The Web

Twitter announced Tuesday that a small flock of high-flying tweeters in the United States will get to test a feature letting fans pay for special access to online content.... Read more

Facebook has officially jumped into the audio space.... Read more

In their Carbis Bay communique, the G7 announced their intention to work together to tackle ransomware groups. Days later, U.S. president Joe Biden met with Russian president Vladimir Putin, where an extradition process to bring Russian cybercriminals to justice in the U.S. was discussed. Putin reportedly agreed in principle, but... Read more

Facebook on Wednesday beefed up automated tools to assist group moderators striving to keep exchanges civil in a time of clashing viewpoints.... Read more

Make no mistake: We are also in the midst of a digital pandemic of ransomware attacks. The recent ransomware attacks on Colonial Pipeline and JBS U.S. Holdings Inc.—the world's largest meat processors—underscore the growing brazen nature of organized, deliberate attacks on increasingly significant targets, and our chronic inability to defend... Read more

The standoff between the Indian government and Twitter escalated Wednesday when the country's technology minister accused the social media giant of deliberately not complying with local laws.... Read more

Scientists at Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) and NEC Corporation have jointly developed a 28-GHz phased-array transceiver that supports efficient and reliable 5G communications. The proposed transceiver outperforms previous designs in various regards by adapting fast beam switching and a leakage cancelation mechanism.... Read more

In recent months, people have reported seeing a parade of star-like points passing across the night sky. The formation is not extraterrestrial, or even astrophysical in origin, but is in fact a line of satellites, recently launched by SpaceX, that will eventually be joined by many more to form Starlink,... Read more

Russian authorities on Thursday ordered Facebook and the messaging app Telegram to pay steep fines for failing to remove banned content, a move that could be part of growing government efforts to tighten control over social media platforms amid political dissent.... Read more

The National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) has released a new preliminary draft report, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Interagency or Internal Report (NISTIR) 8374, Cybersecurity Framework Profile for Ransomware Risk Management.... Read more

Back in 2009, threat actors hacked into the website servers of social app RockYou, accessing over 32 million user passwords stored in plaintext. Now, in what appears to be the largest data breach in history, attackers have compromised 262 times as many passwords. With 3.2 billion leaked passwords from multiple... Read more

If you were having difficulty accessing your favorite website on Tuesday evening Australian time, you're not alone. A jaw-dropping number of major websites around the globe suddenly became unavailable with no immediately obvious explanation—before reappearing an hour later.... Read more

An outage at a little-known firm that speeds up access to websites knocked a lot of top internet destinations offline on Tuesday, disrupting business and leisure for untold millions globally. The problem was quickly resolved. The company, Fastly, blamed a configuration error in its technology.... Read more

The latest wave of ransomware attacks hitting the United States and globally portends a difficult battle against hackers, even as government and the private sector ramp up defenses.... Read more

Dozens of websites went down briefly around the globe Tuesday, including CNN, The New York Times and Britain's government home page, after an outage at the cloud computing service Fastly, illustrating how vital a small number of behind-the-scenes companies have become to running the internet.... Read more

If you use such social media websites as Facebook and Twitter, you may have come across posts flagged with warnings about misinformation. So far, most misinformation—flagged and unflagged—has been aimed at the general public. Imagine the possibility of misinformation—information that is false or misleading—in scientific and technical fields like cybersecurity,... Read more

India on Saturday issued "one last notice" to Twitter to comply with new IT regulations that the social media giant says threaten privacy guarantees.... Read more

Microsoft Corp. blamed "accidental human error" for its Bing search engine briefly not showing image results for the search term "tank man" on the anniversary of the bloody military crackdown in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 1989.... Read more

Facebook on Friday set its ban on former US president Donald Trump for two years, saying he deserved the maximum punishment for violating platform rules over a deadly attack by his supporters on the US Capitol.... Read more

The advertising of nicotine products is highly restricted, but social media allows a way for these products to be marketed to young people. What's more, e-cigarette flavorings make them particularly appealing to teenagers and young adults. A team of researchers have developed machine learning methods to track the conversations on... Read more

