Sofia Elizabella Wyciślik-Wilson

When it's not messing around with privacy settings and manipulating trending topics, there's nothing Facebook seems to like more than to tinker with timelines. Today the social network announces the latest changes to your newsfeed -- now you should see more posts from your friends and family.

The problem we currently face, Facebook says, is that there is "far too much information for any one person to consume". This is where algorithms come into play, meddling with timelines and newsfeeds in ways that never please everyone. The latest change promises that content from "the friends you care about" will appear "higher up in your News Feed".

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That Google gathers data about you is not news. If you use Google products, it's something you've decided to put up with -- either that, or you live in blissful ignorance of. Whether you're using Gmail and YouTube online, Google keyboard on your Android smartphone, Chrome across platforms, or whatever, being a Google user means handing over an awful lot of personal information.

But just how much does Google know about you? If you use the voice-activated "OK, Google" feature of your phone, there are probably lots of recordings of you stored online; what about everything else? Google has now launched My Activity, a portal which reveals everything the company knows about you. Every search you’ve made, the apps you've used, the videos you've watched, and everything in between.

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Online ads aren’t going away anytime soon, and that'll keep the likes of Adblock Plus in business for the foreseeable future. But if you choose not to use an ad blocker and are therefore going to be bombarded with ads, they might as well be ads that are relevant to you, right?

Google is rolling out a new feature that enables users to choose the topics they are interested in so the ads they see will be more appropriate to them. But as well as improving the ad experience for users, the new scheme means that advertisers are handed even more information about people that can be exploited for financial gain. It also enables Google to use information it gathers about users to tailor ads.

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Evernote has today announced that it is increasing the prices of its paid-for packages, whilst simultaneously increasing the restrictions on free Basic accounts. Both the Plus and Premium tiers are increasing in price by a third, while those looking to avoid having to pay will find that they are now limited to syncing data between just two devices.

Evernote says that the price increase reflects a "significant investment of energy, time, and money" that will be needed "to deliver the Evernote we envision" -- something the company admits it has a "long way to go" before achieving.

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Facebook is all about sharing and consuming, and today the social network launches two new extensions for the Chrome browser that make it easy to do both. The Share to Facebook and Save to Facebook extensions do very much what you would expect, encouraging not only sharing, but also the use of Facebook as a bookmarking tool for articles you want to read later.

As well as these two extensions, Facebook is also rolling out redesigned Social Plugin buttons. The Like button that you see adorning so many websites is getting a modern makeover, losing the iconic Facebook 'f' logo, and gaining an emoji-lover-friendly thumbs up icon instead.

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The world of technology relies on encryption. Everything from private messages to online payments are secured in this way -- but how does it all work? Mozilla has come up with a way to teach people about encryption, combining gaming and emoji into a useful learning tool.

Codemoji is described as "a fun way to learn about ciphers", and while you might think that it's aimed solely at children, there's something here for all ages. The idea is very simple: letters and words are translated into emoji so they can only be read by those who understand the decryption technique.

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"Son and heir", not "sun and air". Excuse me while I "kiss the sky", not "this guy". If you've ever struggled to interpret the lyrics to a song, you've probably scurried online to look up what is actually being sung. By teaming up with LyricFind, Google just made this much quicker and easier.

No more jumping from site to site. No more ad barrages. Now Google will display song lyrics directly in search results from the world’s largest lyric licensing service. As well as making things easier for searchers, the deal means that artists get paid royalties as their lyrics are viewed.

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Today at the Red Hat Summit, Microsoft announced the launch of .NET Core 1.0. Continuing the company's embrace of other platforms, the latest version of the open source .NET runtime platform supports Windows, OS X, iOS, Android and -- of course -- Linux.

At the summit, Red Hat said that .NET Core 1.0 will be fully supported by Red Hat Enterprise Linux. With Microsoft's partnership with Red Hat late last year, and the company's on-going expansion into the cross-platform cloud, Linux support is not entirely surprising. Also announced today was ASP.NET Core 1.0 and Entity Framework 1.0 for developers to get to work with.

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The owner of a California-based travel agency has received a $10,000 settlement from Microsoft after a forced Windows 10 upgrade rendered her computer unusable. Teri Goldstein found that her work computer downloaded and started to install Windows 10 without her permission, but the installation failed.

The installation not only failed, Goldstein says, but also slowed down her computer, leading to days of lost business. After failing to get help from Microsoft's customer support, she took the company to court.

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Security researchers from Ben-Gurion University Cyber Security Research Center (CSRC) have unearthed a vulnerability in Google Chrome that can be exploited to make copies of DRM-protected video streams. The problem affects all Chromium-based browsers, and makes it possible to circumvent Widevine encryption technology Google uses to secure streams.

Widevine has been used in Chrome for a while, after Google acquired it back in 2010. It has been used to prevent piracy of premium YouTube channels, and is also used to protect Amazon Prime and Netflix streams. Google was informed about the problem back in May, but is yet to issue a patch.

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The UK may not yet have introduced online voting -- nor is it likely to any time soon -- but it does have a website that can be used to raise petitions for debate. The House of Commons website is home to a huge number of such petitions, and any that gain 100,000 signatures will be raised in Parliament.

After the UK referendum on EU membership saw the country narrowly voting in favor of Brexit (even if they didn’t know what this meant), a petition calling for a second referendum has been signed more than 3 million times. Ironically, the petition was set up by a pro-Brexit, anti-EU politics student a month before the referendum actually took place. His plan was to call for a re-run in the event of a narrow vote to remain in the EU, but his wording is such that it could (although it's unlikely) backfire on him.

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With the likes of ISIS understanding the power of social media, Facebook and other online services find themselves under increasing pressure to counter terrorist and other extremist content. A report by Reuters says that a number of online companies are using automated tools to remove videos that violate terms of use.

Such tools have previously been used to prevent the spread of copyright videos online, but now it seems that they have been put to a new task. While automation can do little, if anything, to prevent the initial appearance of extremist videos, social networks can use them to stem the flow of republishing.

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If you're in the market for a Surface 3, now is the time to buy one. Microsoft says that production of the Surface 3 will come to an end in December this year, and warns that stocks are already starting to run low.

It's not yet clear whether the end of production for the cheapest Surface device signals the end of Microsoft's Atom-based devices. But it certainly seems as though the company is keen to focus its attention on the Pro range as well as the Surface Book.

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The replacement for data protection arrangement Safe Harbour, the EU-US Privacy Shield, has undergone final amendments. Safe Harbour has already been deemed invalid, and frantic talks have been underway to finalize its successor.

Despite gaining the backing of Microsoft, EU-US Privacy Shield has faced a great deal of criticism. In the wake of the Brexit vote in the UK referendum on EU membership, the UK may be forced to comply with the rules even though it is in the process of exiting the Union. One of the most significant changes to come about -- and one that will be welcomed by privacy advocates -- is a promise from the White House not to engage in indiscriminate bulk data collection of European data.

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The OnePlus 3 is the first 'flagship killer' that has been available to buy without an invite. Reviews (and we'll have one written up soon) have been overwhelmingly positive, but a couple of issues have surfaced.

Some users have been disappointed to find that their handset does not take full advantage of its 6GB of RAM, while others bemoan poor color calibration of the Optic AMOLED screen. We've already shown you how to manually tweak memory settings, but an official update is on the way to address not only memory and color issues, but also to increase performance of the OnePlus 3.

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