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Firefox's upcoming releases will block ad trackers by default

Mozilla has today announced that, starting in October, the Firefox web browser will begin to implement new features aimed at blocking cross-site ad tracking. The changes will make it much harder for third-party advertisers to track Firefox users' web browsing activity and, by extension, it will be more difficult for ad networks to construct personalised profiles of those users.

The rollout of Firefox's new blocking features won't happen overnight, however. Instead, Mozilla has a three-step process in mind which will eventually ensure all ad tracking is blocked by default.

Blocking ad trackers isn’t new to the open-source browser. Firefox began blocking pop-up ads way back in 2004, while an outright ad blocking feature was implemented in 2015, although it currently only applies to Private Browsing mode.

Last year, Mozilla launched Firefox Focus on Android, which automatically blocks trackers and completely wipes browsing history when the application is closed. On Firefox for iOS, ad blocking was already available in Private Browsing mode, but earlier this year that feature was also switched on by default for normal browsing as well.

The privacy game plan

Mozilla’s three-part strategy begins with blocking trackers that slow down page loads. This feature is currently being tested on Firefox Nightly, the internet company’s testing platform. If this works well, it will be added to Firefox 63 – which is currently slated for an October 2018 release – as a default feature, thereby injecting a speed boost to page loads and enhancing general performance.

Following that, Mozilla plans to remove ad trackers that follow users across sites, a feature that will actively delete cookies and block third-party content storage. This will be tested by some Firefox users in September and, if successful, will be rolled out as a default feature in Firefox 65, due to be released in January 2019.

Finally, Mozilla wants to moderate deceptive practices in other areas, like fingerprint tracking (which can be used to identify users by their devices) and cryptocurrency mining. There’s no official word on when these additional privacy safeguards will be released, or exactly how the company plans to implement them, but Mozilla has stated its intent to block these practices by default as well.

Giving users a voice

Over the years, Mozilla has added features to its browser to ensure user privacy was protected. For instance, the company added an extension to keep Facebook locked in its own sandbox after the Cambridge Analytica fiasco and this, Mozilla says, “is about more than protecting users – it’s about giving them a voice”.

"Some sites will continue to want user data in exchange for content, but now they will have to ask for it, a positive change for people who up until now had no idea of the value exchange they were asked to make,” reads the company’s latest announcement.

• The best Mozilla Firefox VPN in 2018

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Twitter tests a feature that suggests accounts to unfollow

This week, Twitter briefly tested a new feature that provides users with a suggested list of accounts to unfollow. 

Originally spotted by TheNextWeb’s Matt Mavarra, the test – which only ran for a few days – provided a pop up on the user’s Twitter account that recommended the user review a list of "accounts you may not need to follow".

Here's how the feature looked:

Culling Twitter

In a statement to The Verge, Twitter explained that the test is a step towards cleaning up users’ timelines.

“We know that people want a relevant Twitter timeline. One way to do this is by unfollowing people they don’t engage with regularly,” the statement read. “We ran an incredibly limited test to surface accounts that people were not engaging with to check if they’d like to unfollow them.”

The test for this feature has now concluded, and Twitter hasn't confirmed if it will be rolled out permanently. 

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Neflix bans its actors from saying ‘binge-watching’

It appears that Netflix has asked actors that star in its original productions to avoid using the term ‘binge-watching’ when talking about viewer habits.

In an interview with the Empire film podcast, Guy Pearce, who stars in Netflix’s new show The Innocents, revealed that “I don’t think Netflix likes the term ‘binge’… we were strictly sort of instructed beforehand not to talk about ‘binge-watching.”

• Should Netflix come with a warning label?

While talking about binge-watching shows on Netflix is usually said with some affection, and refers to how watchable its shows are, it appears Netflix doesn’t like the term, as binging is usually seen as an unhealthy or shameful activity.

This may be a sign that Netflix (which once embraced the concept of binge-watching) is looking to improve its profile, and hopes to be thought of as a premium content provider.

With the company recently raising its prices, it no doubt wants to have a reputation that matches its higher subscription cost. But, will banning the term ‘binge-watching’ help?

• Here’s the best shows on Netflix to (whisper it) binge watch

Via Business Insider

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Twitter and Facebook fight leads to cross-posted Tweets being deleted

Facebook and Twitter’s fight over whether tweets posted on Twitter can be automatically posted to Facebook has been rumbling on since the beginning of the year, and has now resulted in large numbers of Facebook posts made that way disappearing.

It appears that the cause of these posts disappearing is Twitter’s recent decision to delete its Facebook platform app. In January, Facebook announced it was removing a feature that allowed cross-posting from Twitter, which made Twitter’s Facebook platform app redundant.

Known as “cross-posting”, the feature allowed people to post Tweets on Twitter, which would then be automatically posted in Facebook. It meant users with both social media accounts only needed to post an update once, and it seems that Facebook saw this as preventing people from going to its website and posting the update themselves.

Missing posts

When Twitter deleted its Facebook app, it apparently didn't realize that this would make previous posts that had been made using the app disappear.

However, as TechCrunch reports, a number of people have been complaining about their missing posts.

While it’s frustrating for many users, this issue also has big ramifications for businesses that relied on being able to post updates to both Twitter and Facebook.

Not only have the Facebook posts disappeared – comments on the posts have vanished as well.

So, who's to blame? TechCrunch reports that a source with an understanding of the problem got in contact to say that Twitter’s deletion of the app was a surprise to Facebook, and that Twitter didn't alert the company to the problem immediately.

However, the Axios website refers to another source close to Twitter who claims that Twitter had asked Facebook for more time to see if there was a way to make its app continue to work, but Facebook said no.

Regardless of who's at fault, it appears that the deleted content is now back. If you rely on cross posting between Twitter and Facebook, however, you may need to look into other ways to maintain your presence on the feuding social networks.

• Facebook has a new idea for connecting you with strangers

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Report: Yahoo and AOL will scan your emails and sell the data to advertisers

If you’ve got a Yahoo or AOL email address then your correspondence might not be as private as you think, as Oath (the combined Yahoo and AOL business) uses a program that scans accounts, with over 200 million inboxes scanned in total.

That’s according to The Wall Street Journal, which reports that these scans are designed to look for information contained in your emails that can then be sold to advertisers to help them provide targeted ads. This could lead to more relevant adverts then, but it comes at the cost of some privacy.

It’s also something that other major email providers don’t do. Gmail for example stopped doing this in 2017 – though it and other email providers still allow third-party developers to read your emails if you sign up for certain services.

It won't scan everything

The scanning system run by Oath is aimed purely at advertising and will apparently exclude sensitive information, such as health and banking records.

However, it’s still doing something that free alternatives won’t, and the scans go quite deep, as they’re apparently able for example to detect what products you buy from scanning digital receipts. There’s also the worry that Oath may make mistakes and scan some more sensitive information that it’s not meant to.

What’s more, Yahoo Mail’s privacy policy also states that email accounts can be manually reviewed, which means that it’s not just a program that can access them, but also in some situations employees of the company.

So if you’re using AOL or Yahoo Mail and care about privacy it could be time to switch to a different email account. Though, for anything really sensitive, email probably isn’t the best communication and storage solution anyway.

• This isn't the only privacy issue Yahoo Mail has faced

Via TechCrunch

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Best free image hosting websites 2018 for photos and videos

Ubiquitous cloud computing and the advent of smartphones with superb connectivity and compact-beating cameras have turned us into trigger-happy snappers and eager uploaders.

While Facebook remains the top destination for pictures, other image hosting websites (free or paid) have mushroomed in popularity as folks look for a safe abode for photos that have a serious propensity to be shared and potentially go viral.

When it comes to sussing out the best online home for your pics and vids, you will want to check out where these services are based, and whether or not they require registration. You’ll also need to consider other features: storage space, file size limits, file support, how easy it is to upload pictures, platforms supported, and whether there’s capacity for direct linking, image galleries, editing capabilities and more.

Note that image hosting websites are fundamentally different from online photo printing or backup services – the latter are used primarily to keep a copy of pictures online, with sharing being a minor consideration. At any rate, let’s take a look at some of our favorite free image hosting websites.

Best free image hosting websites in 2018

Imgur is by far the biggest image hosting website in the world (and one of the top 50 online properties). You don’t have to register to use it and everything is pretty much unlimited with three exceptions: you’re limited to uploading up to 50 pictures per IP address per hour, the maximum file size for non-animated images is 20MB, and 200MB for GIFs.

Files are kept online forever but just be aware that the service does apply lossy compression to non-animated images over 1MB (for anonymous uploads) and 5MB (for account holders). So don’t use this as an online backup service for your pictures. There are also a plethora of tools available either produced by Imgur or members of the very active user community.

