Within any given country, while you might have a choice of different internet providers, the speeds they offer and the prices they charge tend to be broadly similar.

UK-based comparison site Compare the Market has done some interesting research looking at the costs and speeds of broadband around the world. So prepare to be made jealous, or smug, depending on where you live.

A detailed report about fake news by a parliamentary committee in the UK has accused Facebook of being a "digital gangster" that has deliberately broken privacy and competition laws. The report by the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee calls for the social network to be subject to statutory regulation.

The report comes after an 18-month investigation, and it is damning of Facebook and its executives in general, and Mark Zuckerberg in particular. Criticism is levelled at the lack of action taken against fake news and misinformation on the social network, and there is concern that current election laws were not enough to prevent sites such as Facebook being used by hostile foreign agents to interfere with the democratic process.

In recent years it seems that there has been an astonishing increase in the number of Flat Earthers -- people who believe that the Earth is flat, and anything that suggests otherwise is a conspiracy. The thinking is that, for some reason, NASA, international government, scientists and so on are all desperate to convince people that the Earth is round when it is in fact flat.

While Flat Earther numbers are still relatively small, the increasing membership of this school of thought in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary is both confusing and worrying. So just what is going on? The rise in internet usage has been blamed for the spread of fake news, conspiracy theories and all manner of bizarre ideas, and a new study has concluded that one particular site is responsible for the increasing support for the Flat Earth theory. That site is YouTube.

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.

In an increasingly-connected world where data is collected and shared, privacy has become ever-more important to people. If you are of that mind, you may have enabled the Do Not Track (DNT) setting in your web browser in the hope that it will stop the websites you visit from tracking your online activities. Bad news: it probably makes no difference whatsoever.

This might be something you knew already, but research by privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo -- which famously does respect DNT requests -- found than more than three-quarters of people were not aware of that that many sites ignore DNT settings.

New research commissioned by Google, carried out by Harris Poll and released to coincide with Safer Internet Day suggests there is a gap between perception and reality when it comes to online security.

The majority of people (69 percent) give themselves an A or B when it comes to protecting their online accounts -- only five percent give themselves a D or an F. In fact, most people (59 percent) believe that their accounts are safer from online threats than the average person and 61 percent say they are too smart to fall for a phishing scam.

Three months ago, Flickr announced sweeping changes to its different accounts, the most significant of which was the news that anyone with a free account would be limited to storing 1,000 photos online.

If you are a Flickr user with a free account, you may well have already noticed that you are unable to upload any more photos -- the new limit kicked on in January 8. But in under two weeks, Flickr will not only prevent you from uploading photos that tip you over the magic number, it will start actively deleting files to keep you within the 1,000 limit. If you want to keep your photos, you'll have to upgrade to a professional account or -- as we'll show you -- download them.

It has been a busy time at Mozilla recently, with the relaunch of Mozilla Labs and the closure of the Firefox Test Program. The second piece of news -- coupled with the shelving of certain changes to Firefox -- led to speculation about the future of Firefox Screenshots, but Mozilla has come forward to try to calm these fears.

The company says that the screengrabbing tool -- which has become loved by many users since it launched nearly a year and half ago -- is here to stay. It's not all good news, however. One major feature is getting the axe: the ability to save screenshots to a Firefox-hosted server.

While the BitTorrent protocol is, by its very nature, decentralized, the same cannot be said of torrent search engines such as the Pirate Bay. Torrent-Paradise, however, is a little different.

A new version of the site uses the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) to provide decentralized torrent searching. The idea behind how the system works is very similar to the way BitTorrent makes it possible to download files without the need for a central host.

With the US government shutdown in its third week, President Trump continues to try to convince both his own party and the Democrats to agree to fund one of his campaign promises -- a wall on the southern border.

So far, the shutdown has seen national parks and more left unstaffed, and today is the first payday on which hundreds of thousands of federal workers will not receive a paycheck. Another side effect of the shutdown is that numerous government websites are offline as their TLS certificates have expired, and no one is available to renew them.

Netflix has millions of users around the world, but how many of these are actually paying customers? Many of us either know (or are) people who share their Netflix account with friends and family, or leech off the one person they know that's willing to pay for a subscription.

But Netflix free rides could be coming to an end. At CES, UK-based firm Synamedia revealed artificial intelligence software that could be used by Netflix and other companies to detect and block the sharing of account credentials.

Responding to a forum post that accused it of "fingerprinting users", privacy-centric search engine DuckDuckGo says that fears are unfounded and that it is not tracking its users.

The allegation was made after the Firefox extension CanvasBlocker showed a warning to users. The suggestion of fingerprinting -- gathering as much information as possible about a user through their browser to create a unique identifier that can be used for tracking -- is clearly something that would seem to sit in opposition to what DuckDuckGo claims to stand for. The company CEO says the accusation is simply wrong.

An increasing number of apps and websites are gaining dark modes, often simply for the sake of aesthetics, but also because of power-saving considerations. Having added eye-saving dark modes to numerous Android apps, Google has confirmed that it is doing the same for the Windows 10 version of Chrome.

While there is no particular time frame in which we can expect to see Chrome's dark mode, a Chrome developer has confirmed that the feature is in progress.

A number of major US newspapers -- including the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Wall Street Journal and New York Times -- have been hit by a cyberattack that is said to originate from another country.

Malware was first detected on Thursday by Tribune Publishing, the owner of some of the affected titles, but unsuccessful attempts at quarantining meant that there was disruption well into Saturday. The Department of Homeland Security is currently investigating the incident which is not thought to have exposed any personal customer details.

It may well just be coincidental timing, but shortly after DuckDuckGo accused Google of personalizing search results even for people not signed into their account, Google has handed control of the Duck.com domain over to its rival.

The concession comes after years of frustration for DuckDuckGo, with Google having acquired Duck.com after buying On2 Technologies (previously The Duck Corporation) in 2010. The privacy-focused search engine has long asked Google to point the address at its website, and this has finally happened. Duck.com now redirects to DuckDuckGo.