Category: Internet
Russian hackers steal more than 1 billion usernames and passwords
A Russian cyber gang has stolen more than 1.6 billion internet username and password combinations, according to US security firm Hold Security – a company that specialises in finding breaches. Hold Security said that the gang – which it dubbed “CyberVor”, after the Russian word for thief, vor – had gathered confidential data from more than 500 million…
BT Openreach says ‘we’ll do better – promise’
BT Openreach – the phone and broadband company that we all love to hate – is promising to do better. Back in June, the UK telecoms giant was told by watchdog Ofcom that it could face fines if it did not meet new targets to repair its extensive UK telephone and broadband network. Under new…
IFTTT adds support for Android Wear, Nike+, Yo and others
Great news for users of the internet's biggest open secret, IFTTT: The company has added support for nine more channels. If you've not used "If This, Then That" - or IFTTT - before, then you should really sort that out as it could change your life. Essentially, what the clever service does is link together…
Twitter buys “deep learning” company Madbits
Does Twitter know everything? It soon might thanks to its acquisition of intelligence technology firm Madbits. Twitter users often joke about asking the "hive-mind" questions, but could Twitter soon have an actual hive-mind? (Umm, probably not). The company has built software that will analyse tweets to extract meaning and detail - meaning that Twitter will…
Unsympathetic Shoreditch “Tech City” workers campaign against “colonisation”
For the longest time, Shoreditch - the part of London just north of the City financial district - was run down and underdeveloped. It was perhaps one of the few places in central London that normal, working class people, might live. But then in the 1990s and continuing through the first decade of this millennium…
Twitter CEO wants to boost messaging
Speaking in a call to investors, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo has revealed that he'd like to see the platform improve its messaging capabilities. According to Business Insider, Costolo described the following potential enhancement: "Specifically, being able to take a public conversation and being able to migrate it to a private channel. So, taking a public…
Are there two stranger Tweeters than Richard Dawkins and Gerry Adams?
Twitter is the greatest thing to happen to celebrities since... well... ever. No longer do those in the public gaze have to rely on an unreliable media to shape their public image, and have journalists mediate the interaction between the well known and the great unwashed. Twitter provides a direction connection between celebrity and fans…
Dating site OkCupid also experiments on its users
To paraphrase the Smashing Pumpkins, despite all our rage we are still just rats in a cage... In June, Facebook disclosed that it had tested to see if emotions were contagious, deliberately manipulating the emotional content of the news feeds for 700,000 people. Now it seems that Facebook is not the only website that conducts…
Labour Party crowdsourcing digital policy ideas
We're less than a year away from the next general election and if we know anything, it is that politicians are pretty much uniformly completely out of touch with technology and how it should be used. Luckily - you might be able to help. Labour Digital, a group of Labour Party bigwigs have created a…
Greenpeace and Amazon in war of words over clean power
Greenpeace does not appear to be a big fan of Amazon, or its Amazon Web Services In a recent Green Internet report, Greenpeace praised companies such as Microsoft, Google and Apple for their green credentials, while claiming that AWS had the "dirtiest" cloud. "AWS has dropped further and further behind its competitors in building an…