It’s difficult to mention free image hosting and not bring Flickr into the conversation. The site experienced a meteoric rise under the ownership of Yahoo and Oath/Verizon since 2017, and targets the prosumer audience rather than casual happy GIFer users. Flickr’s base offering remains free with 1TB of storage, powerful photo editing tools and smart photo management, while its paid-for Pro Plus boasts advanced stats, ad-free browsing and a desktop auto-uploader.

With tens of millions of subscribers, Flickr has managed to build one of the biggest photo communities on the web. Also note that if you are in the market for an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, you can get a 15% discount, which should be more than enough to buy the paid-for Flickr account.

This little-known image hosting website has a unique feature which makes it massively useful for those looking to create thumbnail galleries very quickly. You can upload compressed ZIP files (up to 250MB in size), ideal for archives without index. There is a 10MB file size download limit for pictures, with no limits on the number of uploads/downloads, or how long a file is hosted – only JPG, GIF and PNG files are supported, though.

Unlike others, Imagebam’s focus is entirely on hosting pictures rather than fostering a community and encouraging discoverability. While registration is optional, it provides you with photo management tools, and the ability to organize your images and galleries.

It’s near impossible to go more minimalist than Imgbb and that’s probably why it’s one of the more popular image hosting websites around. Simply drag-and-drop your files on the homepage and you’re ready to go. There’s a 16MB limit (all major image file formats are supported), but no limit to the number of files you can upload, or restrictions on how long they can remain online. Imgbb doesn’t require the user to register – just be aware that all the pictures you upload will be reviewed by human editors.

Like Imagebam, Imagetitan doesn’t operate an entire community, instead simply providing a straightforward browser-based interface. There are no mobile apps here – you can only upload files smaller Than 1.5MB, and only the three major image file types are accepted (JPG, GIF and PNG). There’s no limit to the number of files you can upload, and no bandwidth restrictions, plus the pictures will remain online for as long as you want.

You are provided with a deletion code to remove pictures at a later date. You don’t need to register and you can upload pictures via FTP (up to 100 of them). Hot-linking is not prohibited but Imagetitan doesn’t provide direct links.

At the other end of the spectrum is Pixabay, a popular upmarket image hosting service that pegs itself as an online community of people who publish high quality copyright-free images and videos. To be part of this exclusive club, however, you must stick to the site’s stringent image quality guidelines, which means that all the photos are vetted by humans.

Login is compulsory and the mobile apps do not currently support direct image uploads. Pictures need to be at least 3,000 pixels wide, up to 40MB in size, and you can upload up to 10 pictures in 10 days. High quality images won't effect the upload limit and the more high quality images you submit, the more your daily granted number of uploads will increase.

Other popular image hosting sites include…

Tinypic: A fast, simple and reliable free video and image hosting site owned by Photobucket. There is no registration or login required, simply submit your picture or video.

Use.com: Another well-loved free image hosting website that offers unlimited uploads, perpetual online storage and unlimited bandwidth. Use.com boasts an extra level of privacy by allowing you to share photos and videos with just your friends and family – or with the whole world if you prefer.

Pexels: One of the growing rivals to Pixabay, Pexel wants to help designers and bloggers – and indeed everyone who is looking for an image – to find great photos that they can use everywhere for free. All photos submitted are therefore released under the CC0 license which means pictures can be used for free without attribution.

Deviantart: By far the biggest community of image sharers in the world is Deviantart. An “online social network for artists and enthusiasts” is how the service describes itself, and 45 million or so registered members have uploaded millions of pieces of art online. This is probably as far away as you can get from the likes of Imgur and traditional image hosting websites.

• We’ve also rounded up the best web hosting services for 2018

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Facebook has a new idea for connecting you with strangers

If you're bored of your friends and family, how about connecting with a few strangers to spice up your Facebooking? The social media site is testing a new feature that displays interests you have in common with people you aren't connected to – people who might be commenting on your friends' posts or pictures, for example.

As CNET reports, the idea is that if you share something in common with a person – maybe you're in the same public Facebook group, or you went to the same college, or you work for the same company – then that shows up alongside that person's name.

Perhaps conscious of the current conversation around user privacy, Facebook is keen to emphasize that only information that's currently visible on your profile will be used. In other words, other people can only see this type of data if it's set to be visible by anyone or by friends of friends on your Facebook page.

Helping people connect

Apparently Facebook wants to prompt conversations that might not otherwise happen if you didn't know someone is from the same community as you, or has the same interest in antique pottery, or whatever else Facebook is digging into. The trial run of the feature is currently limited to a select number of users in the United States.

"Knowing shared things in common helps people connect," Facebook told CNET. "We're testing adding a 'things in common' label that will appear above comments from people who you're not friends with but you might have something in common with."

It remains to be seen if and when the feature rolls out for everyone, but Facebook is constantly testing out new ideas and tools as it tries to keep user engagement high. A significant number of users are reportedly ditching their Facebook accounts as they look to take their social networking elsewhere or just cut it out all together.

• Facebook now lets you disconnect third-party apps in bulk

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Get your broadband sorted this Bank Holiday with one of these 5 deals

We know it's uncharitable to moan after the summer we've just had, but wouldn't it be nice to have a dazzling August Bank Holiday for once?

Still, if there's one good thing to come of a Bank Holiday sat inside with the curtains closed, it's bargain hunting. As well as Bank Holiday deals on everything from TVs to mobile phones to games consoles and beyond, it's also the weekend of the year when internet providers slash the price of broadband deals.

So whether it's a hefty £90 pre-paid credit card with BT Superfast broadband, a tasty Amazon.co.uk Gift Card from TalkTalk or simply a cheap broadband only deal that you won't find anywhere else, we reckon that one of these five broadband deals below will have what you're after...

• Or just check out all of this weekend's best broadband deals

The exclusive broadband deal you won't find anywhere else

The broadband deal with the Amazon.co.uk Gift Card

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The fibre broadband deal with all the free gifts

The BT broadband deal to beat all others

• Test your internet with TechRadar's broadband speed checker

See all of the best broadband deals available this Bank Holiday:

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Cryptocurrency-stealing Trojan raises new concerns on the Mac malware front

Mac users have another potential worry on the security front, with the news that Lazarus, a notorious bunch of hackers from North Korea, has adapted its cryptocurrency-stealing malware to target macOS.

As spotted by Computerworld, security firm Kaspersky’s researchers uncovered the campaign, which goes under the name of ‘AppleJeus’, and the malware – called Fallchill – was initially spotted after it had successfully compromised an Asian cryptocurrency exchange.

Kaspersky notes that the victim was infected by a Trojanized cryptocurrency trading app, which was downloaded from a legitimate-looking website and developer that has either been hacked by Lazarus, or is a clever false operation entirely set up by the malware-peddling group.

As mentioned, the security company then made the discovery that the Fallchill Trojan has been adapted to also infect macOS machines, and not just Windows PCs as was previously the case. According to Kaspersky, a version targeting Linux users is also in the pipeline, meaning the hackers are looking to spread their cryptocurrency-thieving net much wider.

Stealth first

When the cryptocurrency trading app is first installed there doesn’t appear to be anything amiss on the surface, but it stealthily checks the system to see if it’s worth compromising – and if it decides that’s the case, then a software update is triggered which downloads the actual malicious payload.

Kaspersky observes that of late Lazarus has been getting more aggressive, and that it’s obviously a significant milestone that macOS is now being targeted.

The security firm notes: “There is steadily growing interest in macOS from ordinary users, especially in IT companies. Many developers and engineers are switching to using macOS. Apparently, in the chase after advanced users, software developers from supply chains and some high profile targets, threat actors are forced to have macOS malware tools.

“We believe that in the future Lazarus is going to support all platforms that software developers are using as a base platform, because compromising developers opens many doors at once.”

Obviously we all need to be careful about where we download our software from, and exercise a degree of caution even if it appears to be a legitimate company on the face of it.

And Mac users need to get into the mindset of being more vigilant, as while it’s a bit of a tired old line that more malware is targeting macOS, this is clearly the case – not to mention that it’s of particular concern when the potential loss is a financial one.

• We’ve picked out the best mining GPU of 2018

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The best mining pools of 2018 for cryptocurrency

If you're serious about cryptocurrency mining, then before you begin mining right away, you should first look at the best mining pools of 2018 for cryptocurrency.

This is because the most popular currencies such as Bitcoin and Litecoin can take centuries to generate a valid 'block' on your own and make money.

With Mining pools, you can work with other miners and devices across the internet to pool your resources in performing complex calculations to generate blocks of data. The mining 'reward', as it's known, is then split proportionally amongst each participant.

