Whitelists have traditionally been used as a way of limiting what users can do, but they're time consuming to maintain and keep up to date.

Florida-based Terra Privacy is addressing this with a system where destinations are continually inserted and removed from the whitelist in real-time, in concert with the user's activities.

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It's not all that long since Facebook introduced a fundraiser feature, making it possible for users to ask others on the social network for money for a particular cause. Now the company has expanded the personal fundraiser feature so that it can be used for more things.

Specifically, Facebook now permits people to raise money in two additional categories: sports and community. With the community category covering "neighborhood services, community improvements or environmental improvements," fundraisers have now become much wider-ranging.

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As names go, it's clear that little thought went into Google's new Data Gif Maker. It's a simple tool that lets you create animated GIFs to compare statistics about two different topics. Google says the free tool is aimed at journalists, but anyone with a website is able to use it however they want.

The idea is simple. Rather than just saying Android is more popular than iPhone, you can let a graphic do the work for you. Data Gif Maker produces bar charts that we have all become familiar with during elections, giving an easily-interpreted visual representation of basic stats -- but these are animated to make them more eye-catching.

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The way Facebook's algorithm's work -- and the way we generally make and maintain friendships -- means that expressing our view on social media is very much like shouting into an echo chamber. The people we follow and who follow us are likely to have broadly similar views on many topics, and Facebook has long worsened the problem by suggesting content we might like to read.

But this is about to change. Not that Facebook is going to stop suggesting content, rather it is redesigning the Trending topics page. What this means is that you're going to see news from a wider range of sources, decreasing the chances that you'll only see articles that precisely mirror your existing views.

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Recently leaked documents gave a unique insight into just what can be posted on Facebook, and what moderators are expected to censor. In response to this, the company's head of global policy management, Monika Bickert, has written a lengthy statement in which she tries to explain how Facebook choose what to censor.

While some of Facebook's policies are well known, this is not true of all of them, and this is not without reason. Bickert explains: "We don't always share the details of our policies, because we don’t want to encourage people to find workaround." She says that Facebook faces a difficult task in determining whether a post that is reported should be removed or not.

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At the moment, Facebook appears to be more concerned with keeping fake news out of users' news feeds and clamping down on clickbait and propaganda, but there has also been a lot of interest recently in how the social network moderates -- or censors -- content posted by its users. A leak of what has been dubbed The Facebook Files gives a fascinating insight into how the company moderates content, shedding light on just what its secret internal guidelines are.

Some of the rules are surprising -- livestream of self-harm, for instance, will not be censored, still images of animal abuse are fine -- others less so -- promotion of terrorism and terrorist groups is not permitted, ditto direct threats to someone's life (although the wording of the threat is important). With nearly 2 billion users, Facebook employs an incredibly small team of moderators, and the leaked documents show they have a very tough time.

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Facebook recently announced that it wants to do more to cut down on the amount of spam and clickbait that appears in users' News Feeds. Now the social networking company is putting the wheels in motion, working on updates that will help it to identify such content.

In the crosshairs are two different types of clickbait headline: those that exaggerate information, and those that leave out key pieces of information in a bid to get readers to click through. Facebook is also paying more attention to individual posts rather than focusing on the overall output of accounts and pages.

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Fire up the Twitter app on your phone or tablet, or visit the Twitter website, and you'll probably be greeted by a message inviting you to check your settings. And you may well want to do so. Twitter is introducing key changes to its privacy policy which will enable it to use more personal data to personalize the user experience. In other words, ads and data sharing.

At the same time, the company is adding new controls which enable you to stop tailoring content to you based on your location, interests and other data. A new Your Twitter Data is a nod to increased transparency which not only shows you what data Twitter is storing about you, but allows you to control how it is used -- to a certain extent.

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In the US, May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and Facebook is using this to raise awareness of the tools it offers for those in need of help. The social network says that it wants to help people connect with the help they need to promote good mental health and well-being.

The company is also expanding its suicide prevention tools -- something it has offered for a decade now -- by working with new partners. The latest addition to the fold is The Trevor Project to help offer support to LGBTQ youth, and Facebook also says that its overall arsenal of tools has been improved by advancements in technology.

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Just a couple of weeks since a leak of season five of Orange is the New Black was held to ransom, the same is now happening with the upcoming Pirates of the Caribbean 5. Yesterday Disney CEO Bob Iger revealed that hackers had stolen one of the company's movies, and it has since transpired that it is the upcoming Johnny Depp flick.

Subtitled "Dead Men Tell No Tales", Pirates of the Caribbean 5 is due to hit the big screen next week, and hackers are demanding a ransom from Disney to avert a leak ahead of the official launch. This is the latest move in the world of piracy that shows a marked shift from the previous aim of release groups simply wanting to be the first to push out a decent quality rip of a movie.

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E-signature and security firm DocuSign has confirmed a data breach in which attackers gained access to a database containing customer email addresses. The company says that no other data was revealed in the security breach, but it led to a large phishing campaign.

Attackers used the stolen email addresses to spam people with emails containing an infected Microsoft Word document. The company insists that its core service remains secure, but coming in the wake of the WannaCry ransomware attack, people around the world are on high alert.

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When it's not being accused of being used for propaganda or peddling fake news, Facebook is often criticized for being home to meaningless clickbait that exists only to generate ad revenue. As part of an on-going drive to make people's News Feeds more useful and pleasant to use, the social network is clamping down on what it refers to as "links to low-quality web page experiences."

Facebook wants to cut back on content that is "misleading, sensational and spammy" and links to web pages that contain "little substantive content and that is covered in disruptive, shocking or malicious ads." Starting right now, you should start to see fewer of these links.

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Just yesterday we wrote about the repeated closure of an atheist Facebook group by the social network. Now, in a similar act that has more than a slight whiff of censorship to it, Facebook has "unpublished" the page of Women On Web, a group that puts women who live in places that have abortion restrictions in contact with doctors.

The doctors that women are connected with can provide them with abortion pills, and it seems that because of this the group, Women On Web, has been found by Facebook to be engaged in the "promotion or encouragement of drug use". The group describes itself as "a place for the pro-abortion rights, pro-choice, and reproductive justice communities to engage in discussion and share news."

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In today’s era of globalization and ever increasing interconnectedness, the demand for affordable connectivity is growing around the world. The ability to have access to an affordable means of communication is essential for economic and social development across the globe.

Today, we take for granted the free access to information almost anywhere and at any time. Thanks to mobile connectivity we are able to communicate with people across the world at the tap of our fingertips.

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Within the next few weeks the BBC is planning to introduce password protection to iPlayer. The system is intended to prevent people from using the streaming TV catch-up service without paying a licence fee.

The corporation says that it does not plan to introduce "mass surveillance techniques or ask internet providers for IP addresses," but is merely interested in ensuring people comply with the law. The system should also help the BBC to reduce the number of people from outside the UK using iPlayer for free.

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