Internet

Some will say that cookies, at least most traditional cookies, are bad for your health and Web cookies have grown to become the same for your digital health. Created primarily to make it more convenient for users to revisit sites, again and again, the rather crude technology has been abused time and again to track users across the sites they visit. Browser makers are stepping up to fight such privacy invasions and the latest release of Firefox is designed to block another kind of cookie.

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Amazon and SpaceX have found themselves in a space battle, with both companies accusing the other of trying to sabotage their satellite internet plans. The controversy began when Elon Musk's SpaceX proposed reducing some of its Starlink satellites' orbit altitude, with the goal of increasing connection speeds.

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A huge internet outage is wreaking havoc on US East Coast connectivity, with Google, Zoom, Verizon, and other services all seeing considerable issues on Tuesday morning. It's a further reminder of how precarious working from home can be in this time of pandemic, given the extent to which distributed teams now rely on productivity management and communication tools like Slack, Gmail, and more.

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While many people probably take to Google to search for the latest news, social media has been playing a bigger role in bringing news, both real and fake, to even more people. Of course, this has also brought them under more scrutiny because of the consequences for the news industry in general, particularly when page views, ads, and profits are concerned. Facebook seems to suggest that it is offering the better option for all parties involved as it rolls out Facebook News outside the US for the first time.

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The Biden administration has made White House press briefings more accessible for people who are deaf or have trouble hearing. If you head over to the official White House channel on YouTube, you'll now be able to watch these press events with an American Sign Language interpreter, something Press Secretary Jen Psaki says is intended to improve accessibility.

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This week the Google Play Hot Air Balloon offline mini-game launched into the wild. This game was in development for quite a while now, appearing in testing for months back in 2020 - now it would appear that it's ready to roll. If you'd like to give this game a go, make sure you've got the latest version of the Google Play store on your Android device - then disconnect from the internet.

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Google is notorious for retiring apps and services, whether those were in wide use or not. That doesn't apply to just software either and the company has sunset more than a handful of unsuccessful hardware projects that would have caused smaller companies to fold. Not Google, of course, for whom experiments, big or small, are a fact of life. The latest to join the dreaded Google Graveyard is Loon, the moonshot turned "Other Bet" that would have brought the Internet to places where towers and cables dare not go.

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Microsoft is adding a new Edge feature that will be familiar to Chrome and select other browser users: an alert when your password is compromised. Called Password Monitor, the security feature is designed to alert users when their password has been discovered as the result of a third-party breach, such as from an old forum you used to post on that was later compromised.

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Following the inauguration of Joe Biden as the 46th President of the United States yesterday, there was some question as to whether or not internet platforms such as Twitter, YouTube, Twitch, and Facebook would reactivate the accounts of former President Trump. We now have an answer concerning one of those platforms, as Twitch has announced that it is banning Trump's account indefinitely.

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Google has dozens of apps and services, some of them a bit esoteric while many are popular and useful for both end users and businesses. One thing that is common among most of these is the need for an Internet connection. Google, after all, is primarily an Internet company. That Internet connection, however, might not always be available or stable and, fortunately, Google is making one of its key apps available offline, at least for some set of users.

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In what's likely a sign of things to come in a much more internet-capable Presidential Administration with Joe Biden, the first update to Whitehouse.gov today included a secret message. The message appeared in the basic HTML of the website, delivering an Easter Egg to coders reading the source. The message read as follows: "If you're reading this, we need your help building back better."

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Tomorrow, Wednesday the 20th of January, is Inauguration Day in the US, marking the start of Joe Biden's term as the 46th US president. The inauguration will happen in an event at the US Capitol in Washington DC -- and though you can't attend yourself, you can still watch it live using a variety of platforms.

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