This makes mining much faster, but don't just join the first mining pool you see. This is because the method used to allocate rewards and the final amount you'll receive will depend on the mining pool in question.

So, in this guide we've listed five of the best known pools online today, to help you decide which is right for you.

Where possible we've found pools with multiple servers around the world, allowing you to connect easily. If these pique your interest and you want more information, head over to the Bitcoin Wiki to see a detailed comparison of all the top pools.

• We also show you how to mine Bitcoins

Slush Pool started out in 2010 when it was known as Bitcoin Pooled Mining Server before rebranding itself. It's the oldest currently active mining pool and has an excellent reputation for stability and accuracy. Currently Slush Pool is the fourth largest mining pool representing around 11.4% of hash power overall.

The sign-up process is very simple and you can create a demo miner in order to familiarize yourself with the dashboard. The website itself offers both a simple and a more advanced interface for experienced miners.

You can also set your minimum pay-out threshold to as little as 0.001 BTC, but there are additional fees for any pay-outs under 0.01BTC.

Slush Pool is democratic in that you can register your preferences about the kind of mining you want your devices to perform, for instance: Bitcoin Core strict rules only.

The website also has some very useful sections for those who are new to mining. This section on mining rewards is particularly helpful as it contains a detailed explanation of how pay-outs are measured by each user's scoring hash rate. If you switch from Slush Pool to another, then try to return, your score will drop significantly.

Pool fees stand at 2% which is a little higher than some of the other pools out there. Slush Pool has servers in the US, Canada, Europe, Singapore, Japan and China.

• Sign up for Slush Pool here

AntPool is currently the largest mining pool operating today, representing just over a quarter of hash power worldwide. It's owned and operated by Bitmain, a China-based firm which also manufactures the Antminer series of ASIC mining devices (you can check out our guide to the best ASIC devices here).

AntPool has servers all around the world and makes use of an innovative peer-to-peer mining protocol to link your device to the one nearest to you during setup, for a faster and more reliable connection.

Once you've set up your account and entered your wallet address, payments are sent every day between 08:00-10:00 AM Beijing time (which is eight hours ahead of the UK), provided that the amount you've mined is at least 0.001 BTC.

Being the largest pool allows users some perks in that they can choose how they want to be rewarded. One method is PPS (Payment Per Share) which means you're charged 4% on pay-outs plus 2% of any transaction fees earned. You can also choose PPLNS (Payment Per Last N Shares) which is free but AntPool will keep all transaction fees. Currently, there is a new feature - from June 18th to September 18th there is no pool fee.

You can mine solo if you wish but it's very unlikely you'll make a profit doing so unless you have a colossal amount of hash power. Whichever method you choose, remember that individual pay-outs are generally smaller for larger mining pools.

• Sign up for AntPool here

This outfit is one of the most well-known brands in the world of cryptocurrency, and owns the domain Bitcoin.com as well as BTC.com. Prior to starting a mining pool in 2016, BTC.com was already famous for creating a powerful Bitcoin wallet as well as its own blockchain explorer.

BTC.com operates one of the most popular mining pools, vying with AntPool for the top spot. It currently represents over 20% of overall global hash power. Mining servers are located in both the EU (Germany) and China. BTC.com currently supports mining only Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash.

Ever innovative, BTC.com has its own method of rewarding miners known as FPPS (Full Pay Per Share). FPPS calculates a standard transaction fee within a given period,adds it to the block reward (currently 12.5 BTC) and then distributes the whole to miners as with traditional PPS (Payment Per Share). Sharing transaction fees, especially when they are high, makes mining much more lucrative which may explain BTC.com's popularity.

The only small criticism we can level at BTC.com is that we found the website to be rather flaky. For example, the page explaining how FPPS works failed to load, and while the help section of the website is useful, there's no specific ‘getting started’ guide as with Slush Pool. We were nevertheless able to find all the information needed to configure a miner. Windows users can also add and configure miners easily using BTC tool and BTC Smart Agent.

• Sign up for BTC.com here

KanoPool has been around since 2014. Despite being one of the smaller pools out there (currently representing only 0.3% of global hash power), it has become popular due to its low mining fees and easy setup.

Registration with KanoPool is optional: when configuring your miner, you only need to enter your BTC wallet address as the username to begin mining right away. However, users who do choose to register can view more detailed statistics about the mining pool.

The payment method used by KanoPool is PPLNS (Payment Per Last N Shares). 'N' in this case is five times the network difficulty, immediately after a block is found.

The pool fee itself is 0.9% and transaction fees are included in the block reward, meaning pay-outs are quite generous relative to rival larger mining pools, although payment may take some time. You can find a more detailed explanation of how pay-outs are managed on KanoPool's website.

If you do choose to visit the KanoPool web page, you'll see that the layout is extremely simplistic, and there are no detailed tutorials as all the information you need to get started is on the help page. Nevertheless Kano himself is an active participant in the BitcoinTalk forum and is very prompt to respond to questions about the pool.

• Sign up for KanoPool here

F2Pool (also known as DiscusFish) is a Chinese-based mining pool and has been operating since 2013. It has several servers on the Chinese mainland as well as in Hong Kong and the US.

F2Pool is relatively large, representing around 5.5% of the hash power for the most popular Bitcoin mining pools. It’s also one of the most diverse pools in that while you can mine BTC, F2Pool also supports Litecoin, Zerocoin, Ethereum, Siacoin, DASH and Monero to name just a few.

Pay-outs are made at midnight UTC each day on a PPS (Payment Per Share) basis of negative 3%. The pool keeps all transaction fees. Right now, the threshold for Bitcoin payments is 0.005 BTC.

The website is also currently offering a little extra incentive to miners. If you mine 1 LTC, you'll get 1000 DOGE free.

The website itself is well laid out and contains useful information, but non-Chinese users who need support are encouraged to use the official F2Pool English language thread in the BitcoinTalk forums.

The sign-up process for the pool can be a little tricky as you need to fill out a Captcha and also verify your identity via text message, meaning you must have access to a mobile phone to start mining.

• Sign up for F2Pool here

• We’ve also picked out the best graphics cards for mining Bitcoin, Ethereum and more
• Check out also the best VPN service of 2018 that we've nailed down.

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Slack wants to turn your business into "a team of teams"

Slack has grown rapidly over the past few years to become one of the world’s most popular chat and collaboration tools.

The company, which incredibly is still only four years old, now numbers over eight million daily active users, with the UK ranking as one of its top five markets worldwide, and the likes of Marks & Spencer, Sky, ITV and Ocado all signed up as customers.

But far from resting on its laurels, Slack is aiming to keep growing and expanding its reach across the world to allow businesses to raise their collaboration even higher.

• The best online collaboration tools 2018

Crafted

"We have only one mission, we want to make people's working lives simpler, more pleasant, and more productive,” Rav Dhaliwal, Slack’s head of customer success for EMEA tells TechRadar Pro at a recent meeting at the company’s UK office in the heart of Belgravia.

"Slack is acting as the fabric to bring your organisation together,” he says.

The company is enjoying huge growth, having added two million users since the turn of the year, and now counts over a thousands employees across eight global offices.

But this success comes with added pressure, as Slack now has to face the question of how it stays useful and relevant in what has become a hugely competitive marketplace.

"On the surface, it may look like we have a very similar proposition...but if you scratch the surface, what you see is that we have a huge amount of differentiation,” Dhaliwal says, highlighting how Slack is looking to ensure its quality of service going forward. 

"Craftsmanship is one of our core values," he says, noting that within Slack, all updates are released in a timely and innovative manner, which he says is, "the antithesis to move fast and break things."

Slack has expanded its product offering within its platform recently, with Dhaliwal singling out the addition of private shared channels as a particularly strong selling point for customers. 

The opportunity to securely and quickly chat to contacts outside of your organisation has proved incredibly useful for customers operating with global contacts, with the productivity benefits helping Slack be recognised as a true game-changer.

Dhaliwal notes that Slack’s philosophy of being an open platform is what makes it so appealing, particularly with larger organisations. 

The company’s new Enterprise Grid feature is also proving attractive to big businesses, with over 150 large organisations now utilising the platform, which is designed for workforces of around 500,000 to a million employees.

"An organisation is not a monolithic thing, it's a collection of teams - so really what you want to do is to make it a team of teams,” says Dhaliwal.

"Huge momentum"

For a company that has helped foster communication and collaboration across the globe, it’s good to see that Slack also has a strong belief in its local work.

The company’s UK office is booming, with new staff joining on a regular basis, and more and more local customers signing up all the time.

Dhaliwal notes that 63 percent of the FTSE100 use Slack, and 45 percent of daily usage in the UK is paid for, making this one of the company’s strongest markets worldwide with “huge momentum”.

