Broadly, the companies that sell domains to users – called registrars – are now required to send a verification email to the domain name holders every time a new domain is registered or the domain details are modified.

In theory, the validation process is extremely easy: you receive an email from your registrar and simply have to click on a link to verify that the domain's registration information is true and accurate. Then you are done.

The suspension is under ICANN's control and there is little or nothing that your registrar can do about it. The problem of course is the system relies on people receiving and responding to an email.

In the mid 1900s, the most popular banana in the world—a sweet, creamy variety called Gros Michel grown in Latin America—all but disappeared from the planet. At the time, it was the only banana in the world that could be exported. But a fungus, known as Panama Disease, which first appeared in Australia in the late 1800s, changed that after jumping continents.

Now, half a century later, a new strain of the disease is threatening the existence of the Cavendish, the banana that replaced the Gros Michel as the world's top banana export, representing 99 percent of the market, along with a number of banana varieties produced and eaten locally around the world.

The Cavendish is less desirable, more susceptible to other diseases, has a tendency to bruise, doesn't ripen easily or last very long before spoiling, and is "lamentably bland," as Mike Peed wrote in a 2011 piece for the New Yorker.

More than 80 percent of mobile devices have encryption flaws, while an application written in any of a trio of scripting languages—including PHP, ColdFusion and Classic ASP—are more likely to have serious flaws.

Many companies' security programs have become more mature, but a large number of smaller software startups have cropped up, with novice programmers in many cases, Wysopal said.

"These things are easy to fix, but they are so pervasive it goes to show that the mobile developers are really ignorant about how to write good crypto code," he said.

“The European office couldn't wait, however, so James “used an aggregated on-demand international ISDN connection so the databases could sync as required.”

“This was massively expensive, but was only needed for two weeks before we could place the order for broadband. The system worked fine unattended, and everyone was happy as the ERP system worked flawlessly.”

Despite the outbreak of happiness, “a week later the IT Manager called me into a meeting with HR to inform me I had been made redundant, effectively immediately.”

“Two months later,” James wrote, “I received a call from the horrified IT Director (the IT Manager himself had been made redundant straight after me), to ask if I knew why they faced an ISDN bill for over £100,000.”

EFF's Encrypt the Web project aims to fix that, and Let's Encrypt—a collaboration with Mozilla, the University of Michigan, Cisco, Akamai and many other sponsoring organizations—should be a huge step forward.

The larger barrier, though, is difficulty. Once someone has purchased a certificate, they need to install it on their website, a time consuming and error-prone process that requires significant technical skill, which is a cost in itself.

Facebook’s chief executive officer and his wife, Priscilla Chan, unveiled the plan in an open letter to their newborn daughter, Max (short for Maxima), in a Facebook post on Tuesday, promising to donate 99 percent of their stock in the social-networking company "during our lives."

The new Chan Zuckerberg Initiative will be a limited liability company controlled by Mark and Priscilla, not a charitable trust, meaning they will also make philanthropic investments and back political causes.

There’s also one more thing in common with the philanthropic endeavors of Buffett, Gates and Zuckerberg: they reduce their tax bills, as the contributions are tax-deductible.

“I believe Thunderbird should would thrive best by separating itself from reliance on Mozilla development systems and in some cases, Mozilla technology,” Baker wrote in her open memo, posted on Mozilla’s public governance forum.

Mozilla now views any support for Thunderbird, even the limited support it has been providing for the past three years, as akin to “paying a tax,” in Baker’s words, on top of the work those engineers spend building Firefox.

The first prototype of a sodium-ion battery has just been revealed by the RS2E, a French network bringing together researchers and industrial actors. This technology, inspired by the lithium-ion batteries already used in portable computers and electric vehicles, could lead to the mass storage of intermittent renewable energy sources.

Being three times lighter than sodium ions, lithium ions also make it possible to produce very lightweight batteries, an undeniable asset when it comes to portable electronics.

Over at Github, Ola Flisbäck offers up a depressing demonstration of just how easy it is to zero in on an individual by watching the stream of presence and status notifications.

Here's the problem: in trying to make sure Telegram is usable, it's been made way too chatty. For example, Flisbäck writes, “The Telegram Android app sends a notification to all contacts when it becomes or stops being the "foreground" app on the device.

If The Grugq and Matthew Green are right and Telegram's encryption is also problematic, the app is probably more like the spook's friend than the enemy of civilisation

This month CBS announced plans to launch a new Star Trek TV series in 2017. Few details are known about the show—which will be produced by Alex Kurtzman, who co-wrote the last two Star Trek films—but that hasn’t stopped fans from speculating.