The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a trade agreement between the United States, Canada, Japan, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Brunei, Vietnam, Malaysia, Chile, and Peru. At its heart, the TPP is intended to make trade between these and other Pacific Rim countries who may sign on to the TPP easier. What is interesting, and what many don’t realize, is that the TPP has an anti-spam section that deals with electronic commerce and spam. Sort of.

Nearly eight years ago (to the day!) we told you about the online game that tests your vocabulary skills, and donates 10 grains of rice to the World Food Programme (also known as the World Food Program, and WFP) for every correct response that you give. FreeRice.com is legitimate, and the real deal, and we’re delighted to see that they are still going strong!

The hacker group known as Anonymous has declared cyber war on ISIS (the Islamic State, which also goes by ISIL and Daesh). While Anonymous has actually stated this previously, they have stepped up their game, and their public announcements of this war on ISIS, following last Friday’s attacks in Paris. In response to the announcement, ISIS released their own statement, calling Anonymous “idiots”.

The United States is worrying about something that they consider a new Russian threat: increased Russan submarine activity around the undersea fiber optic cables that carry Internet communications, and the potential that those submarine cables could be severed, crippling U.S. Internet operations. Whether you see this as promoting Russia as a bogeyman, or a real possibility, the reality is that history has demonstrated that undersea Internet cables can be cut, and that it wreaks havoc.

The White House has taken the novel step of starting a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign to help raise funds for Syrian refugees. In partnership with the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the Prez has gone on Kickstarter with an appeal to the American people: please send money.

The term Mukbang BJ (also written as Muk-bang BJ) is not what you may think, although it is sort of related to porn – food porn that is. Mukbang is a Korean phenomenon – in Korean muk-bang translates roughly to “food broadcast”, and the BJ stands for ‘broadcast jockey’, in the same way that DJ stands for disk jockey and VJ stands for video jockey.

Countless parents wring their hands over trying to keep their underage children off Facebook, something which Facebook itself seems mostly unable to do, and unable to do at all if the child lies about their age when signing up. But one parent has done more than wring his hands: he sued Facebook.

By now you may have heard about the Charlotte Proudman and Alexander Carter-Silk brouhaha. If you haven’t, here’s the bottom line: Charlotte Proudman, an up and coming young barrister in the UK, sent a LinkedIn connect request to Alexander Carter-Silk, a prominent, senior intellectual property solicitor. Carter-Silk accepted her request, and in his reply, commented on her LinkedIn profile picture. That’s when all hell broke loose, with Proudman attacking Carter-Silk, saying she found the compliment offensive, and making their private In-Mail public – very public.

Last month the U.S. Justice department announced the takedown of the Darkode (get it? DarkCode – Dark Code?) international cybercrime ring, which the DOJ called one of the “gravest threats” to the security of online data. But what exactly does that mean to you, the average user sitting at home behind your computer?

With this past week’s Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v Hodges, creating a national right to gay marriage, and the ensuing pride fests, you can’t miss the coverage on the Internet, some of which includes the acronym LGBTTIQQ2SA. Lots of people are familiar with the LGBT acronym, but LGBTTIQQ2SA?? Here’s what it means.

Heinz Ketchup recently discovered that a porn site had set up shop on a domain that Heinz had let lapse, and is their face red! You see, not only had the domain lapsed, but there were bottles of Heinz Ketchup on store shelves with a QR code that lead to the lapsed domain, which had been turned into a pornography site.

With the recent outbreak of Middle Eastern Respitory Syndrom (MERS) in South Korea, officials are taking to tracking people who are quarantined by tracking their smartphones. If someone who is quarantined leaves their quarantine area – and takes their phone with them – public health officials will know.

Can a dating app succeed where so many other Israeli – Palestinian peace efforts have failed? Matthew Nolan thinks ‘yes’. Nolan is the brains behind Verona, a dating app specifically for those who identify themselves as either Israeli or Palestinian.

Teenager Cella (@cellla_ on Twitter) apparently really wasn’t looking forward to her new job at Jet’s Pizza in Mansfield, Texas. So much so that she tweeted “Ew I start this fuckass job tomorrow,” followed by seven ‘thumbs down’ emoji. Following that tweet, she was promptly fired, also on Twitter.

During a diplomatic visit to China, Argentine president Cristina Fernandez Kirchner sent out a tweet mocking the Chinese, and perpetuating the stereotype that native Chinese speakers cannot pronounce the letter R.