Even the threat of Brexit is not perceived as something to affect Slack’s future strategy, which is set to evolve into utilising more advertising to build on the company’s heritage of expanding via viral means.

The UK is set to play a key part in Slack’s growth though, maintaining its status as a hub for digital success and innovation with one of the most vibrant companies in the technology space today. 

As Dhaliwal says, “businesses are transforming, and they're using Slack as the vehicle to help them.”

• The best small business software of 2018

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What is private cloud?

Cloud computing gets divided into three types: public, private, and hybrid; the last being a mix between the first two types. While a public cloud connects to multiple users through the internet, a private cloud is restricted to only select users, such as a university, or a company. The private cloud can be located directly on premise directly on the internal network, or at an off premises company owned and managed data center. Private cloud also gets known by the names corporate cloud, and internal cloud.

Virtual private cloud

A variation of the private cloud is the virtual private cloud (VPC). The difference is that a private cloud is hosted over the organization’s internal infrastructure, while the VPC uses a third-party’s cloud provider infrastructure. However, unlike a public cloud that serves multiple organizations, the VPC remains dedicated to a single organization.

An example of a VPC is the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, a service of Amazon Web Services, which allows a Hardware Virtual Private Network connection from the AWS data center to the organization’s corporate data center for a high level of security. Such a solution can be a good intermediate step offering the features of a private cloud, while letting a vendor handle the heavy lifting of deployment and maintenance. 

While a private cloud setup can most certainly exist on its own, these days, it frequently gets connected to a vendor’s public cloud server, in a hybrid cloud setup. This provides advantages of redundancy, and scalability to provide additional resources at times of peak demand, in what gets called ‘cloud bursting.’ In some setups for times of peak demand, less sensitive applications may be get shifted to the public cloud, so that additional hardware resources in the private cloud can be devoted to those applications that need to be run locally. 

Advantages of private cloud

Let’s look at the advantages of a private cloud setup:

• Security - With a private cloud setup dedicated to a single client, security is inherently higher than in a public cloud situation that has multiple users.
• Control - The organization gains total control over the access to the server, and the data stored on it.
• Performance - With a private cloud, with the hardware on-premise, and therefore behind the firewall, latency will be lower, and therefore network speed is faster. 
• Customization - With control over the hardware and infrastructure, components can be upgraded as needed, such as RAM and hard drives to optimize performance, and more resource intensive apps can be specified to run on the newer gear.
• Management - With a public cloud, the cloud provider is the top manager, but in a private cloud environment the IT administrator for the organization retains this.

Disadvantages of private cloud

There are also some disadvantages to the private cloud environment. One is that the startup costs for hardware acquisition are quite a bit higher than a public cloud. It can also be hard to budget for, as it is not always simple to plan out hardware failures.

The costs for maintenance, and that it is done cost effectively, also fall on the IT department, causing them to turn to public cloud solutions with their more predictable monthly costs that are simpler to budget for.

However, for the organization’s mission critical applications, the investment in a private cloud setup can be justified, as uptime can be more highly optimized with redundant hardware.

With a private cloud solution it can be a challenge to plan out the capacity. If it is overbuilt, it will be underutilized, and therefore money is wasted on resources that are not necessary. If the private cloud is underpowered, than it will not be up to the task, and not able to meet times of higher demand, although this has prompted some organizations to enable cloud bursting, as detailed above.

A final downside is that as the private cloud is located on the corporate LAN, there can be difficulties accessing it from outside the network, while maintaining a high level of security.

With the downsides of acquiring, deploying, and maintaining, a private cloud solution, it has come under criticism as public clouds offer economies of scale from companies that offer their expertise in this increasingly complex area. After all, public cloud offers resources on demand, at affordable prices. However, not all applications, often due to security and compliance with regulations, are amenable to a public cloud approach, necessitating a private cloud environment as the organization needs to maintain control over their sensitive data.

Private cloud software

To build out a private cloud requires software. There are plenty of choices from vendors, such as Microsoft Azure, VMWare vCloud, and the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, each offering an array of services, including private clouds, virtual private clouds, and the ability to connect to a public cloud provider to implement a hybrid cloud solution.   

Another popular solution is the Eucalyptus cloud platform, which stands for the Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems and is open-source software that provides solutions for IaaS methodology. This grew out of a research project at the University of California, Santa Barbara, which then transitioned to the business Eucalyptus Systems in 2009.

Subsequently they decided to work with Amazon Web Services in 2012, to allow users to join their Eucalyptus private cloud to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for implementation of a hybrid cloud setup. Eucalyptus was subsequently acquired by HP in 2014, and integrated into their Helion portfolio. 

Explaining the wide adoption of Eucalyptus has been their wide support across both Windows and Linux virtual machines, accounting reports for administrators, the ability to virtualize multiple clusters into a single cloud, secure internal communication via WS-Security between internal resources, and compatibility with popular hypervisors, including VMWare and KVM.

It continues to be a robust software platform, with an advanced feature set such as CloudWatch that can collect and study metrics to spot trends, and even provide alerts, Auto Scaling that can increase the resources as needed to match the workload, and scale them back when not needed, and granular reporting that can report the cloud utilization down to the cloud application by each user.

While private cloud only environments are giving way to hybrid cloud architecture, incorporating the innate advantages that the public cloud offers, they continue to be an important component to include for organizations seeking the most robust cloud architecture.

• We also discuss multicloud in greater detail here

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Facebook is using a reliability score to stamp out trolls

In Facebook’s ongoing fight with fake news, it employs a number of methods to help weed out falsehoods from the truth, but now we know the company’s method for verifying the verifiers.

An article from the Washington Post has revealed that Facebook assigns its users a reputation score between 0 and 1. When a user flags a post as containing false news, their score is adjusted based on the veracity of this tip.

So, for users who consistently flag posts that genuinely contain fake news, their score will rise and Facebook will lend their future tips more weight, whereas the opposite is true of those that continuously report legitimate news. 

• Latest Facebook update shows which of your idiot friends share fake news

Who watches the watchmen?

The score has been introduced to combat the growing problem known as ‘brigading’, which sees organized groups of trolls or political activists deliberately flag posts in the hopes to suppress or censor them.

Despite the fact that Facebook is now using third-party fact checkers to respond to each of these flags, if they are continuous and made in high quantities, the post can experience reduced visibility, regardless of their legitimacy.

Speaking with the Washington Post, Facebook’s product manager for fighting fake news, Tessa Lyons, stressed that this score was just one of the methods the company uses to check the reliability of fake news reports and that it wasn't the sole indicator of a user's trustworthiness.

At present, this is strictly an internal measure and there is no way for users to check their reputation score, a precaution likely put in place to avoid any further gaming of Facebook’s systems to drive personal or political agendas. 

• Facebook is taking down misinformation that could lead to violence

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GDPR sees cookies crumble on EU news sites

Several months on from GDPR, the new laws are having a dramatic effect on how news websites gather information on their readers.

A new study has found that the number of tracking cookies on EU news sites has fallen 22 per cent since GDPR came into force, with the UK has seen the biggest drop, with a post-GDPR fall of 45 per cent fewer cookies.

Cookies related to website design and optimisation saw the biggest overall fall, with 27 per cent less in July compared to April, with advertising cookies dropping 14 per cent and social media falling nine per cent.

However major technology companies such as Amazon, Google and Facebook seem not to have been affected by GDPR as much, with only one per cent of news sites ditching Google cookies, five per cent dropping Facebook cookies and two per cent getting rid of Amazon cookies. 

• What is GDPR? Everything you need to know

GDPR cookie 

The research, conducted by the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford, compared cookie usage on 200 news sites across seven EU countries, including the UK, in both April 2018 and July 2018.

Despite GDPR leading to policy changes in many areas, 98 per cent of news sites in the EU still use some form of cookies, meaning that user tracking may still be happening at a smaller scale.

"We may be observing a kind of 'housecleaning' effect. Modern websites are highly complex and evolve over time in a path-dependent way, sometimes accumulating out-of-date features and code," researchers Timothy Libert, Lucas Graves and Rasmus Kleis Neilsen said in their report.

"The introduction of GDPR may have provided news organizations with a chance to evaluate the utility of various features, including third-party services, and to remove code which is no longer of significant use or which compromises user privacy."

• 5 unexpected consequences of GDPR

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Making way for a new landscape: The everchanging world of private clouds

Most technologies experience continuous change and innovation, and with the extent to which cloud computing has significantly evolved over the last ten years, it is no exception. Previously, the cloud was for more for technology-based sectors, whereby the computing geniuses of the world would test new, revolutionary ideas.

