Microsoft has become the latest member of the Coalition for Better Ads (CBA). The group works with technology companies and trade organizations to help develop an ad ecosystem that works for advertisers without compromising the experience of internet users.

In taking up membership of the CBA, Microsoft is joining Google who has already worked with the organization to develop a selective ad blocker for Chrome due for release next year. Microsoft is also looking to introduce ad blocking into Edge, but the blocker would only discriminate against ads deemed unacceptable by the CBA.

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Recently it was discovered that the Pirate Bay had embedded a JavaScript cryptocurrency miner into the footer of its homepage, and now a popular Chrome extension has been found engaging in similar activity.

The SafeBrowse extension purports to block popup ads and skip ad pages that appear before downloads, but in fact it was secretly running a Coin Hive mining tool in the background. With over 140,000 users, SafeBrowse -- which has now been removed from the Chrome Web Store -- was quietly making an income for its developers through clandestine use of CPU time.

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UK prime minister Theresa May has called on the likes of Microsoft, Google, Twitter and Facebook to act faster to remove terrorism-related and extremist content. At the moment, it takes an average of 36 hours to remove content shared by the likes of Isis, and May wants this slashed to just two hours.

But even this is not enough for the government. It wants technologies to be developed -- or refined -- that will identify this sort of content and prevent it from getting online in the first place. Facebook agrees -- its love of AI is well-known -- but the solution to online extremism is not as simple as saying "technology firms need to do more."

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Digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has resigned from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) because of a move to standardize the Encrypted Media Extension (EME) API for controlling DRM in web browsers.

The EFF is far from being the only group to be unhappy with the W3C for the decision to standardize EME, but this is the first -- and possibly only -- one to have gone as far as resigning as well as filing objections. The group says that it proposed compromises that were ignored, and the opposition of EFF and other W3C members were simply overruled.

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If you are having trouble accessing Outlook.com at the moment, you're not alone. Many people -- particularly in Europe -- are experiencing problems with Microsoft's email service.

Microsoft has confirmed that there is an issue with "load-balancing infrastructure," and investigations are underway to discover the source of the problem. Users affected by the problem say that the messages they try to send remain in the Draft folder rather than reaching the intended recipient.

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The "fake news" moniker may be a relatively recent one, but the phenomenon is not exactly new. Search engines and social media sites have long fought a battle against rogue news sources, and Microsoft's latest attack sees the company adding fact-checking to Bing.

The addition of Fact Check labels means that anyone looking at search results should be able to tell at a glance if a particular news story has been debunked. The label can be applied to sites as a whole as well as individual articles, making it easier for Microsoft to alert people about poor news sources -- although the company does not do any actual fact-checking itself.

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Facebook has today launched Crisis Response, a central hub that provides access to its various crisis response tools such as Safety Check. Over the years, the social network has gradually added more and more tools that serve to help those caught up in a disaster, and those who know them, and the new center pulls all of these into one place.

As well as serving as a central hub, Crisis Response on Facebook is also being bolstered by links to articles and videos posted on the site so users can be kept better informed about a given crisis.

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A security researcher discovered two serious flaws on the HMRC tax website which could have allowed attackers to view, or even edit, tax records. But the researcher, Zemnmez, was astonished not only by the flaws, but also at how hard it was to report them.

In a lengthy blog post entitled "how to hack the uk tax system, i guess," Zemnmez gives details of his findings. He also reveals that it took no fewer than 57 days to successfully report the issues so they could be looked into.

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Frequent flyers will soon be able to stay online whenever they fly after Virgin Atlantic revealed details of a new in-flight Wi-Fi connectivity plan.

The airline has confirmed its entire fleet will now be able to get Wi-Fi during flights around the world, with all 39 aircraft now connected, even on transatlantic flights and those carried out by Virgin's US partner network Delta Air Lines.

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Facebook ad metrics are facing scrutiny after it transpired the social network is overestimating the potential audience advertisers can expect to reach. A senior analyst from Pivotal Research Group points out that Facebook's Adverts Manager tool suggests demographic figures that exceed official numbers.

For example, advertisers are told that they could hit up to 41 million 18- to 24-year-olds in the US, but according to recent census data only 31 million 18- to 24-year-olds live in the US. The discrepancy is not isolated, as there are similar instances of inflated potential reach suggestions for various age groups in the US, UK and Canada.

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If you've ever thought that Facebook knows a little too much about you, here's something that's going to do nothing to dislodge that fear from your mind. Using a combination of government census information and data from satellites, the social networking giant has mapped the location of people in 23 countries around the world.

In all, Facebook knows where millions of people live down to an accuracy of 5 meters. All of this has been made possible by a mapping technology developed by Facebook to help it see how people are distributed across the globe to determine how best to supply internet to different parts of the world.

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Nine years after going open source, Reddit is archiving the source code for its website and mobile apps. The source code will still be accessible, but will no longer be updated -- Reddit cites concerns about competition as one of the reasons for the change in direction.

But Reddit is not completely turning its back on open source. While it will no longer be possible to access the full source code, it will still be possible to access a limited number of small codebases -- such as baseplate, rollingpin and mcsauna. The site says, "those who have been paying attention will realize that this isn't really a change to how we're doing anything but rather making explicit what's already been going on," but users are not convinced by the explanation.

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When you type a URL into your browser’s address bar and hit enter, there will be a slight delay while the software asks a DNS (Domain Name System) server for the IP address of the site in order to be able to load it.

Switching to a faster DNS server could shave milliseconds off the lookup time, and ultimately speed up your browsing. You can do this manually, or there’s a simpler option.

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Redesigns are tricky beasts, almost inevitably dividing opinion and leading to questions about why things couldn't have just been left alone. Running the risk of a double whammy of complaints, YouTube has rolled out not only a redesign of its sites, but also a brand new logo.

Both the desktop and mobile versions of YouTube have been treated to a new look. It's the redesign that has been beta tested on users for a few months, and with a few extra tweaks, the company is ready to give everyone access to it. While a fresh lick of paint for the site and apps was expected, the new logo is rather more of a surprise.

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If you have yet to be granted access to Facebook's trip-down-memory-lane feature, On This Day, now you're in luck. The social network has opened up the feature to all of its two billion users.

At the same time, Facebook is introducing some interesting extras, and taking steps to ensure that more negative memories are not surfaced for you. On top of this, there are new seasonal memories and new ways to celebrate friendships.

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