It turns out Apple doesn't take well to banks teaming up to get their own products on the iPhone.

Apple responded to the banks' request last week with a strongly worded letter that came to light on Tuesday, explaining that letting the banks have their way would "fundamentally diminish the high level of security Apple aims to have on our devices."

The new policy calls for the social network to serve up ads regardless of the presence of ad-blocking software, and in exchange give users greater control over their ad preferences to cut down on intrusive or annoying ads.

The social network notes that, as a free service, it has to use the ads to bring in revenues.

Luckily, Andrew Tierney and Ken Munro, the two security researchers who created the ransomware, actually have no ill intention. They just wanted to make a point: some Internet of Things devices fail to take simple security precautions, leaving users in danger.

“It actually works, it locks the thermostat,” Munro, who last year found that a Samsung smart fridge leaked Gmail passwords, said sitting next to three thermostats that were displaying the famous quote from the movie Hackers: “Hack The Planet.”

Security experts and some senior Obama administration officials fear there is not enough protection for any ballots transmitted over the Internet. They are warning states that any kind of online voting is not yet secure and most likely will not be for years to come.

Experts say that states will not be able to protect themselves from experienced hackers, including foreign countries who could meddle with a U.S. election. That is one of the reasons that Ron Rivest, an Internet security expert and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, gives online voting security “a big fat F.”

The issue of PPI is three times greater than malware: no less than 60 million download attempts every week. That's something that the authors say represents "a major security threat". They estimate as many as five per cent of all browsers have been affected.

Some software builds in a 20-day delay before waking up so users don't immediately associate it with the free download they just installed. Some check in the computer's registry for anti-virus and that they're not already installed.

The "404 No More" feature uses copies of webpages from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine to replace 404 "not found" errors with something more useful. If you visit a link to a page that's disappeared, Firefox will fetch from archive.org a version of the page before it vanished.

To try "404 No More", Firefox users will have to install Firefox Test Pilot, a browser plugin for English-language Windows, OS X and Linux Firefox builds that lets you experiment with in-development features.

Apart from the 12-inch MacBook, which was refreshed in April, every single Mac line from the mini to the Pro is designated as "Don’t Buy" because of how long it’s been since Apple updated them.

The Mac mini has gone 657 days since its last update, which was controversial in itself since Apple removed quad-core options and made the product harder to upgrade after purchase.

Seagate thinks it can grow and profit from the world's expanding need for storage for reliably increasing exabytes-shipped demand, which flash has no hope of significantly denting in the next five to ten years.

In Seagate's view, the high-capacity disk sweet spot is 8TB over the next few quarters, and it has a cost advantage as its air-filled 8TB drive has fewer heads and platters than WD's 8TB helium-filled drive. Western Digital thinks it will be a 10TB sweet spot instead.

Car hackers Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek have again hacked a 2014 Jeep Cherokee, this time by physically linking a laptop to commandeer its steering and kill the brakes.

The localised attack is similar to other CAN bus attacks in which researchers have popped locks, compromised steering, and brakes.

The pair say they've penned a paper, to be revealed at Black Hat, in which they recommend vehicle manufacturers should better lock down CAN buses. To help auto-makers along, the pair have built an intrusion detection system that can detect their attacks.

You qualify for the free upgrade if you use assistive technologies, which include such features as a magnifier to better see the screen, a narrator to read text aloud, keyboard shortcuts and an on-screen keyboard.

Microsoft has not announced a deadline for the free offer for users of assistive technologies, so those of you who still want Windows 10 should grab the freebie while it lasts.