While Backoff is only now being publicly disclosed, it has already had a large impact. Sigler noted that Trustwave is currently working on four post-breach forensics investigations that involve the Backoff malware. Across all four, nearly 600 businesses have been infected, and he expects more to come in.

In a brute-force attack, the hacker repeatedly tries username and password combinations until they gain access. According to US-CERT, as of July 31, antivirus technologies were not detecting Backoff, though that is now likely to change, thanks to the advisory.

While Facebook going down is a good thing as far as office productivity goes, it's clear that some addicts aren't happy: police in California got so tired of getting calls about the outage that the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department's public information office was forced to take to Twitter to tell off people for wasting police time.

In June the firm's servers took a dive, reported as the longest in its history, although service was resumed reasonably quickly.

The population density of the Gaza Strip has been disputed, but in comparison with other cities, Gaza City, with a population of around 750,000, is undoubtedly a densely populated urban area.

The median age in Gaza is 18, compared with a world average of 28. In most European countries it's about 40, and it is 30 in Israel. Only in a dozen or so African countries is the median age lower, reaching 15 in Uganda.

A study published in 2006 found that despite high educational achievement among Gazan women – all have at least nine years of schooling – and relatively low and constant infant mortality rates at around 25 per 1000 births, few chose to pursue independent careers.

"It is about time a formal specification is defined for PHP, though the lack of one has by no means hindered the adoption of this programming language," wrote Al Hilwa, program director of software development research for IT analyst firm IDC.

Thanks to its copious use on the Web, PHP is the seventh most widely used language today, according to the latest monthly estimate of programming language popularity from development tools provider Tiobe.

After consulting focus groups of Internet customers, government researchers have come to a conclusion that should surprise no one: people don't want data caps on home Internet service.

GigaOm surveyed 15 ISPs last November and found that eight capped data, at least for some customers. Those ISPs with data caps include Comcast, AT&T, CenturyLink, Cox, Charter, Suddenlink, MediaCom, and CableOne.

The City of London police has started placing banner advertisements on websites believed to be offering pirated content illegally.

When a website on Pipcu's Infringing Websites List (IWL) tries to display an advert, Project Sunblock will instead serve the police warning.

COSEINC is a Singapore security outfit that has run a critical eye about 17 major antivirus engines and products and found dangerous local and remotely-exploitable vulnerabilities in 14.

"AV engines make your computer more vulnerable with a varying degree of performance penalty [and] is as vulnerable to zero day attacks as the applications it tries to protect from. [It] can even lower the operating system exploiting mitigations."

Gomez did not try to profit from the paper. He also wasn't acting as some sort of indiscriminate distributor of infringing works. But under Colombian law, none of that matters.

Colombia gave the US copyright industry everything it wanted in order to secure this free trade agreement… and then it just kept going.

Just as in the US, plenty of useful information is locked up and inaccessible to anyone unable to afford the frequently exorbitant fees charged by various gatekeepers. Copyright's original intent -- "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts" -- isn't served by this behavior.

The site is currently controlled by pro-Russia rebels who have been accused of shooting down flight MH17.

The crash site has yet to be properly investigated and some bodies have still not been recovered. An international push is under way to get the site secured.

Nederkoon pays for Internet service that promises 75Mbps downstream and 35Mbps upstream through his FiOS connection. However, his Netflix video streams were limping along at just 375kbps (0.375mbps), equivalent to 0.5 percent of the speed he's paying for.

After connecting to VyprVPN, his Netflix connection suddenly ramped up to 3000kbps, the fastest the streaming service allows and around 10 times faster than he was getting when connecting directly with Verizon.