Sofia Elizabella Wyciślik-Wilson

In an attempt to bring aging copyright laws up to date for the digital age, the European Parliament and European Commission have agreed the final text of the EU Copyright Directive.

After several rounds of intense negotiations, it was decided to retain the controversial Article 13 which can be used to block the uploading of content, and Article 11 which has been described as the "link tax". The directive will place the onus on the likes of Google and Facebook to ensure that users do not upload copyrighted content, leading to fears that this could mean the introduction of restrictive upload filters and make life difficult for smaller companies.

A security researcher has discovered a vulnerability in Canonical's snapd package which could be exploited to gain administrator privileges and root access to affected Linux systems. The security issue has been dubbed Dirty_Sock and assigned the code CVE-2019-7304.

Chris Moberly found a privilege escalation vulnerability in the snapd API. This is installed by default in Ubuntu -- under which proofs of concept have been tested and found to work "100% of the time on fresh, default installations of Ubuntu Server and Desktop" -- but may also be present in numerous other Linux distros.

The photo sharing site 500px has revealed details of a security breach that took place in mid-2018.

The company says that its engineering team only became aware of the breach -- which is thought to have taken place around July 5, 2018 -- a few days ago. 500px launched an investigation in conjunction with a third party and police, and says that "an unauthorized party gained access to our systems and acquired partial user data".

Google has announced that it is dramatically narrowing the focus of Android Things, originally conceived as the company's wide-ranging IoT platform.

Now rather than being an OEM tool that can be used to produce just about anything for the Internet of Things, Android Things will instead be focused on just two product lines: smart speakers and smart displays.

Email provider VFEmail has been hit by a huge attack that resulted in all of the data it stores in the US being wiped out.

Describing the attack as "catastrophic", VFEmail revealed that a hacker had breached its security and succeeded in deleted not only primary data systems, but also the backups. The attacker was caught in the act, and it was possible to intervene before damage was caused to servers in other countries. But for VFEmail users whose data was stored in the US, the news is far from good.

It is not news that Gmail has a right-click menu; what is news, however, is the fact that it has been updated so it is now actually useful.

Google has gradually been updating Gmail over the years, and the refreshed context menu provides easy access to more message options. For control freaks, the new menu is a godsend and makes the web-based email tool more like using a desktop email client.

Facebook is under pressure to stem the flow of pseudoscience among its users. The social network has faced criticism and pressure about many issues including the dissemination of fake news and disinformation, and false information spread by anti-vaxxers is the latest target of concerned experts.

There has been much concern about how Facebook could be used to influence elections, but there are growing calls for the social media giant to step in and prevent anti-vaccinations groups from being used to spread false information. Despite medical evidence pointing to not only the efficacy but also the safety of vaccinations, the anti-vaxxer movement has found a home on Facebook which experts say is dangerous.

Mozilla has sent an open letter to Facebook calling on the social network to do more to fight disinformation and asking for increased transparency about political advertising.

The letter -- also signed by 32 other organizations including human rights and press freedom groups -- has been sent to Facebook in the run-up to the 2019 EU Parliamentary Elections. It comes after Mozilla's COO wrote to the European Commission to express her concerns about the lack of transparency at Facebook.

Like PUBG, Fortnite has proved to be a phenomenally successful game, attracting millions of players around the world. With battle royale games faring so well, EA decided to take a slice of the pie, and released Apex Legends, its own free-to-play take on the genre.

In the space of just 72 hours, the game reached a major milestone -- 10 million players. It took Fortnite two weeks to pull in the same number of players.

Who doesn't feel a little nostalgic from time to time? Progress is great, but sometimes it's nice to look back at how things used to be -- even if it's only to laugh at how different and primitive things used to be. The world of computing is no different in this regard.

Last year, developer Felix Rieseberg released Windows 95 as an Electron app to let 90s computer users relive their younger years. Now he's back with a second version of the Windows 95 app, and it's even better than ever -- gaming classics such as Doom and Wolfenstein3D are now included, for starters!

Spotify has updated its Terms of Service agreement, implementing an explicit ban on the use of ad blockers.

While the music streaming service has a decent number of paying users, a large percentage of the userbase stick with free, ad-supported accounts. A proportion of these free users turn to ad blockers, and this is something Spotify has been increasingly trying to clamp down on.

If you have played Fortnite on different consoles, you've very probably asked how you go about merging accounts so you can access all of your Vbucks and collectibles in one place.

Fortnite's initially messy approach to cross-platform gaming meant that many people ended up creating two (or more) accounts in order to be able to play with their friends. Epic Games dramatically improved cross-platform compatibility, but gamers who created multiple accounts were not able to share all of the weapons, currency and other goods collected between these accounts. Now this has changed.

Users of Trakt -- a service for "scrobbling", or tracking the movies and TV shows you watch in the likes of Plex and Kodi -- have received emails from the company notifying them of a data breach that took place way back in 2014.

Trakt says that although the security breach took place over four years ago, it only recently discovered it. The company says that an investigation is underway, but that it believes a "PHP exploit was used to capture data", including users' emails, usernames, encrypted passwords, names and locations.

The German cartel office, the Bundeskartellamt, has imposed new restrictions on how Facebook processes the data it gathers about users of Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp.

Germany's antitrust watchdog has hit the social network with a ban on combining user data it gathers from different sources, unless it has explicit consent from users. While Facebook is still free to gather data about Instagram users and WhatsApp users, this data cannot be automatically combined with data gathered via a users' Facebook account.

A few months after adding background blurring to its Teams tool, Microsoft has brought the same option to Skype on the desktop.

The feature serves two purposes. Firstly it helps to focus attention on the person that is speaking, but secondly -- and perhaps more importantly -- it hides any untidiness (or secrets) that may be going on behind the speaker. It's another push from Microsoft to move people away from Skype Classic to Skype 8.