Adobe's vice president of product development, Govind Balakrishnan, said the firm had chosen to end Flash because other technologies, such as HTML5, had "matured enough and are capable enough to provide viable alternatives to the Flash player."

In 2014 it was used each day by 80% of desktop users, according to Google. The current figure is just 17%.

The issue emerged July 22, when Gentoo user Dennis Schridde submitted this bug report to the Systemd project. Essentially, he described a failure within systemd-resolve (sic), a Systemd component that turns human-readable domain names into IP addresses for software, like web browsers, to connect to.

The library was stripping underscores from some domain names – such as Netflix's ipv6_1-cxl0-c088 node – and that caused everything relying on the resolver to fail, Schridde reported.

Within minutes of the first attendees filing into Grant Park, the cell networks got shaky. Within 20 minutes of the doors officially opening, every network was down.

Tapping a monster to catch it would result in nothing but an error screen — a particular punch in the gut to many a player who traveled far in hopes of completing their Pokedex, as the Park was set to spawn some of the game’s rarest monsters.

Since Amazon introduced the Alexa-enabled Echo device in 2014, the jokes have become so omnipresent that Alexa Philbeck, 29, briefly considered changing, or at least obscuring, her name.

“If I introduced myself, people assumed my name was Melissa or Alyssa,” she says, “Now when I introduce myself … I’ll say, ‘My name’s Alexa,’ and then sometimes I’ll say, ‘Like the Amazon Echo.’ ”

“Our worst fears have been realized,” said Christian Mihr, RSF Germany’s executive director. “The German law on online hate speech is now serving as a model for non-democratic states to limit Internet debate.”

A UK parliamentary report in April cited the German example when it recommended making social networks pay large fines for failing to remove hate speech quickly enough.

The lack of security on those internet connected toys is so pervasive that the FBI provided detailed advice for taking steps that might help with security, such as using strong passwords. The most important piece of advice from the FBI, however, is to make sure the devices are turned off when they’re not actually being used, and when they are being used, to keep an eye on what’s happening through the app associated with the device.

Unfortunately, there’s little or no indication that there’s any serious effort on the part of device makers to secure their products.

ProPublica has been researching why the U.S. health care system is the most expensive in the world. One answer, broadly, is waste — some of it buried in practices that the medical establishment and the rest of us take for granted.

In his lab, Gerona ran tests on the decades-old drugs, including some now defunct brands such as the diet pills Obocell (once pitched to doctors with a portly figurine called “Mr. Obocell”) and Bamadex.

The findings surprised both researchers: A dozen of the 14 compounds were still as potent as they were when they were manufactured, some at almost 100 percent of their labeled concentrations.

The delivery of knives bought online to private addresses is to be banned under a package of measures to tackle knife crime to be announced by the home secretary, Amber Rudd.

The home secretary, announcing the proposed new offences, said: “Knife crime has devastating consequences. I am determined to tackle this and do all I can to break the deadly cycle and protect our children, families and communities.

A security researcher has discovered that it's relatively easy to abuse this mechanism to hack into anyone's account. All a wannabe hacker needs is the target's full name, username, and date of birth.

Scott Helme, a security researcher who acted as one of the guinea pigs to test the flaw, said that Myspace's account recovery feature is "insane."

C has become a monster. It gives its users far too much artillery with which to shoot their feet off. Copious experience has taught us all, the hard way, that it is very difficult, verging on “basically impossible,” to write extensive amounts of C code that is not riddled with security holes.

If you’re a developer you already know where I’m going, of course: to tout the virtues of Rust, which is, in fact, a viable C/C++ replacement. Two years ago I suggested that people start writing new low-level coding projects in Rust instead of C.