President Trump's signing of bill overturning the FCC's planned internet privacy protections, allowing ISPs to track and sell consumers' online information to third parties with greater ease has generated a storm among privacy advocates.

It also prompted AnchorFree, the company behind the Hotspot Shield VPN, to carry out a survey of over 2,000 US consumers to gauge sentiment toward the internet and privacy.

It’s time to replace the traditional VPN and regain trust of your endpoints with a more secure and easier approach to remote access. VPNs have typically been the go-to solution for access to internal applications, with one-third of access requests to corporate networks coming from outside the firewall.

However, VPNs come with security drawbacks, including the increased risk of unauthorized remote access to sensitive data. Typically, they grant access at the network level, meaning every user with VPN rights can access the same applications that any other user can, which is a risky practice.

Twitter continues to place ever-increasing importance on video on its network, and the company has announced a new batch of partners that will bring a host of live-streamed programming to the service.

There are 16 streaming partners in total, including Bloomberg which will bring a 24-hour rolling news services to Twitter. Other partners include Live Nation which will deliver live concert performances, and NBA, PGA and MLB to cater for the sports side of things.

Like Google, Facebook places great importance on advertising. The social network not only earns money from ads itself, but also allows companies and individuals to do so by displaying ads in videos. Pirates were quick to spot an easy way to earn money -- steal someone else's popular video and watch the ad revenue roll in.

Now Facebook is fighting back in a way that has already been used to some extent by YouTube. There is a new "claim ad earnings" option in the Rights Manager tool which enables the owner of a particular video to bag the ad revenue when their material is pirated. But the update to Rights Manager are more far-reaching than this.

It's something that many people have expected for some time, and now we know that it's true. Facebook has admitted that governments around the world have used the social network to spread propaganda and try to influence the outcome of elections.

In the run-up to the US election, there was speculation that powerful groups had been making use of Facebook to influence voters by spreading fake news. Now, in a white paper, Facebook reveals that through the use of fake accounts, targeted data collection and false information, governments and organizations have indeed been using the social network to control the news, shape the political landscape, and create different narratives and outcomes.

Today Facebook publishes its Global Government Requests Report, revealing just how many data requests the social network has received from governments around the world. This time around, the report covers the second half of 2016, and it shows a mixed-bag of figures.

While the number of items that had to be restricted due to contravention of local laws dropped, the number of government data requests increased by 9 percent compared to the previous six months. Facebook is well-aware that it faces scrutiny and criticism for its willingness to comply with data requests, and the company tries to allay fears by saying: "We do not provide governments with "back doors" or direct access to people's information."

If your telecom's poor connectivity is preventing you from working from home, you're not alone. There are four million Brits suffering from the same woes, according to new research from uSwitch.com, the price comparison and switching service.

In the past year, almost half (43 percent) of employees in the UK have worked from home at least once. Among the younger workforce, those aged 18 - 34, the percentage jumps to 55. Yet, 58 percent have suffered from slow speeds and poor call quality. The problems were so pervasive that 46 percent of those with issues believe they can no longer work from home until something changes.

The fight against fake news continues, with Google announcing not only changes to search algorithms to help prevent false information from rising to the surface, but also new tools to allow users to report "unexpected, inaccurate or offensive" results.

While the algorithm tweaks should impact on general search results, the reporting tools have been designed for Google's Autocomplete predictions and Featured Snippets which have been problematic in recent months. Updated algorithms should help to ensure more authoritative pages receive greater prominence, while low-quality content is demoted.

Donald Trump is obsessed with the notion of FAKE NEWS. Whether his definition is the same as everyone else's is open to debate, but there is a genuine problem with the spread of propaganda, nonsense, and stories which are clearly fabricated. Google and Facebook and other big names from the world of tech have started to fight back, and now it's the turn of Jimmy Wales.

The Wikipedia founder is setting up WikiTribune, an online news publication which focuses on fact-checking, using a combination of paid journalists and contributions from the community. It is described as a "new kind of news platform," and aims to provide "accurate information with real evidence, so that you can confidently make up your own mind."

Riverbed recently announced it's buying Xirrus for an undisclosed sum of money. The former is a company that builds SD-WAN products and generally looks to improve and optimize WANs. Xirrus, on the other hand, builds next-gen Wi-Fi networks.

With the new acquisition, Riverbed will be able to offer its customers "the power of unified connectivity and policy-based orchestration that spans the entire distributed network -- WAN, LAN/WLAN, data center and the cloud."

Overwhelmed by the number of emails hitting our inboxes these days, it's little wonder that a "unsubscription service" like Unroll.me came into being. Designed to make it easier to clean up your inbox, it turned out that Unroll.me was selling user data to other companies -- including Uber, which is caught up in other controversies of its own.

After this came to light, CEO Jojo Hedaya has written a sorry-not-sorry-style apology. In it, he says that it was "heartbreaking" to find that users were upset to discover "how we monetize our free service." But while recognizing that people are unhappy, there are no plans to change the practice. If you're concerned, however, a data scientist has written a guide to deleting your account.

Around this time last month, Google was facing criticism for appearing to censor LGBTQ+ videos with the Restricted Mode feature. Now the company says that it has addressed the problem and will no longer be "incorrectly filtering videos."

Google says that this means hundreds of thousands of videos with LGBTQ+ content have been unlocked, and more than 12 million videos in total have been affected. The company has already issued an apology for the filtering, but now it is keen to be seen making amends.

Google is launching a series of Internet Citizens workshops as part of its YouTube Creators for Change program. Aimed at 13- to 18-year-olds, the workshops have been designed to teach teenagers how to spot fake news, how to stay safe online, and how to "make negativity bounce."

Taking in topics such as comment moderation, dealing with online abuse, and how to respond to offensive content and echo chambers, the workshops launch today in the UK, starting in Liverpool, and will spread around the country over the coming weeks. But is the program just stoking the idea of generation snowflake?

It's news that -- on the face of it -- makes very little sense; the Wall Street Journal reports that Google is going to include an ad-blocking feature in its Chrome web browser. For a company that makes so much money from advertising this seems like something of a strange move, but in the light of recent ad controversy, it could be sensible business.

Just last month a large number of big companies started to pull advertising from Google and YouTube after finding that their ads were appearing on sites hosting extremist material. This, coupled with the fact that there is a general backlash against advertising from consumers (hence Adblock Plus pushing its Acceptable Ads program), could explain why Google is keen to be seen to be doing something that will give uses a better ad experience with greater control.

Bob Taylor, who far more than Al Gore had a claim to being the Father of the Internet, died from complications of Parkinson’s Disease last Thursday at 85. Though I knew him for 30 years, I can’t say I knew Bob well but we always got along and I think he liked me. Certainly I respected him for being that rarity -- a non-technical person who could inspire and lead technical teams. He was in a way a kinder, gentler Steve Jobs.

Bob’s career seemed to have three phases -- DARPA, XEROX, and DEC -- and three technical eras -- mainframes, local area network (workgroup) computing, and the Internet.