Adults in Great Britain are using the internet more than ever before according to new figures released by the government's Office for National Statistics (ONS).

The internet was used daily or almost daily by 82 percent of adults (41.8 million) in Britain in 2016, up from 78 percent (39.3 million) in 2015 and 35 percent (16.2 million) in 2006 when statistics were first collected.

Google is pushing out Chrome 52 for Android, and the big news with this release relates to video. With video being such a massive component of internet traffic, it is perfectly natural for Google to focus on this area, and the company says that improvements have been made to battery consumption and loading times.

There is a marked shift of focus to speed and power efficiency -- compared to the desktop where the focus has long been quality over everything else.

A Google Project Zero hacker has discovered a zero-day vulnerability in the password manager LastPass that could lead to accounts being completely compromised.

The security flaw can be triggered by visiting a malicious website, and it has been confirmed to be an issue by white hat security researcher Tavis Ormandy. He has filed a full report to LastPass with a view to getting the vulnerability patched.

However careful you are online it's always possible to get caught out by a maliciously coded website or advert that leads to malware ending up on your machine.

Online safety service SafeDNS is launching a new system for detecting malicious internet resources, which it claims blocks close to 100 percent of them for better online protection.

The rocky road to finding a replacement to the Safe Harbour data transfer agreement appears to have become a little smoother. The successor to the EU-US arrangement is Privacy Shield, and European regulators have said it will be permitted to run to at least a year without intervention.

Having been deemed unsuitable because of the level of access it gave the US to European data, Safe Harbor's replacement has been a long time coming. The head nod from regulators will be widely welcomed by the tech industry, as well as those disturbed by NSA surveillance revelations.

As businesses come to rely increasingly on the cloud, the impact of downtime in any part of the network infrastructure is felt more keenly.

Network intelligence company ThousandEyes is launching a new Internet Outage Detection product, providing a way for enterprises to reliably detect outages across ISPs.

The TechCrunch website was today hit by a hacker group going by the name of OurMine. The group describes itself as "an elite hacker group known for many hacks showing vulnerabilities in major systems".

The hack was -- on the face of it, at least -- not particularly malicious, and came across as almost polite. Rather than completely defacing the site, OurMine chose instead to simply post a news story to indicate that the CMS had been breached.

You've probably noticed that it can be hard to make out details on Google Maps. You're not alone; Google has noticed too, and the company has just launched a redesigned version of the essential travel tool.

The changes apply to the desktop, iOS and Android versions of Google Maps and the most immediately apparent difference is the new color palette -- much subtler and easier on the eyes. But Google has also cleaned things up to improve visibility, and added new 'areas of interest'.

What's the first word that pops into your head when you hear Bitcoin? It's probably cryptocurrency, but a judge in Florida says this is wrong -- it's actually property.

In a case relating to alleged money laundering, Judge Teresa Pooler ruled that the charges could not stick as Bitcoin was not money, and therefore could not be laundered. With the decision that Bitcoin cannot be considered a 'monetary instrument', this could have implications for future cases.

Just a few days ago, KickassTorrents was dealt a blow when Artem Vaulin was arrested and the site seized by feds. Of course, it didn’t take long for mirrors to spring up, keeping KAT online in new locations. But the original team has also taken steps to ensure that the community lives on.

The KAT team has set up Katcr.co, home to a forum complete with many familiar old faces. This time around, there are no torrents -- this is strictly a forum -- although the KAT mirrors are still to be found online.

Twitter is worried. It's worried that while it is a well-recognized brand, a disturbingly large number of people have no idea what Twitter is actually for. What is the point? Getting slightly meta, the company today explains its raison d'être and tries to clear up some common misconceptions.

'What misconceptions are there about Twitter?', you may well ask. That it is a social network. (It ain't.) That you have to use it every day. (Seriously?) As Twitter says, 'We realized we had some explaining and clarifying to do!'

When I find myself without internet access for even just a short period of time -- say, less than an hour -- I feel like I am having withdrawal symptoms. I get anxious, irritable, and frustrated. First world problems, am I right?

Sadly, according to Facebook, there are 4 billion people on the Earth with no access at all -- makes a short outage seem rather insignificant. Mark Zuckerberg and company are looking to change this with an unlikely tool -- solar-powered airplanes that beam the internet to the ground. Today, Facebook announces that its experimental aircraft successfully completed its first flight last month in Arizona.

Flash is seen, quite rightly, as the scourge of the internet, and for some time there has been a vocal movement to eradicate all traces of it. Following the lead of Google Chrome and upcoming versions of Safari, Mozilla is taking the step of blocking Flash content from Firefox that is "not essential to the user experience".

It's part of the company's drive to reduce reliance on Flash, whilst recognizing that there is still a need to provide a degree of support for "legacy Flash content". Mozilla has taken the decision to ditch Flash in a bid to improve browser performance, boost security and improve battery life on mobile devices.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has revealed the true scale of online crime in England and Wales, and it is high enough to effectively double the overall crime rate. The previous estimate about the number of online crimes was 3.8 million, but the latest figures show that it is in fact over 5.8 million.

The ONS says that a tenth of adults have fallen victim to online crime, and incidents are not specific to particular areas or social classes. The statistics take into account virus attacks, online fraud, phishing attacks and the like, with 3.8 million of the overall 5.8 million incidents accounted for by various sorts of fraud.

These days, the web is all about advertising. Whatever type of site you visit -- news, entertainment, music, or whatever -- you are almost certain to encounter ads. Many people turn to ad blockers not just because ads can be irritating (and something of a privacy concern), but also because they can dramatically slow down browsing.

We've already heard about Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages project which looks to speed up the web for mobile users. But AMP is about more than just pushing page content to handsets quicker. Google has also developed a way to dramatically speed up the appearance of ads: AMP for ads, or A4A.