Now, the landscape of the cloud is far more widely incorporating and open for business, with companies taking up residence for multiple reasons and to serve a huge range of sectors. All have asked themselves the same question: which is better, where does the future lie, in the private or public cloud?

• What is cloud computing?

Two competing forces

Both forms of cloud are scalable, flexible clusters of computing power, usually servers, and associated services including management. The public cloud is easy to access and generally provided by large corporations such as Google or Amazon.

On the other hand, the private cloud is slightly different. Private clouds are for the exclusive use of a specific entity, and they may be hosted either by that entity itself, using its own equipment and location or, more frequently, hosted by a third-party provider that manages the private cloud, ensuring updates, quality of service and security.

While it is common to hear people defending their preferred cloud provision, and plenty of published articles contrast the two, as time passes it becomes less appropriate to discuss cloud computing in these terms. For as the market matures, and more people experience cloud computing in various formats, clearly there is a place for both forms, but perhaps in slightly different formats or proportions.

What's right for you?

When it comes to selecting cloud provision, is not which is 'better', but rather the stage of maturity of the business (what is appropriate for a start-up may be much less appropriate when it is an established business), the nature of its work (if the same business diversifies, it may need to change its cloud) and the sector that the business operates in. 

Social, legal and regulatory matters also affect cloud computing. With an increasing focus on privacy and data protection comes a need to ensure the highest levels of security, particularly for those in sectors such as banking and health, where data security is vital and mandatory to ensure regulatory compliance. Many would say this is where the private cloud excels, since private cloud providers are generally much more specific about their security provision than public cloud providers, whose provision can also vary widely. While the public cloud is generally safe, many businesses need the detailed understanding and assurance that private provision can bring. 

For less privacy-sensitive applications, however, the public cloud can offer a much more accessible and affordable platform. Indeed, the apparent affordability of the public cloud can seem very appealing, but when businesses begin to grow and scale their provision, the apparent costs can become misleading. As a business becomes more complex, the greater range and more detailed specifications of private cloud provision, such as the ability to plug in specific applications and assure constant availability and data speeds, can become very important and reduce or outweigh cost differentials.

Uniting forces

That being said, many businesses have some data and activity that is sufficiently security-critical to require private provision, and some that is not. Many firms now combine both private and public cloud provision, either in the form of a bespoke hybrid package from third party providers, or a combination of in-house and third-party provision. This has the advantage of assuring security and other compliance as required by sector or location, while also letting the business leverage the cost, flexibility and accessibility benefits of the public cloud.

And while there is also talk of open source solutions making private cloud provision more affordable, at the moment the user base probably has too many concerns about the early stage of development to make it appealing to most. In terms of public clouds, worries about security, providers' ability to assure regulatory compliance, the relative loss of control over data and the limited extent of public cloud services' support and expertise all combine to make many businesses prefer to retain at least some of their provision in a 'traditional' private cloud.

Stepping into the future

Ultimately, for as long as pen source solutions remain in their infancy and the public cloud continues to lack detail and transparency, it is unlikely that businesses will, en masse, move their data to the public cloud any time soon. Although the public cloud boasts many advantages, it cannot assure the reliability and safety of private cloud provision. Rather, the general movement seems to be more towards combined provisions that blend the accessibility and cost benefits of the public cloud with the accountability and security of its private counterpart. The proportions in which these two are allocated will vary by sector, by the ambition of each business and its stage of development.

Future predictions are always speculative and prone to inaccuracy, but for now and for the foreseeable future, businesses that can combine public and private clouds that meet their needs and stay within their budget are far more likely to be headed towards success.

Toan Nguyen is director business development & cloud platform at e-shelter

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Twitch Prime won’t support ad-free viewing for much longer

The live-streaming platform Twitch is rolling back its ad-free streaming options, following a blog post detailing upcoming changes to Twitch Prime accounts.

As of September 14, Twitch Prime users will start seeing pre-roll, mid-roll, and display ads while watching broadcasts across the streaming site, which was bought by Amazon in 2014 and now attracts over 15 million daily users - largely for live-streams of video-game playthroughs and esports events. Those with Amazon Prime accounts automatically get access to Twitch Prime benefits.

•  Netflix is testing video ads that play between episodes 

There is, thankfully, something of a workaround. Monthly or annual subscribers will only start seeing ads come in after their next renewal date, so renewing before September 14 will net you either a month or year of ad-free streaming - even if it only postpones the inevitable.

The announcement comes only days after Netflix started testing skippable adverts between televisions episodes for a small number of users, albeit only for other Netflix content.

Support your troops

The change is likely to rile some customers used to their current levels of privilege, which also include free monthly games for download and in-game loot for the likes of Fortnite or Hearthstone.

Twitch, however, called the wider presence of adverts “an important source of support for creators who make Twitch possible”.

Those really flinching at the idea can upgrade to the Twitch Turbo subscription, which retains ad-free viewing alongside more emoticon options, custom username colors, and cloud storage for your own broadcasts for up to 60 days.

•  How to stream a PC game for Twitch 

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What is multicloud?

Cloud computing has become an important tool for business, enabling redundant data processes, and computing resources that can scale to meet the challenge of an uptick in demand, all in an instant. It has enabled offerings as diverse as Software as a Service, and the increasingly popular container technology.

With many of today’s businesses reliant on the cloud, some now have more than a single cloud provider, known as multicloud. As many businesses have more than one vendor for many pieces of technology, from servers to smartphones, they similarly may not stick to a single cloud provider, and use the best from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, the Google Cloud Platform, and other cloud providers.

Why multicloud?

There are several reasons why an enterprise would choose to take this multicloud approach, and have more than a solitary cloud vendor. These include:

• Redundancy - By having more than one cloud provider, it follows the principle of “If you have two you have one, and if you have one you have none,” as it should be assumed that any cloud provider will have downtime issues, and this is insurance against these inevitable outages.
• Scalability - Cloud computing often gets combined with container technology via Kubernetes software, and having access to multiple clouds allows for even more rapid resources on demand, and additional scaling capability as needed for peak demand.
• Location - Having regional cloud providers will position them closer to where the users are, to improve performance, and reduce latency issues that develop when the cloud server is on the other side of the planet. An additional benefit is that having the cloud server in the same country as the users makes it easier to comply with the local laws and regulations.
• Customer lock-in - This is an economics term that comes from when a company becomes entrenched in a particular provider for a service. Companies wish to avoid this, as otherwise the cost to switch can be prohibitive, and the vendor can essentially have a total monopoly over them.
• Competition - This is the opposite situation, and with access to multiple cloud providers, the company has leverage to negotiate a more competitive deal from each.
• Features - While cloud providers offer similar feature sets, they are not identical. There are times when multiple cloud providers are used to optimize their feature sets for the apps that they are running, such as choosing a more secure cloud vendor for more sensitive data, and a more economical one for an app with less of a security requirement. Similarly, speed, capacity and cost can all figure into the choice of the cloud vendor for each application.

Given the many advantages enumerated above, it comes as no surprise that many organizations have adopted a multicloud approach. When studied in 2017 by Microsoft and 451 Research, it was found that “nearly a third of organizations work with four or more cloud service providers,” showing a significant trend towards multicloud.

In some cases, this happens to an enterprise, department by department, as each incorporates a cloud provider to serve the needs of their workers in that section. However, as this evolves it is preferable to architect a more comprehensive multicloud solution that can be applied organization wide, rather than piecemeal.  

Disadvantages of multicloud

There are also downsides to a multicloud approach. Essentially, they relate to complexity, and to a higher cost. The higher complexity of multiple cloud providers makes it more difficult to manage, from both a task perspective, and also from a security standpoint.

The higher cost comes from having additional contracts with additional providers. Realize that while there are certainly merits to a multicloud approach, once implemented, adding additional providers is not always the best answer as things get more and more complicated, and sometimes two well-chosen public cloud providers may be an ideal solution at times.

What is hybrid cloud?

Another approach is hybrid cloud, which can both compete, and complement the multicloud approach. In a multicloud setup, it is technically having a multiple of the same cloud type, which more commonly is of the public cloud variety, although it could also be of the private type, as in an enterprise that has several of their own data centers. This is different from the hybrid cloud approach, which consists of both a public cloud, and a private cloud, with the infrastructure to have them work together.

While multicloud, and hybrid cloud are two different models, it should also be realized that they are not exclusive of each other, and more robust setups may use a combination of the two environments, drawing upon the advantages of each. Contributing to the popularity of the cloud environment is the use of container technology, and combined with microservices that break applications down to component pieces, which run particularly well in the cloud.

