In yet another chapter of the ongoing saga of tech giants and their questionable privacy practices, Google finds itself settling a $5 billion privacy lawsuit. This lawsuit revolves around Google’s alleged tracking of users in Chrome (and other browser’s) “incognito” mode, a practice that we’re sure is continuing unabated.

In what is seen by many as an alarming move, the UK Government has been discretely expanding a contentious surveillance technology with the potential to log and store the internet histories of millions of individuals.

Recently, a bug has caused private tweets shared within Twitter Circles to show up on public timelines. Twitter Circles are groups of users who can share tweets exclusively with each other, much like Instagram’s Close Friends feature. However, as reported by TechCrunch, tweets intended for private Circles are now being shared with a wider audience than intended.

Cookies are delicious, depending on your palate. Some like sugar, I’m partial to oatmeal raisin. Others may prefer chocolate chip, and advertisers like the digital ones. And while the wording must be confusing for many, many people, there is no shortage of digital cookies. The majority of modern websites rely extensively on several different types of cookie to provide their users with services. Some are completely innocent, others may be more insidious. The thing is, a cookie by any other name is still a cookie, although the end-user may not realize it.

Google has become an important tool for most people. Unfortunately, this tool’s power levels tend to take a sharp blow in the average user’s hands (fingertips?).

WhatsApp is urging users to update to the latest version of WhatsApp ASAP, after it was revealed that WhatsApp spyware – believed to be the handiwork of Israeli cyber company NSO – has been installed on countless phones.

Because of spyware companies like the NSO Group, and their Pegasus spyware, it can now be fatal to click a link sent to you in a text message or email. That is what experts believe happened to Jamal Khashoggi, and perhaps almost to Omar Abdulaziz, who received a fake text message supposedly from DHL, and which experts believe installed the NSO Pegasus spyware on his phone.

If you are a Windows XP user running Kaspersky anti-virus and you can’t connect to the internet from your computer, you are not alone. The latest update to the AV software is preventing many users from being able to connect to the internet, causing users to swarm to the Kaspersky forum to grumble.

Bots generate at least 10% of all online traffic, according to data released today by Solve Media, a company that provides security authentication solutions through CAPTCHA-based advertising technology. Solve Media indicates that they have seen a 400% increase in what they term ‘aberrant’ traffic across web-based services such as commenting, voting, registration, contact and commenting.

The court in the case of the Lower Merion School District in Pennyslvania that was spying on its students – in their homes – via webcams and software installed in the students’ school-provided laptops – has been ordered to let the students see the photos that the school surreptitiously took of them. As it turns out, the photo of Blake Robbins was just the tip of the iceberg; according to reports, there are nearly 58,000 photos taken by the school district, all by remotely accessing the webcam in the students’ laptops while spying on their students in the students homes and in other places off the school premises.

PhoneSnoop is software developed for the Blackberry which allows you to turn any Blackberry into a snooping device. Much like Flexispy at least claims to do, you just load PhoneSnoop on any Blackberry, activate it, and then you can listen in on whatever is happening in the room in which the Blackberry is placed.

Stupid users are the worst problem on the Internet, according to this survey of more than 600 Internet users.

If your computer is suddenly doing strange things such as running very slowly, or you are suddenly getting pop ups advertising various products such as the notorious Winfixer, along with others such as Storage Protector, Sysprotect, and AntiSpywareMaster (that are really spyware, not anti-spyware), your computer may be infected with the Vundo virus. Known also as the Vundo Trojan, Virtumonde, or Virtumondo and sometimes even as MS Juan (which Vundo leaves in your registry), the Vundo virus was first discovered back in 2004, but has recently made a reappearance, infecting countless PCs. And it’s darn hard to eradicate.

Firefox and IE both have site blocking (or at least, site warning) built into their current iterations. Google also does site blocking now. All do site blocking based on some metric, known only to them, that tells them that a site is more likely than not to be a malicious site, such as a phishing site, or a site loaded with spyware. The problem with site blocking browsers and site blocking search engines such as Google is that sometimes they get it wrong.

We’ve been getting complaints of “Classmates.com email trying to take over my computer” and “I clicked a link in a Classmates .com email and my computer froze”… or “..and my computer told me I had a virus.” This is because Classmates.com has fallen prey to spyware called XPOnlineScanner (XP Online Scanner). XPOnlineScanner claims to be an XP antivirus software, but is really spyware, and Classmates.com currently has some advertising banners are acting as a conduit for XPOnlineScanner to download itself on to your Windows PC.