Facebook plans to end a contentious policy championed by CEO Mark Zuckerberg that exempted politicians from certain moderation rules on its site, according to several news reports.... Read more

On the horizon for eight years now, Google's planned replacement for Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), Quic, seems to be finally underway. In fact, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) published Quic as a standard for the worldwide network earlier this week. If successful, this protocol might replace TCP, which has... Read more

Twitter is rolling out a subscription service, starting in Canada and Australia, that offers perks like an undo button for subscribers.... Read more

Internet fads tend to have a distinct life cycle. First, the embrace by early adopters and tastemakers, particularly the young. Next, an explosion of popularity leading to inescapable ubiquity. Finally, death by overexposure and a wretched zombie afterlife of continued usage by parents and the terminally uncool.... Read more

Influencing millions of people on social media and being paid handsomely is not as easy as it looks, according to new Cornell University research.... Read more

New EPFL research has found that almost half of local Twitter trending topics in Turkey are fake, a scale of manipulation previously unheard of. It also proves for the first time that many trends are created solely by bots due to a vulnerability in Twitter's Trends algorithm.... Read more

In a new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a research team of the Institute of Complex Systems of the University of Barcelona (UBICS) analyzed the time evolution of real complex networks and developed a model in which the emergence of new nodes can be... Read more

Russian lawmakers on Tuesday backed a bill that would force foreign internet companies to set up local offices or face harsh penalties, including an outright ban.... Read more

Cloud computing is a growing market. But cyberattacks on cloud software systems are on the rise, too, as these applications often contain security vulnerabilities that hackers are able to exploit. CodeShield software—which is produced by the company of the same name—uncovers these vulnerabilities and fixes them using automated methods. CodeShield... Read more

Disinformation campaigns are not new—think of wartime propaganda used to sway public opinion against an enemy. What is new, however, is the use of the internet and social media to spread these campaigns. The spread of disinformation via social media has the power to change elections, strengthen conspiracy theories, and... Read more

On May 7, a pipeline system carrying almost half the fuel used on the east coast of the United States was crippled by a major cyber attack. The five-day shutdown of the Colonial Pipeline resulted in widespread fuel shortages and panic-buying as Virginia, North Carolina and Florida declared a state... Read more

The nation's leading social media companies have pulled out the stops to shut down conspiracy theories, hoaxes and falsehoods about COVID and vaccines, QAnon and the 2020 election, but they are far less aggressive when it comes to the latest hotspot in the war on misinformation: climate change.... Read more

Facebook has reversed its policy banning posts suggesting COVID-19 emerged from a laboratory amid renewed debate over the origins of the virus, raising fresh questions about social media's role in policing misinformation.... Read more

Facebook said Wednesday that it has disrupted more than 150 deceptive influence schemes since 2017, with Russia the biggest single source, as culprits strive to stay "under the radar."... Read more

Facebook and Instagram on Wednesday announced plans to let users stop displaying "like" tallies racked up by posts, letting people opt out of seeking status through the approval of others.... Read more

European Union officials unveiled plans Wednesday to beef up the bloc's code of practice on online disinformation, with the aim of preventing digital ad companies from profiting off of "fake news."... Read more

What do misinformation and disease have in common? They spread easily.... Read more

India's government has ordered social media platforms to take down content that refers to the "Indian variant" of the coronavirus.... Read more

Vaxxing, not waxing, is the new must-do before a hot date, with dating apps joining the White House on Friday to promote COVID-19 shots.... Read more

President Joe Biden's cybersecurity executive order, signed May 12, 2021, calls for the federal government to adopt a "zero-trust architecture."... Read more

Extremism on social media is as much a national security risk now as terrorism from Afghanistan or Syria, the head of UK domestic intelligence has warned as he slammed Facebook in particular.... Read more

As an expert in the algorithmic engines that drive online advertising, Harikesh Nair loves to explore that rarified zone where deep scholastic research and real-world business needs overlap.... Read more