Cost benefits of a multicloud approach

Also, keep in mind that it can be more cost-efficient to have a multicloud approach, as it forces the vendors to compete for the business, and the workloads can be placed on the lowest cost cloud. However, this can quickly become a case of 'cheap can be very expensive' as the lower cost cloud service may have a higher latency, thereby reducing the efficiency of the work done.

Additionally, be sure to account for the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership), not just the less expensive upfront price, designed to gain your business. Such hidden fees, such as integration of the app, licensing and others can take away the economic advantage of the new public cloud provider, compared to an existing solution.

Let’s look at an example of an enterprise that transitioned to a multicloud approach. Internet video provider Netflix has much of its business based on delivering video via the cloud. And for years, as Netflix is quite transparent about their architecture, their public cloud provider has been Amazon Web Services (AWS). It made headlines when Netflix decided to go to a multicloud approach, and added a second cloud provider, Google Cloud.

According to a report, Netflix has implemented Google Cloud “for several functions, from disaster recovery to artificial intelligence.” While on the one hand, Netflix risks its decade long relationship with AWS, but taking the multicloud approach provides flexibility for sustained growth. Powering this multicloud approach at Netflix is Spinnaker, an open source tool that was developed at the company, and connects 95% of its infrastructure to AWS, so Netflix has hardly abandoned their original cloud provider.

• We also discuss cloud computing in greater detail here

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Venezeula ties its economy to petro cryptocurrency

Venezeula has announced it will be pegging its economy to a national cryptocurrency as it looks to save itself from economic ruin.

The crisis-hit South American country, which recently saw its hyper-inflation grow to more than 1,000,000 per cent, has announced it will be tying the bolivar to the government's own petro cryptocurrency.

As part of the move, the bolivar will be devalued 96 per cent, from 285,000 to the dollar to six million. In addition, corporate tax rates will go up, as will the minimum wage. Overall, Venezuela hopes that wages, pensions and prices will all be pegged to the new currency.

Venezuela petro cryptocurrency

Announcing the news, President Nicolas Maduro said that the new "sovereign bolivar" would help the country to bounce back from its recent hardships, which he has blamed on the United States.

"I want the country to recover and I have the formula. Trust me," Maduro said on state television. "They've dollarized our prices. I am petrolising salaries and petrolising prices.

"We are going to convert the petro into the reference that pegs the entire economy's movements."

Venezeula launched its cryptocurrenncy back in February as it looked to raise cash. At the launch, President Maduro said that around 100 million petro tokens would be issued, each of which would be backed by a barrel of the nation's vast oil reserves.

However many observers warned the scheme could be a scam, with US President Donald Trump quickly signing an executive order banning Americans from investing.

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Is your router a cybersecurity risk?

Internet routers could be affected by a major security flaw that could let hackers infiltrate your home network.

Research from TheBestVPN found vulnerabilities in routers from some of the biggest device manufacturers around today, including those from NetGear, D-Link and ZTE.

The research team found that all three contained software flaws that could allow malicious access, which TheBestVPN says could result in, "a complete takeover of your router".

Router security

The team says that the hack process is relatively straightforward, with the criminals simply needing to create a page with a basic javascript or html form.

When a user clicks on this or lands on the webpage, external functionalities can be launched, allowing personal data can be exploited.

The launch can even be triggered by visiting a single website or image, meaning users will need to be on their guard constantly.

TheBestVPN names the Netgear DGN2200 and DGN2200M, Dlink DIR-300, and ZTE F660 as the products found to be at risk, but warns other models could also be affected. 

The company is warning users to patch their routers immediately, and exercise caution when going online - with a VPN also advised.

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EU targets tech giants with tough new anti-terror content rules

Even though Google, Twitter and Facebook have been allegedly trying to curb the spread of radical sentiments on their social platforms, the European Union isn’t satisfied.

The EU will soon be proposing a new law that will force all technology companies – including large and small businesses – to identify and delete terror propaganda, with failure to comply leading to hefty fines.

The details of the legislation are still being discussed but, as Bloomberg reports, it could follow the guidelines laid down in March this year, which gives internet companies an hour to inform authorities and take down any content referring to terrorism, hate and violence, child sexual abuse, counterfeit material and copyright infringements.

Read more: Uganda imposes hefty social media tax to cut down on ‘gossip’

No more complacency 

The EU made internet companies sign a code of conduct last year that would see abusive and terror content pulled down within 24 hours of being posted, but Brussels is looking to abandon the self-regulatory approach. 

According to the Financial Times, the EU has “not seen enough progress” and is thus taking “stronger action in order to better protect our citizens”.

“We cannot afford to relax or become complacent in the face of such a shadowy and destructive phenomenon,” Julian King, the EU’s commissioner for security, told the Times.

Until now, companies running online social platforms were not considered legally responsible for what was posted, but if the new legislation is passed, that will change.

Before this tough new approach becomes law, however, the European Parliament will need to approve the proposal and be passed by a majority of member states.

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Netflix is testing video ads that play between episodes

Your next Netflix binge-watching session might be interrupted with a video advert for one of Netflix's own shows, as the video streaming platform has confirmed it's testing the idea with a limited number of users.

Reports on Reddit explain how it works. As you finish one episode and wait for the next one to buffer up, Netflix will serve up a trailer for one of its own programs – something like Orange is the New Black or The Crown that Netflix has funded directly rather than licensing from elsewhere.

After you've sat through the promo, your binge-watching continues. As yet there's no indication as to if or when the ads will roll out to everyone, or how many people are in the trial (though it seems to be live in several countries).

"Surfacing recommendations"

"We are testing whether surfacing recommendations between episodes helps members discover stories they will enjoy faster," Netflix told Ars Technica in a statement as it confirmed that a test for video adverts was indeed underway.

Netflix says the ads are skippable, so if you can find the remote or the mouse quick enough, you don't have to sit through a promo clip of Ozark or Better Call Saul. So far the trailers do seem to focus on Netflix's own programming, though that's based on user reports rather than anything Netflix has said officially.

On some platforms Netflix already shows video previews when users hover over titles. Ultimately it's going to be user response – how many of these adverts get clicked on – that will determine whether the test gets rolled out as a permanent feature.

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You won't find this £15.99 per month cheap broadband deal anywhere else online

We spend a lot of time at TechRadar trying to dig out the best prices and deals for you on a massive range of hardware and services - from PS4 bundles to antivirus software. As well as, of course, the best broadband deals.

But sometimes we just like to take the bull by the horns and proactively seek out cheaper prices than you'll find anywhere else. That's why we've teamed up with Onestream to give you a discount on the internet provider's cheapest broadband tariff.

So that means you can now get Onestream Flow Unlimited Broadband for an extremely enticing £15.99. That includes unlimited broadband usage, average download speeds of 11Mb and Onestream's so-called "super dooper router" for free (all you'll pay is £9.99 for delivery) - there aren't any activation costs whatsoever.

A word of warning though...this £15.99 per month broadband deal will only be available for a fortnight. It ends when the clock strikes midnight on August 31 and September arrives.

Onestream's super cheap broadband deal

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Google One now offers temptingly-priced cloud storage in the US

Google One, the firm’s new cloud storage service which paying Google Drive subscribers have been gradually upgraded to in recent times, is now available to anyone who wishes to sign up over in the US, with other territories to follow shortly.

In other words, Google One is now officially live, and those in the States can hop over to the official website to grab a piece of the action (those elsewhere in the world can supply their email to be notified when the service goes live in their particular region).

The cloud storage locker is very competitively priced, with the basic plan giving you 100GB of online storage for $1.99 (around £1.60, AU$2.75) per month, and you can get double that at 200GB for $2.99 (around £2.35, AU$4.10) monthly. A 2TB plan will set you back $9.99 (around £7.90, AU$13.75) per month.

Compare that to Microsoft’s OneDrive, where $1.99 per month will only get you 50GB of storage space; half of what Google is offering.

Extra benefits

As Google notes in its blog post on the launch of the service, subscribers also get additional perks such as credits on the Play store, and deals when searching via Google (so you might be offered a bargain when you’re looking for a hotel for a weekend away, for instance).

Google One is being pitched as a family-friendly service, allowing a plan to be shared between six family members, and also offering easily reachable 24/7 technical support in case problems are encountered.

Outside of the US, Google says that it will be “rolling out to more countries over the next few weeks”, so it shouldn’t be long at all before the service arrives in the likes of the UK or Australia.

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What is Kubernetes?

Kubernetes is an open source system for managing applications in a container technology environment. Kubernetes automates the manual processes to deploy and scale containerized applications. It can also manage clusters of containerized applications, which can span public, private and hybrid clouds. 

The name, Kubernetes, is inspired by the container ship analogy, and builds on that to indicate the Greek word that translates to “helmsman,” as in the one who needs to pilot the container ship. Kubernetes also gets called “kube” and “k8s” which is a numeronym, using the first letter, the last letter, and the number of letters in between those letters. 

