Sofia Elizabella Wyciślik-Wilson

The world woke this morning to news that a trunk had been driven through a crowd of people celebrating Bastille Day in Nice, France. With 84 people killed and many seriously injured, people around the world are not only shocked and appalled, but also concerned about friends and family in the area.

As has become worryingly common, Facebook today activated its Safety Check feature to allow people in Nice to let those they know that they are safe. In addition to this, Google and a number of phone providers are offering free calls and texts between the US and France.

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Concerned as ever with diversity and equality, Google recently proposed a new set of emoji including a wider range of images of women in different professions. Today the company makes good on its promise and delivers the goods... with a little help from the powers-that-be.

Launched because "there aren't a lot [of emoji] that highlight the diversity of women's careers", the new emoji portray women in roles that have previously been the domain of man -- at least in pixel form. In all, the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee is adopting more than 100 new emoji after Google's suggestions.

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If you weren't on the ball a few months ago, your OneDrive storage space is about to be slashed. Having previously announced its plans to reduce cloud storage for all OneDrive users, Microsoft relented and said those that already had this amount of storage could keep it... but only if they asked for it.

Anyone who failed to do so will be ruing the day. Today is the day that Microsoft cuts free OneDrive storage from 15GB to just 5GB -- even less than when the cloud service first launched. In addition to this, the 15GB camera roll bonus has been discontinued. So what can you do?

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Internet Explorer has been much-maligned over the years, and Microsoft Edge sees the Redmond company trying to shake off the shackles of the past. Its latest marketing push finds Microsoft claiming that Edge is the best desktop web browser for Netflix viewing.

The reason? In addition to claims about greater battery efficiency, Microsoft's killer blow is that Edge is the only of the main desktop browsers to support 1080p viewing. It might seem like a surprising and audacious claim, but the test bears it out. Microsoft Edge has a serious unique selling point.

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Google has its fingers in lots of messaging pies, and having added SMS support to Hangouts on Android, it wasn’t long before the merging of text and chat conversations was introduced. With the release of Hangouts 11, this changes.

With the new release, merged conversations are now gone -- SMS and chats are kept separate, but you won't lose anything -- perhaps in a bid to push people to its Messenger app to take care of texts. The same release also sees the addition of a long-awaited feature: the ability to send videos in a message.

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Pokémon Go may be proving jaw-droppingly popular, but in the rush to catch 'em all, it seems that users have overlooked something of a privacy issue with the game. It's not unusual for apps and games to request, or require, access to your Google account but there are usually limits in place.

Not so with Pokémon Go. As reported by Search Engine Journal, iOS users have discovered that the game not only requires access to users' Google accounts, it requires full access. This is the highest level of access available to any app and if it is revoked, the game won't work.

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Kim Dotcom is a difficult man to ignore, and he's all set to get right back in your face after lurking in the shadows for a few months. In a series of tweets over the weekend, the German technology troublemaker announced that his file sharing service Megaupload is due to relaunch in 2017 -- on the fifth anniversary of a police raid.

Known as Megaupload 2.0 (remember the 2.0 phenomenon?), the platform is expected to appear on 20 January next year. Dotcom has previously expressed something of a passion for Bitcoin, and this looks set to continue with the relaunch -- complete with 100GB of free storage and on-the-fly encryption.

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Gotta catch 'em all! The Pokémon phenomenon, it seems, did not die. Nintendo suddenly has a surprise hit on its hands in the form of augmented reality title Pokémon Go which is already riding high in the charts. The game has proved so successful, that in the few days since its launch it has been installed on more than 5 percent of Android smartphones.

The international roll-out has been paused while developer Niantic tries to beef up its servers to cope with demand. But while US Pokémon catchers are having a whale of a time, would-be gamers in other parts of the world -- such as the UK and the rest of Europe -- are turning to nefarious sources to grab Pokémon Go APKs. The bad news is that malware writers have already picked up on the title's popularity and developed infected versions.

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It just became significantly harder to mine Bitcoins. The halving event rolled around yesterday, July 9, and means that the reward for mining just dropped by 50 percent. The cryptocurrency is generated by machines around the world 'mining' for new bitcoins.

Rewards of bitcoins are handed out for giving over computing power to process bitcoin transactions. It's a very, very slow way to make money -- and it just got a whole lot slower. While there were previously 25 bitcoins (around $16,000) available globally to miners every 10 minutes, the figure is now just 12.5 bitcoins. But what does this mean for the digital currency?

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PostGhost, the website that describes itself as "an archive of public tweets deleted by politicians, celebrities, and other public figures" has been shut down by Twitter. The website was told that its display of deleted tweets was a violation of the Developer Agreement and Policy.

The site was a relative newcomer, having only been active for less than a week. Political tweets archive Politwoops almost met a similar fate, but the distinction with PostGhost is that it was only concerned with tweets from verified users with 10,000 followers or more -- a group that includes politicians, writers, singers, and other celebrities (major and minor).

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It might be the weekend, but the code monkeys at Microsoft doesn’t let a small detail like that stand in the way of work. The release of Windows 10 Anniversary Update is now within spitting distance, and the Insider builds are being pushed out thick and fast.

Today Dona Sarkar announced the launch of Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 14385 for PC and Mobile. As we're so close to launch day, it should come as no surprise that this is a bug fix release -- but there are plenty of them. There are also some extra performance tweaks thrown in for good measure.

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It was only a matter of time before Facebook's decision to open up live video to everyone was going to result in controversy. Sure enough, earlier this week, the social network became the medium through which the shooting dead of Philando Castile by a police officer was shared with the world. The graphic video quickly became notorious, but then vanished temporarily.

There were suggestions that Facebook was censoring the footage, but the company said that a technical glitch was to blame. But whether the video was censored, collapsed under the weight of traffic, or did succumb to a problem, the killing of Philando Castile on Facebook Live raises many questions about how the platform is used, and Facebook has responded to the incident with an explanation about its censorship policies.

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Continuing in its relentless drive to take over the world of messaging, Facebook Messenger is gaining end-to-end encryption. To start with, the security feature is only rolling out on a 'limited test basis' but if feedback is positive, it will get a wider airing.

Facebook says that the move comes in response to requests for additional security options to protect discussions about sensitive matters, saying that security and privacy experts have been involved in the implementation of the feature.

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With so much focus now placed on privacy and security, you would have thought that the Blackphone from Silent Circle would have been a roaring success. But documents from a court case with former partner Geeksphone reveal that there have been just a handful of sales, and revenue is hundreds of millions of dollars lower than expected.

Silent Circle found itself in court after Geeksphone complained that it had not received a $5 million payment agreed as part of a buyout. Geeksphone had helped to build the original Blackphone, and Silent Circle went on to buy the Spanish company's share before launching the Blackphone 2. But sales were much, much lower than expected, leading the company to describe its hardware business to "be a significant financial drain".

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The UK government is on a mission to protect the young of the country from the dark recesses of the web. And by the darker recesses, what is really meant is porn. The main ISPs have long been required to block access to known piracy sites, but porn is also a concern -- for politicians, at least.

As part of its bid to sanitize and censor the web, Sky -- from the Murdoch stables -- is, as of today, enabling adult content filtering by default for all new customers: Sky Broadband Shield. The company wants to "help families protect their children from inappropriate content", and in a previous experiment discovered -- unsurprisingly -- that content filtering was used by more people if it was automatically enabled.

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