It has been difficult to avoid talk of Kodi for one reason or another recently, and it's something that's likely to be on the lips of fans of UK football now the 2017/18 Premier League season has started up.

Watching pirated streams of football matches through IPTV providers and other services has long been a popular use for Kodi, and the English Premier League (EPL) has had enough. The organization previously obtained a High Court order blocking illegal streams in real-time, and a more recently obtained injunction extended this ability. With the new season now under way, football fans are discovering that they now need a VPN like IPVanish to get their fix.

HBO has had something of a rough time of things lately, suffering not only a hack that led to a series of leaks, but also a Game of Thrones leak via a distribution partner. Police in India have now arrested four people in connection with the leak of the episode The Spoils of War.

Shortly after the leak occurred, HBO's distribution partner Star India admitted it was the source of the episode. Now three employees and one former employee of Prime Focus Technology -- a company which processes Game of Thrones ready for streaming on Hotstar -- are being questioned in relation to the leak.

Looking to compete with the likes of eBay and Craigslist, Facebook's Marketplace serves as a place for people to go to buy and sell locally. Following on from success in the US, UK, Australia and other countries, the social network is expanding the exchange further into Europe.

In total, Facebook's Marketplace is spreading to 17 European countries, meaning that it is now available in a total of 24 countries.

Despite the age of its Material Design, Google is being surprisingly slow in rolling out the look to its products. While the UI is found pretty much universally in Android apps, the appearance on the desktop is happening at a rather more leisurely pace.

Chrome 59 sees the appearance of Material Design, and now Google is testing the look in the desktop version of Google Calendar. The design is undergoing testing through Google's Trusted Tester program, but images have leaked out giving us a glimpse of what's to come.

UK payment processor Worldpay is the subject of a £9.3 billion ($12.1 billion) takeover by US rival Vantiv. The merged company will be known simply as Worldpay and will be headquartered in Cincinnati, but run from New York and London.

In the deal, Vantiv is paying £8 billion ($10.4 billion) for Worldpay, plus an additional £1.3 billion ($1.7 billion) to cover debts. It is one of the biggest takeovers of a UK company since the Brexit vote of 2016.

Facebook has introduced a ban on address cloaking, a technique used to bypass review procedures and display content that violates the social network's policies.

Cloaking is used to disguise the true nature of posts and ads from reviewers, so they will see different contents to real-world users when they click through. Facebook says that it will be working with other companies to find ways to fight cloaking and implement punishments. AI will be called upon to do some of the legwork.

During its Q3 earnings report, Disney announced plans to launch its own streaming service in 2019. As part of this shift in business, the company will end its distribution agreement with Netflix.

The company also announced that it has agreed to acquire an additional 42 percent stake in BAMTech. The $1.58 billion makes Disney a majority stakeholder and will give it greater control over the ESPN-branded multi-sport video streaming service due to launch in early 2018.

The impact of the recent HBO hack continues to be felt. We've already seen scripts and spoilers leak online and now there's a new cache of leaks along with a ransom demand from those responsible.

The data dump includes details of the script for episode five of the current season, and a video directed at HBO CEO Richard Plepler in which the unknown hackers -- who sign off as "Mr. Smith" -- give the company three days to pay up a ransom in Bitcoin.

The BBC has announced plans to roll out a new font across its network of websites in a cost-saving measure. The corporation has designed a new font called BBC Reith, named after Lord Reith, the founder of the BBC.

The beeb says that it will be able to save an undisclosed sum of money by ditching the fonts it currently uses as it will no longer have to pay license fees for them. That sound you can hear is the shrill ring of irony as a corporation that charges a license fee tries to avoid paying a license fee...

Season seven of Game of Thrones has been something of a disaster for HBO. Not in terms of interest or viewing figures, of course, but in terms of hacking, leaks, spoilers and piracy.

Last night saw the official airing of episode four of season seven but this particular episode, The Spoils of War, leaked some days ago. Distribution partner Star India has admitted the leak came from its website, and HBO has called in the FBI to investigate the hack that lead to a number of episode and script leaks.

The fourth episode of the latest season of Game of Thrones has leaked online before its official air date. Download links to the episode -- The Spoils of War -- have been shared on Reddit and Twitter, and the video appears to be a low-quality internal version.

Earlier this week, HBO was the victim of a hack in which 1.5TB of data was stolen. In addition to full episodes of other shows, there were scripts and spoilers for Game of Thrones, and these were subsequently leaked. This time around, however, it does not seem that the hack was the source of the S07E04 leak.

This week's hack of HBO led to the release of stolen episodes of Ballers and Room 104, and the threat of Game of Thrones leaks. Now the hackers have made good on their threat and uploaded scripts and episode summaries for yet-to-be-aired episodes, and speculation is rife that it is just a matter of time before episodes hit torrent sites such as The Pirate Bay.

Season seven of the show is just getting underway, and details of episodes three and four have now been published online. Other files have also been leaked following the hack, including log in credentials for HBO staff.

The UK government has been urged to take urgent action against poor broadband speeds across the UK in a new report by a cross-party group of MPs.

Millions of users across the UK are still not getting the minimum standard of internet connectivity needed to enjoy the benefits of modern networks, according to the Broadbad 2.0 report, which has been signed by 57 MPs from all of the three main parties.

While the UK enjoys a fairly decent level of broadband coverage, there are still plenty of people struggling with relatively slow connections. It's a problem that's particularly common in rural areas, and BT has offered to stump up £600 million to ensure that more rural homes have decent connections by 2020.

The UK government had already indicated that it wants every home in the country to have access to an internet connection of at least 10Mbps and plans to introduce rules that will permit customers to "demand" such speeds. BT's investment -- through its Openreach subsidiary -- would bring 10Mbps+ connections to a further 1.4 million rural homes, and would eliminate the need for new rules from the government.

It is now two years since Google launched its open source compression algorithm, Brotli. Microsoft has already shown some interest in the technology, adding support to Edge late last year to speed up the loading of web pages. Having conducted rigorous tests with Brotli compression, Microsoft is now ready to bring it to .NET.

Microsoft's tests show that Brotli is at least as good as Deflate and gzip, in terms of compression levels and the amount of time it takes to compress and decompress. It is because of these results that Microsoft is happy to launch .NET support for Brotli compression "as an alpha-quality preview."