History of Kubernetes

Word etiologies aside, Kubernetes was originally created by Google, as it grew out of an internal project Borg, with containers powering Google Cloud technology. In fact, Google claims to have experience with containers across fifteen years, and claims to “run billions of containers a week,” which gave them plenty of experience that went into this software program. Kubernetes was then donated to the Linux Foundation as a seed technology, to form the the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) in 2015.

While Kubernetes is an open source project, it is officially supported by both Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Kubernetes gained initial acceptance among early adopters, which translated to steady growth, and now occupies a prominent position in the container management software space. 

These days, using multiple containers for a real production app has become commonplace, with the containers located across multiple servers. Kubernetes software enables deployment of these containers, and to scale them across multiple servers to match the workload, including scheduling of the containers across a cluster. It also can help to manage the health of these multiple containers. 

Kubernetes deployment

Kubernetes gets deployed for a group of containers, which gets termed a cluster. One of the containers of the cluster is designated as the cluster master, that runs the Kubernetes control plane processes. The other containers of the cluster get assigned as nodes, which are the worker machines, that fall under the control of the cluster master, which functions as a unified endpoint.

The cluster master has total control of its nodes, designating their lifecycle, including assessing their health, as well as controlling upgrades and repairs to each node. In the cluster, there can be special containers, that get designated as per-node agents with specific functions, for example, log collection, or intra-cluster network connectivity.

The default for a node is for it to have one virtual CPU, and 3.75GB of RAM, which is the standard Compute Engine machine type. For more compute intensive tasks, a higher baseline minimum CPU platform can be chosen. Realize that not all of the node’s resources can be brought to bear on the application that it is designed to run. Rather, some of these resources are needed to run the Kubernetes Engine. The allocatable resources of the node, which can be used to run the application, is the difference between the total resources, and the amount reserved for the Kubernetes Engine.

By way of example, if the node has 4GB of RAM available, 25% of it gets reserved for the Kubernetes engine, and the remaining 75% can be used to run the application, and requires only 20% of the next 4GB of RAM if the node has a total of 8GB of RAM. The Kubernetes Engine is less hungry of CPU resources, reserving only 6% of the processing power of the first core of the node, and only 1% of a second core designated to the node. 

The cluster master runs Kubernetes API Server, which handles requests, which originate from Kubernetes API calls from the Kubernetes software. The Kubernetes API Server functions as the ‘communication hub’ for the entire container cluster.

Kubernetes features

Contributing to Kubernetes popularity is its robust feature set. These include: 

• Automatic binpacking: This automates where containers get placed based on the most efficient use of resources.
• Horizontal scaling: Applications can be scaled up or down via a simple command, or automated to match CPU usage.
• Automated rollouts and rollbacks: Kubernetes rolls out updates to updates to the applications in stages, rather than all at once, and monitors for health issues, and if found, will automatically rollback to a more stable version to preserve uptime.
• Storage orchestration: It works with a variety of storage solutions for additional flexibility, from local to public cloud.
• Self-healing: The ability to kill containers that freeze, and restart containers that freeze or fail their health check.
• Service discovery and load balancing: Kubernetes is able to assign each container its own IP address, with one DNS name, and the ability to distribute the load between them.
• Secret and configuration management: Applications can be updated without an image rebuild.
• Batch execution: Management for batch and continuous integration workloads.

Real world applications of Kubernetes

Kubernetes gets used by top corporations, including Comcast, eBay, Goldman Sachs, The New York Times, and Pokemon Go, among many others. An example of Kubernetes use is video provider Sling TV, which after their launch in 2015 experienced issues as new subscribers were outstripping their existing resources as they attempted to distribute live TV through the internet. In order to improve their customer’s experience, and with a desire for increased flexibility - for now and going forward - the decision was made to shift to a hybrid cloud strategy. This used both an on-premise VMWare multi data center, integrated with multiple public clouds, and controlled through the Kubernetes Engine.

According to Brad Linder, their Sling TV’s Cloud Native & Big Data Evangelist, “We are getting to the place of where we can one-click deploy an entire data center - the compute network, logging and monitoring all the apps.” He goes on to point out that previously deploying a new app would take days, which can now be accomplished in about an hour via the Kubernetes Engine. 

While Kubernetes has humble origins as an internal project at Google, it has evolved to become a dominant player for container management software, no doubt fostered by its open source approach. The power and flexibility of the Kubernetes Engine explains why it get used across so many diverse industries.

• We also discuss container technology in greater detail here

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The 20 best online games you should play today

As good as the best PC games often are, they (and your PC) can cost a lot of money – some of them fail to keep you engaged for a notable amount of time, some of them lead to boredom rather than curing it, and that's not always a great return on the investment you've put in.

Enter online games: low-cost, low-maintenance titles designed to keep you occupied while you’re working (or at home unemployed because you spent too much time playing the best online games).

They’re first and foremost time killers, distracting you from the mundanity of everyday life, rather than trying to say anything important about the state of the world.

Despite their relatively lightweight nature though , the best online games are definitely fun to play – they range from mindless entertainment (Slither.io and Robot Unicorn Attack) to grind fests (Runescape), so no matter what you’re looking for, you’ll find something down your alley in the next 19 pages.

Gabe Carey also contributed to this article

Linux, Windows or Mac - which one is best for you? Watch our guide video below!

Not everyone is a fan of golf as a real-life event, but we think we can safely assume there's a spot in everybody's heart for golf if it’s a bit on the crazy side. 

Wonderputt is a game that takes you to the kind of mini golf courses you've only imagined with mini ski slopes, UFOs, lily pads and herds of sheep that eat the grass to uncover a new green for you to play on. 

The game has a bit of a puzzle box design, so even if you can see the whole course from the outset of the game, after you beat each hole it evolves and changes to become somewhat different and unmask new sections. It inspires a sense of awe, taking a game that's already fun in real life and adding a unique twist you'll only find in a game world.

• Play it here

If Frank Zappa developed video games, they would look something like Frog Fractions.

Created by Berkeley developer Jim Crawford, this game is an ode to the surrealist comedy of Jeff Minter and Ron Gilbert. 

We don't want to get too deep into what Frog Fractions actually is because it's at its strongest when you go in with no clue of what's about to go down. It’s fair to say that, on the surface level, it appears to be a dumb and nondescript game. But, when you delve deeper, it has so much more to offer in the most crazy and hilarious ways possible. 

Make sure you have the volume cranked to get the whole story.

Frog Fractions actually ended up being so successful that it spawned a sequel, though it released in the most Frog Fractions way possible: inside of another game. You can buy Glittermitten Grove on Steam today, wherein Frog Fractions 2 will live forever.

• Play it here

Bomberman on the original PlayStation was one of the best crafted and most addictive multiplayer games ever to be created. Game of Bombs seeks to emulate this virtual drug. As an added bonus, to get the multiplayer experience, you'll no longer need to fish around a drawer of knotted cables for a MultiTap – just go to the website and play a gigantic version of Bomberman online with players from around the globe. Oh, the joys of the digital world!

• Play it here

This text-based online multiplayer zombie game is filled with little in-jokes. Upon starting the game you're greeted with the cheerful message "Be positive! You're going to die. Every time." 

In the top right is actual server time and, when that hits 23:00, the zombies will come out to play. During the daylight hours, you and the other players must work together to build defenses for the following night, a a tactic reminiscent of Fortnite. This game is surprisingly involving and you'll constantly have to remind yourself that it's not really impacting your life, but you'll definitely become invested in the online community.

• Play it here

If you haven't played any of Czech developer Amanita Design's games, then you are missing out on some of the quirkiest, funny and elaborate point-and-click puzzlers of recent memory. 

The third game in this space-aged series is was released back on March 24 on Steam, but you can play the one that started it all back in 2003 for free. Chapter One of Samorost 2 is also online. And, be sure to check out their other games, Machinarium, Shy Dwarf and Botanicula.

• Play it here

Get ready to invest a lot of time into this one – this isn't your average top-down tower defence game, this is more like if you took Zelda and crossed it with Crash Bandicoot. Collect supplies, build bases and explore dungeons, you get the idea. It can be installed as an app from the Chrome Web Store or played online in any browser using HTML5.

• Play it here

Described by the developers as "the ultimate tribute to the NES", most of the jokes in this game will probably only ring true if you are above a certain age. But that's not to say younger people won’t find something to love along the way – if you appreciate a good toilet joke, you have a place here.

