Articles about Internet

At the end of this month, SETI@home is closing down after two decades of alien hunting.

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence was an early example of distributed computing, using spare processing cycles from computers around the world to analyze signals from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico and the Green Bank telescope in West Virginia. Now the project has gathered enough data and is going into hibernation, rendering the famous screensaver useless.

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Firefox users in the US will soon have DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) enabled by default. Mozilla is in the process of rolling out the privacy- and security-focused feature after an intensive period of testing.

DoH is an option for anyone outside of the US, but it will have to be manually enabled. Once enabled, DNS lookups are routed through Cloudflare or NextDNS using an encrypted HTTPS connection, hiding it from third parties such as your ISP.

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Having previously contented itself with offering up algorithm-based suggestions about what you might like to watch next, Netflix has introduced a new feature that lets you see what other people are enjoying.

New lists of the top 10 films and series let you see what is currently popular on the streaming platform. Netflix has chosen to provide top 10 lists based on country, so you'll only see lists of the ten most popular series and movies in your country rather than globally.

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Google has released a Firefox version of its Lighthouse browser extension, giving developers an easy way to test the performance of websites and web apps.

The open source extension makes use of the PageSpeed Insights API, and the new release brings Firefox in line with Chrome which has had a version of the extension for a few years now. The ultimate aim is to make it easier for developers to improve app and page performance by encouraging better practices.

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The UK government has long wanted to police the internet, and now it has expressed a desire for Ofcom to regulate social media.

The government would like to give the telecoms watchdog greater powers to enable it to serve as regulator for the likes of Facebook, Google, Twitter, Snapchat and TikTok. The aim is to protect internet users from "harmful and illegal content" while maintaining free speech.

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Microsoft has introduced a new feature to its Edge browser that blocks "potentially unwanted apps" from being downloaded.

At the moment, the security feature is available in the beta version of Microsoft Edge, but it will also be making its way to the stable version of Chromium-based Edge later this month. Strangely, Microsoft has chosen not to switch on the feature by default.

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Proton Technologies has announced that it is open sourcing its VPN tool, ProtonVPN.

The Swiss firm says that not only is it releasing the source code for its VPN tool on all platforms, but also that it has conducted an independent security audit. Created by CERN scientists, ProtonVPN has amassed millions of users since it launched in 2017 and the decision to open source the tool gives users and security exports the opportunity to analyze the tool very closely.

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Microsoft-related news over the last few days has been all about Windows 7 reaching end-of-life, but today marks the day that the company starts to push the Chromium-based version of Edge to Windows 10 users after beta testing. For businesses and organizations that do not feel ready to make the transition just yet, there is no need to panic.

Microsoft says there are no plans to push the browser to commercial or enterprise devices, and there's a Blocker Toolkit available to disable automatic delivery of Chromium-based Microsoft Edge, anyway. But for Home and Pro users, there is likely to be disappointment for anyone hoping that the rollout of the stable version of the browser would mean it was feature complete. There are in fact several things missing.

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Back in October last year, Yahoo announced that not only was Yahoo Groups closing down, but all data was going to be deleted.

The company encouraged anyone who wanted to safeguard content to put in a data download request by the middle of December. As this was a short deadline there were numerous complaints and requests for more time. Yahoo obliged and offered an extension... but the clock is ticking down fast.

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When Mozilla released Firefox 72 yesterday, users were happy to find that the company had tamed the popup messages that ask whether a website should be allowed to send notifications. Now, with Chrome 80, Google has done the same.

Google notes that while the option to receive notifications from sites can be useful, they are "also a common complaint as many websites request the notification permission on first visit rather than at contextually relevant moments in the user's journey". But rejoice, for there is a solution!

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When Chrome crashes, a message reading Aw, Snap! appears -- and it's not particularly helpful. Mindful of this, Google is going to introduce error codes to the browser to help users determine what has gone wrong.

The idea is similar to the blue screen of death (BSoD) that will be familiar to many Windows users. It's currently being tested in the Canary build of Chrome 81, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the error codes will appear in the final build of this version number.

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As we entered 2020, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) came into force, giving residents of California GDPR-like rights and protection. One of the rights afforded to people by the new law is to request that companies delete their user-specific data.

To comply with CCPA, Mozilla has announced that Firefox 72 -- due for release next week -- will include a new option that enables users to request the deletion of desktop telemetry. Although CCPA is only applicable in California, the new setting will be made available to Firefox users around the world.

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The inventor of the world wide web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has launched a new initiative with the bold aim of transforming the web for the better, avoiding what he sees as the very real risk of it becoming a "digital dystopia".

The Contract for the Web is the work of 80 organizations and sets out a number of key principles that will help to bring global internet access while simultaneously fighting problems such as fake news, privacy invasion and political manipulation. In all, there are just nine principles underpinning the vision; three for governments, three for companies, and three for citizens.

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Joining the likes of Mozilla and Google, Microsoft has announced that it will support DNS over HTTPS (DoH).

The company says that the adoption of encrypted DNS is important for the overall health of the internet ecosystem. It goes on to set out a number of principles that will be at the heart of adopting DoH in the Windows DNS client.

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Social media has evolved over the years in ways that few could have predicted. The likes of Facebook and Twitter are used not only for keeping in touch with friends and family, but also for keeping up to date with news.

But there are endless problems with current social networks, with ads and fake or misleading news being serious problems and irritants. Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, has launched a new social network called WT:Social. It is free from ads and has a news focus. Importantly, users are able to edit headlines which are incorrect or deceptive.

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