Facebook today announced that it is making another change to the way it determines which stories are displayed in News Feeds. As well as factoring in how many people have liked or commented on a story, the social network will now also take into account how long people spend reading individual articles.

But it's not quite as simple as saying that stories people spend a while looking at are the most popular. Some lengthy visits are the fault of slow connections, for example. Equally, it is not safe to assume that only heavily liked and commented articles are the most read -- there are some stories that do not lend themselves to liking and commenting. Today's change aims to strike a balance between different weightings.

Playing video games is a very fun hobby. Hell, for some people, playing them is a job; yes, professional competitive gaming is a real thing. You know what else is cool? Watching other people play. While it was an absurd notion years ago, nowadays, people enjoy being spectators to another person's gameplay. I watch Pewdiepie, like, every day.

The most famous platform for streaming gameplay is Twitch, which is why Amazon bought the service for a ton of cheddar. Not to be outdone, however, Google today announces its own streaming service for gamers -- the unimaginatively named YouTube Gaming. While I do not expect a mass exodus from Twitch, Amazon's service will certainly lose some of its luster as a result. Interestingly, it will be run by former pro-gamer, Ryan Wyatt -- aka Fwiz -- most widely known as the former love interest of Justine Ezarik -- aka iJustine.

Uber, the San Francisco-based private taxi firm, is putting its passengers in grave danger. The company uses a computerized driver sign-up system that can be easily fooled into authorizing drives with fake insurance papers.  The transport network exploded onto the scene a few years ago, and a whistleblower claims that it is all too easy to cheat the system making it possible for virtually anyone to sign up to be an Uber driver.

The vulnerability was found to have been exploited in London where there are around 15,000 Uber drivers in operation. The scam has been demonstrated by The Guardian who worked with a whistleblower to fraudulently sign up as a driver. It was achieved using fabricated insurance papers from a made up company with a fake letterhead.

Microsoft released Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 10130 to the Fast ring two weeks ago, but it came with a couple of major bugs that meant it wasn’t suitable for all. Last week Microsoft pushed out ISOs of the build, for people who were having trouble updating to the new version through Windows Update, but it still wasn’t deemed stable enough for Slow ring Insiders.

Well, the good news is if you’re on the Slow ring you can finally update Windows 10 to Build 10130, as Microsoft is pushing the update out to everyone now. And your patience is rewarded with news that the update comes with some useful fixes.

Symantec has announced public betas for Norton Security 2016 and Norton Security with Backup 2016.

This isn’t a major update, as the company admits, saying: "None of the changes we’ve made will be directly visible to you". There are just a few under-the-hood changes to improve performance, while the package is now fully Windows 10-ready.

I was recently reading in Forbes Magazine that the U.S. has had the best first quarter for mergers since 2000 with $414.7 billion (£267 billion), and it was the best first quarter ever for Asian (non-Japan) M&A with $199.7 billion (£128 billion).

In fact, the first quarter of 2015 will go down as the richest first quarter for mergers and acquisitions since Q1 2007. According to data from Thomson Reuters there has already been more than $843 billion (£543 billion) in global M&A activity this year. That’s 23.3 percent higher than the $694 billion (£447 billion) of M&A activity in the first quarter of last year, and nearly 72 percent higher than Q1 2013.

Acronis has unveiled the first public beta of Acronis True Image 2016 for Windows XP+ and Mac.

The headline addition this time is continuous mobile cloud backup for up to 10 iOS or Android devices.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is about to become a lot more environmentally friendly after announcing the construction of an 80 megawatt solar farm.

The green proposal will generate 170,000 megawatt hours (MWh) of solar power each year, the equivalent of approximately 15,000 US homes.

UK consumer watchdog Which? tested a range of popular tablets and discovered that when it comes to speed, there’s only one champion, and that’s Microsoft’s Surface Pro 3.

It turns out it wasn’t only Microsoft’s slate that bested Apple’s tablets in the speed stakes. The iPad mini 3, which sells for £319 in the UK, was beaten by the Tesco Hudl 2 which costs just £99.

It’s no secret that Chrome for Mac hogs more resources than Safari. The browser by Google has been receiving heat from experts and users alike for shortening their laptop's battery life by 2-3 hours. The good news is that the company finally seems committed to resolving these glitches.

Earlier this month the Mountain View-based giant took its first major step at bringing improvements to its browser when it announced that Chrome will begin to automatically pause flash content on web-pages if a user hasn’t looked at it in a while. The company is now sharing other efforts it is making to improve Chrome.

NTFS permissions are a great way to control exactly what users can access on your system, at least in theory. So it’s a shame that their standard Windows interface is so complex and tedious, yet still doesn’t give you access to all the features you might need,

NTFS Permissions Tools is a free portable utility which makes it easier to perform some common security tasks, and adds a few expert-level bonus features as well.

One-hundred and thirty-three in a series. Welcome to this week's overview of the best apps and games released for Windows in the past seven days.

The Windows 10 release is less than two months away, at least for home PCs and tablets. If you are running Windows 7 or 8.1, you may be interested in reserving the upgrade for your system, or removing the notification if you don't plan to upgrade.

Apple’s recently announced streaming music service is being viewed by many as a potential Spotify killer. Spotify might have more than 20 million paying subscribers and over 75 million active users, but Apple is a force that cannot be ignored, and being late to the party means nothing.

So should Spotify be concerned about the forthcoming battle with Apple? Unquestionably. Although, if new research is to be believed, it’s Apple that should be worrying the most.

Most marketers are focused on providing a personalized experience for the customer. However, many still rely on email communication. Whilst this is still an effective delivery method there’s an inevitable time lag in the message arriving by which time it could be out of date.

That delay may be a thing of the past as eCommerce specialist Reflektion is launching Right Time Messaging. This has the ability to hyper personalize emails to individual recipients right up to the moment the message is opened.

If you have experienced random reboots with your Lumia Windows Phone 8.1 smartphone, you should know that Microsoft is now rolling out a software update specifically to fix this annoying problem.

The software update, so far, seems to target only Lumia 730, Lumia 830, Lumia 930 and Lumia 1520 smartphones. Even though Windows Phone 8.1 Update 2 has long been available, the software update for the aforementioned handsets does not include the latest official version of the tiled smartphone operating system.