Joon Ian Wong

Facebook is deciding how the media should do its job again, even though CEO Mark Zuckerberg has insisted it’s “not a media company.” This time, two Palestinian news organizations say one of their Facebook pages, and the personal accounts of seven editors and executives, were suspended, al Jazeera reported. This prevented them from accessing their organizations’ Facebook pages, which collectively have 11 million “likes.”

Blockchain is permeating the world’s spheres of influence. A U.S. Congressional group dedicated to studying the technology underpinning the bitcoin cryptocurrency was set up today (Sept. 26) by two congressmen. The Congressional Blockchain Caucus was formed by Jared Polis, a Democrat congressman from Colorado and longtime bitcoin believer, and Mick Mulvaney, a Republican representing South Carolina.

Yahoo isn’t exactly king of the hill in Silicon Valley anymore—it’s more like over the hill by Valley standards. But the news that half a billion user details were stolen from it in 2014 should still concern everyone. That’s because stubborn user behavior and the economics of darknet markets mean the chances of a serious breach at another major internet service increase dramatically with each hack.

Since Yahoo admitted on Sept. 22 that a 2014 hack compromised half a billion user accounts, a key question has been: how long has it known?

China’s individual investors are known for their huge appetite for new assets. The government’s strict currency controls make it difficult for them to invest overseas, so their money has traditionally had to go somewhere inside the country’s borders. That’s why from property to copper to domain names to fish bladders, speculation fuels asset markets in China.

One of the biggest distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks ever was directed at independent security journalist Brian Krebs on Tuesday (Sept. 20), and lasted for three days, leading his service provider to take his website offline. More ominously, the attack could have been originated from a “botnet”—a network of devices controlled by a hacker—comprised of unsecured, internet-connected, cameras.

Twitter investors are so hopeful that the company will come under new ownership that a CNBC report that Salesforce or Google could acquire it has sent its shares soaring by 20% in pre-market trading—even with the caveat that ”no sale is imminent.”

Europeans will be able to make calls, use data, and send texts without any additional roaming charges anywhere in the European Union once new rules come into force next June, the European Commission announced today.

Amazon’s algorithms are causing customers to pay significantly more than they should for popular products, while promoting those that benefit the corporation, according to an investigation by journalism non-profit ProPublica published today (Sept. 20).

The Bank of England announced Sept. 16 that it’s upgrading the payments systems that move over $600 billion a day for British traders and banks. By 2020, the Real-Time Gross Settlement system will be made more easily accessible by smaller institutions, and constantly online, instead of only during working hours, Reuters reported.

A gadget that’s bristling with features to be fidgeted with is soaring to the top of Kickstarter’s charts.

The next iPhone will be made of Apple’s “stunning ceramic,” a light, super-smooth, scratch-resistant compound that’s already being used in the new Apple Watch Edition. That’s the theory, anyway, but one that’s strongly argued by self-styled “alchemist and metaphysician” Brian Roemmele on Quora.

Google has killed Project Ara, its ambitious plan to make a modular smartphone, with parts you could replace as they wore out or became obsolete. But the man who launched it isn’t giving up on the idea. Dan Makoski, who founded Ara, is now making modular phone cases—rather than whole phones—with a company called Nexpaq.

A lot of people watched the second season of the hit Netflix series Narcos without paying for it. The entire series or parts of it were streamed, downloaded or torrented 6.4 million times on sites other than Netflix in the first five days of its release, according to anti-piracy tech vendor Muso.

A ruckus has erupted in Norway over Facebook’s repeated removal of an iconic 1972 war photograph of a naked young girl fleeing a napalm attack in Vietnam. Facebook has also suspended users who uploaded it. Things have come to a head today after Norway’s largest newspaper devoted its front page to an open letter to Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg.

The effects of the UK’s vote to leave the EU are showing up in the price of Apple’s products. The cheapest iPhone 7 is 11% more expensive than the iPhone 6S when it was launched last year. The larger iPhone 7 Plus is 16% more expensive than the 6S was originally.

We might soon get delivery vans for delivery bots, if a new partnership between robot-maker Starship and Mercedes-Benz has anything to do with it.

Before addictive apps Candy Crush, Angry Birds, and Words With Friends, there were slot machines, which hooked players in much the same way. Both classes of game were easy to pick up and difficult to put down, doling out rewards over time.

Remembering a strong password is difficult. That’s why people keep using passwords like “123456,” “password,” and more puzzlingly, “monkey.”

If you got an email from Dropbox asking you to reset your password earlier this week, it’s a good idea to do it. Nearly 70 million stolen Dropbox passwords are circulating online, according to Motherboard, which obtained the data. The file-sharing service has confirmed the passwords are linked to a breach that took place in 2012, although it said the theft only involved user email addresses at the time.

No address? No problem for Íslandspóstur, Iceland’s postal service. An envelope bearing a series of detailed descriptions and a hand-drawn map–and no address–made its way from Reykjavik, the country’s capital city, to a farm and “mini-zoo” more than 150 km away in the Dalabyggð region in western Iceland.

There could be more reluctant recipients for the billions in back-taxes that the European commission says Apple owes: Besides Ireland, which will appeal to avoid collecting the windfall, the EU all but invited its other members and the United States to claim their share of the €13 billion ($14.5 billion) sum.

The US government is taking on Europe in defending tax practices of US companies such as Apple, the world’s most valuable.

Making video games today is a complex undertaking that can require years of work. But in the 80s and 90s, it involved a whole other layer of difficulty.