Written by the team behind the comedy website I-Mockery, it stars Abobo, who is actually a standard recurring mid-boss in classic ‘80s beat-em-up Double Dragon. His son is kidnapped and he must battle his way through various NES-themed levels to rescue him. It's all done with warm affection to Mario, Zelda, Contra and Mega Man.

• Play it here

Do you like tanks? What about a good ol’ deathmatch? Well, if you answered "yes" to either of those questions, Tanki might be the best online game for you. It looks a bit like an updated Quake – with tanks, of course – with several Deathmatch arenas, some covered in snow, others with various greenery. The goal is very similar to Quake as well: destroy all the tanks. There's a wide range of turret upgrades, so you can leave enemies cold with the freeze gun, or pound them repeatedly with the dual shot and rail gun, for example.

Maneuvering the tank is a little wonky, but ultimately rewarding. The turret rotates separately from the base so it's possible to move one way while shooting in a completely different direction, much like a real tank. There are several game variants including Team Deathmatch and Capture The Flag. It looks great, too, kind of like a high-res PS2 or Dreamcast title.

• Play it here

A lot of popular Steam games and console titles owe their popularity to sites like Miniclip and Newgrounds, hosts to countless free-to-play titles from small studios with marginal publishing budgets. 

Few of these success stories ring as true as Superhot, a first-person shooter developed in Unity where time comes to a standstill when you do, giving you plenty of time to form coherent strategies. In a sense, Superhot blends elements of both popular FPS games with turn-based strategy mechanics, for a genuinely unique and fun browser-based experience.

• Play it here

It’s eat or be eaten in Slither.io, the HTML5 game where your cursor controls a reptilian long boy (also known as a snake) to eat dots in order to become an even longer boy. It’s much like Pac-Man, in that the goal is to eat as many dots as possible with the ultimate goal of winding up on a leaderboard. The challenge lies in the way of avoiding other snakes, because if you touch one it's game over.

Your score is measured by the length of your snake, the longest of which, at the time of writing, is about 20,000 points. If your snake makes its way into the top 10, it will then be featured prominently on the leaderboard. There isn’t much nuance beyond that, aside from the fact that you can change the skin outfitting your snake to one of several different colors and styles. It’s a simple game, but one that’s perfect for the workplace due to the lack of clicking required.

• Play it here

Just like the previously mentioned Superhot, Spelunky has humble origins. First developed by Derek Yu as freeware, then ported to the Xbox 360 in July 2012, the game was then ported to HTML 5 by Darius Kazemi (and made available as a Chrome app). Spelunky may not be visually impressive (it was created in GameMaker after all), but its randomly generated levels and brutal permadeath mechanics make it a modern classic. 

The goal of the 2D platformer is to collect as much loot as possible in a series of underground tunnels. Sounds easy, right? Wrong. Populated by obstacles like traps and enemies of various species, Spelunky's world is as challenging as it is addictive. 

Luckily, by default, you're equipped with a whip and your own two feet with which you can besiege enemies. And, if that's not enough, you can always be resourceful and use surrounding objects as weapons. Good luck.

• Play it here

Runescape is a free-to-play massively multiplayer online role-playing game, and while it may not seem that important on the surface, it's actually a huge deal. Documented by the Guinness World Records, Runescape is known as the world's most popular free MMORPG, with over 200 million registered players. It also has the title of the most frequently-updated game too.

Like many MMOs, the latest version of Runescape – namely Runescape 3 – takes place in a medieval setting, filled with queens, goblins and, perhaps most importantly, dragons (and we can’t forget to mention the chickens). It's not exactly an example of fine art in terms of its visuals, but for a game that's been around for over 15 years how could it be?

As long as you're equipped with some recent edition of Java, you should be set to start fighting, trading and even playing mini-games with other players in the world of Gielinor. Be careful, though, as Runescape is infamous for being highly addictive.

• Play it here

If you recently played Doom, or are excited by the likes of Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, you may be wondering how developer id Software got its start. Well, look no further than Wolfenstein 3D. Though it wasn't the first title to come from superstar duo John Carmack and John Romero, Wolfenstein 3D was essentially the basis of the entire first-person shooter (FPS) genre.

Although it's a far cry from, well, Far Cry, Wolfenstein 3D is often considered the first true FPS by purists. Kill Nazis and see how gaming has improved since 1994 in this important snippet of history. Experience Wolfenstein 3D for yourself completely free of charge, courtesy of the Internet Archive.

• Play it here

There are few games as close to their source material as The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Created by the writer of the original novel, Douglas Adams, in conjunction with Infocom's Steve Meretsky, the game is more of a historical relic than a piece of software which stands the test of time. 

A text-based adventure, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was originally released in 1984 for Apple II, MS-DOS and Commodore 64, among other platforms. Since it's only vaguely based on parts of the book, you're sure to have a unique experience that Douglas Adams so lovingly tailored to us so many years ago.

• Play it here

On the surface, Spaceplan is yet another repetitive clicking game designed as a means to distract you from the tasks at large. But dust off that geometrical cover and you'll realize there's something really special about this game.

If you're not one for games that take themselves too seriously, Spaceplan is for you. In fact, you spend most of your time fixing a ship using an interface called the "Thing Maker," which, as the name suggests, lets you build things to repair your ship and navigate through space. Once you get a few "things" up and running, the core game mechanic works on its own.

You'll spend most of your time waiting as you do other stuff (like your job, for example) as you accumulate watts used to power your things. It's the perfect game to keep open in another tab to poke at for a few seconds when your boss is looking the other way. The witty dialog is an added bonus.

• Play it here

Our Instagram feeds may be filled with unicorn bagels, unicorn ice cream, and unicorn hair but the only thing we truly care about is unicorn robots. 

Robot Unicorn Attack is a simple endless-runner that will hold your attention for hours. It's been popular online for a while and there's good reason for that – it's simultaneously stylish and silly, but utterly addictive at the same time. The inclusion of Erasure's 'Always' endlessly looping in the background might have something to do with that: it should be grating but somehow it only improves the game. 

You'll always want to be with it, and make believe with it, and live in harmony, harmony, and love. 

You'll find it free to play right here. 

If you’re a fan of indie music, then you’ve probably heard of Japanese Breakfast. This rising star of the indie scene, in promotion of her sophomore album, released this retro-styled turn-based RPG. 

Not only does Japanese Breakquest have great music, as you would expect from a game ostensibly made by a musician, but it also has a ton of cool indie references scattered around that will delight anyone who is a fan of that kind of music.

The game basically expands on the story for Japanese Breakfast’s “Machinist” music video, wherein she is stuck on a spaceship and tries to build a mechanical body for her AI lover. It’s a little bizarre, but it’s lighthearted and fun throughout, and even has midi versions of all of the songs off of her 2017 album “Soft Sounds From Another Planet”

While the game’s target audience might be indie fans, there’s still plenty of charm that will affect anybody who plays it.

• Play it here

What do you get when you take a classic arcade game and make it controllable entirely through keyboarding skills? That’s right, you get ZType. 

This deceptively brilliant browser game takes the simplistic formula of Asteroids, and replaces the joystick with your keyboard, spitting ships down at you that you can only take out by quickly typing the words attached to them. 

It might sound easy but as the waves get higher and higher, the game only gets more difficult. This means that you’ll need to type quickly (and accurately) in order to make it to the higher levels. Eventually you’ll start getting extremely long words that’ll fire one-letter missiles at you that you have to take out in order to proceed. 

Plus, I mean, you can legitimately use the excuse “it’s educational”. What’s not to love?

• Play it here

There aren’t a lot of story-driven browser games to choose from, so when one suddenly pops up, our interest is naturally piqued. A Dark Room is an homage to classic text-based adventure games, so its interface is primitive, but intentionally so. 

Initially, the story takes you to a cold room where all you can do is light a fire and keep it going. Meanwhile, the text on the left side of the screen explains everything that’s going on around you, and eventually A Dark Room opens up more ways to interact with its heavy survival-based narrative. 

Along the way, you’ll have to make choices that impact the events that take place in A Dark Room. Likewise, you’ll have to decide whether to keep playing or get back to work.

• Play it here

These days, its utility is limited to history classrooms for the most part, but The Oregon Trail still has a special place in our hearts. Originally released in 1971, The Oregon Trail was intended as an educational tool for students learning about the very real 19th century pioneers who famously surmounted the non-fictitious Oregon Trail. 

Because it came bundled with the Apple II during the height of its success, The Oregon Trail is primitive in its graphics and gameplay, though it fundamentally operates much like a modern day survival game. You have to collect resources by hunting animals found throughout your journey, which extends from the Kansas River all the way to Willamette Valley.

In the end, the goal is to avoid subjecting yourself to the measles, snakebite, exhaustion, typhoid, cholera or – even worse – dysentery. 

• Play it here

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