place you would want to connect your wireless device to unknown WiFi networks. One of the events at the conference was the DefCon Voting Machine Hacking Village. Participants, including many children, attempted ... (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)

Google says it is investing $300 million to help improve the quality and reliability of online news. It argues that such work is in its own business interests. The biggest change with the 'Google News Initiative' is a couple of steps to improve the ... online experience for people who subscribe to news sites that are behind a paywall. One is that subscribers, once signed up to a news site, will be automatically logged on to it whenever they are signed in to their Google account, saving the need to re-enter passwords. Another change is that people who use this facility will now see a special ... (view more)

More than 700 million email addresses and passwords have been leaked online. While many are bogus, enough appear to be genuine that security experts have advised users to change their email passwords. The collection of account details does not ... appear to have been used for identity theft or other fraud. Instead, the collection has been marketed as a way to send spam messages. The idea is that spammers can login to the compromised accounts in order to send their unsolicited emails. This effectively flies under the spam radar, as most spam comes from IP addresses without any reputation. In this ... (view more)

Facebook is to ban ads from sites that habitually share bogus 'news' stories. The ban will apply even if the ads themselves don't point to the false stories. It's no secret that Facebook is one of the biggest sources of traffic for news sites, both ... legitimate outlets and those which deliberately run tantalizing but misleading, or outright false stories. The latter sites thrive on people sharing the bogus stories on social media sites, thus bringing more visitor and bumping up ad revenue. However, some sites also buy Facebook advertising as a way to attract visitors who will then share the ... (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)