Germany's highest civil court has ruled that the online ad blocker AdBlock Plus doesn't violate competition laws. Axel Springer is the latest of several German media companies to bring a case against developers and lose. Applications that filter out and hide website advertisements are to remain freely available in Germany, the country's highest civil court ruled on Thursday. The Federal Court of Justice (BGH) dismissed a claim brought by German media giant Axel Springer, which had accused Eyeo, the developer of the popular ad blocking extension AdBlock Plus, of unfair competition practices.

Because everyone using Chrome for everything is a bad idea

The media company claims it was an error and will return the money, but style bloggers are considering legal action

It seems that internet privacy protections are still “under construction.”

Some YouTube's videographers take out frustrations on company's employees.

Businessman wins legal action to force removal of search results about past conviction.

The online classifieds site has been likened to an online brothel.

The site provided them with a sense of safety, independence, and control.

Researchers followed YouTube's channel recommendations wherever they led and often found Alex Jones and other fringe channels.

The deadline to file your taxes is rapidly approaching, but cyber criminals have already been hard at work trying to cash in with fraudulent tax returns. This tax season, experts say instead of targeting individual tax payers, scam artists are targeting tax professionals. "One of the challenges that we're seeing this year is that as tax professionals and the I.R.S. have become more and more sophisticated, so too have the adversaries," said Caleb Barlow, IBM Security's vice president of threat intelligence.

Millions of people use Google search every day for a variety of reasons. Students use it for school, business people use it for research, and millions more use it for entertainment. Did you know that you may not be using Google search to its full potential? Here are 20 tips and tricks to maximize your search efficiency.

The fact that Facebook probably has a profile of you whether you’re a Facebook user or not might come as a surprise to some users, though today even the company’s chief executive denied knowledge of the practice — or at least the term used to describe it.

During Congressional hearings about Facebook’s data practices in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica fiasco, Mark Zuckerberg drew an important distinction between what we expect from our Internet service providers (ISPs, such as Comcast or Verizon) as opposed to platforms like Facebook that operate...

Who has all those fake Russian Facebook accounts? I think I had one, at least for a couple of days

The League is among a new crop of dating apps whose business models are predicated on the age-old reality that courtship is partly an economic exercise.

In 1999, the site looked like a blog run by video-store clerks.

Law-abiding citizens: Please do NOT download. Thank you.

Is TrumpStore.com the real "no tax" company?

Home secretary pledges £9m to help combat online criminals dealing in drugs, child pornography and guns

April Fools’ Day is upon us, bringing with it a deluge of terrible jokes, ill-advised pranks, and the occasional inspired product concept. The “holiday” has been around for centuries, and companies from all over the internet have been imposing their jokes on us for the last couple of days.

Panera Bread issued a statement to Fox News this week saying it resolved a data breach that exposed the personal information of “thousands” of customer records. However, according to KrebsOnSecurity, the company was first alerted to the issue by security researcher Dylan Houlihan eight months ago but initially dismissed it as a likely scam. The breach shows customer data available in plain text and appears to include records for any customer who signed up to order food via Panera’s website, panerabread.com.

But Missed Connections lives on, for now.

Ad scammers need suckers, and Facebook helps find them.

Some industry insiders estimate there are as many as 100 brands selling compressed foam mattresses online.

Mozilla today announced a brand new browser that's built specifically for standalone VR and AR headsets, Firefox Reality.

In Europe, an Internet user can force Google to hide search results that are inaccurate or just too personal. But Americans don't have the same legal protections — even in the most extreme cases.

It's meant to keep newsletters out of spam filters, but the fallout lets crypto proponents say, I told you so.

Ever since it was first released almost a decade ago, Google’s Chrome browser has been the most consistent piece of technology in my life. I’ve gone through a legion of phones, laptops, and headphones, I’ve jumped around between Android, iOS, Windows Phone, macOS, and Windows, but I’ve rarely had reason to doubt my browser choice. Things have changed in recent times, however, and those changes have been sufficient to make me reconsider. After so many years away, I’m returning to Firefox, in equal measure pushed by Chrome’s downsides as I am pulled by Firefox’s latest upgrades.

Analyzing the famous academic aphorism ”publish or perish” through a modern digital lens, a group of emerging ecologists and conservation scientists wanted to see whether communicating their new research discoveries through social media—primarily Twitter—eventually leads to higher citations years down the road.

Last week, I wrote a blog post emphasizing the distinction between the social internet and social media. The former describes the internet’s ability to enable connection, learning, and expression. The latter describes the attempt of a small number of large companies to monetize these capabilities inside walled-garden, monopoly platforms.

A Facebook executive's memo that claimed the "ugly truth" was that anything it did to grow was justified has been made public, embarrassing the company. The 2016 post said that this applied even if it meant people might die as a result of bullying or terrorism. Both the author and the company's chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, have denied they actually believe the sentiment.

It’s become a common complaint that social media allows everyone to limit their news consumption to stories that reinforce what they already believe. But the team at Knowhere says it’s found a solution: News stories written by machines. The idea is that Knowhere’s technology can eliminate some of the in-built human bias, and also pull from a wide variety of sources and write stories with enormous speed. For controversial and political news, it doesn’t limit itself to one story. Instead, it allows you to jump between versions of the story that are written from a left, right or “impartial” perspective.

URL shorteners can be both useful and fun. Google's take on the tech launched in 2009, and added a third-party API, the ability to create QR codes and the power to link right to iOS and Android apps. Even Keanu Reeves has a URL shortener named in his honor. Unfortunately, Google is replacing its own service, goo.gl, with Firebase Dynamic Links (FDL) as of April 13th. These new smart URLs let you send folks to any location within iOS, Android or web apps.

After years of letting algorithms make up our minds for us, the time is right to go back to basics.

Toys “R” Us and Babies “R” Us are no longer selling any products online. The toy retailer’s websites went black, and customers were encouraged to visit stores for last-minute sales. The chain is offering up to 30 percent off storewide, and all sales are final. Liquidation sales started in late March.