Sofia Elizabella Wyciślik-Wilson

Last week there were net neutrality protests from a number of big names in the online world. This week there is controversy courtesy of Comcast -- described by DeepDotWeb as "the most hated company in America" -- as the firm apparently declares war on Tor.

The web browser -- one favored by those concerned about their privacy -- has been branded "illegal" by Comcast according to DeepDotWeb and customer reports appearing on the /r/darknetmarkets subreddit (reddit itself having banned subreddits associated with the Fappening). Customers are reporting having been warned that use of Tor is against Comcast's term of use and could result in a termination of service.

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Would-be iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus owners are currently wondering whether or not they will receive the handsets they pre-ordered after Phones 4u went into administration.

On Sunday, the beleaguered retailer threw in the towel after EE decided not to renew contracts. While Phones 4u has said that it will honor orders that have been placed and dispatched, but indicated that orders that are yet to be sent out -- which will include many iPhone 6 orders -- will be canceled, and refunds issued.

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Adverts are pretty much universally hated online. Sites can try to justify their presence as much as they like but visitors will still view them with loathing. Among the many complaints levelled at Facebook, the irrelevance of many of the advertisements that appear on users' pages is a major cause of complaints. For quite some time now Facebook has given users the chance to voice a dislike of individual ads -- opt to hide an ad via the official Facebook method and you can indicate that you find it irrelevant, offensive, repetitive, spammy, and so on -- but it has been hard to know just how much notice has been taken of these complaints. Now Facebook wants to assure users that it is listening and that more relevant ads will be displayed.

Hopefully this can be taken to mean "ads that are more relevant" rather than "there will be more ads and they will be relevant", but the point is that Facebook wants to ensure that you see ads that might actually be of interest. Two new updates will help to tailor your ad experience. The first seems like a fairly obvious one:

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Facebook's policy requiring the use of real names on the social network is not all that new, but it remains controversial. Many users would like to be able to use a nickname (other than the "variation of your real first or last name" permitted by the site), but Facebook continues to insist that forcing the revelation of birth name "helps keep our community safe". Or does it? There's certainly an argument that suggests it makes sense to know who you are dealing with, but this cannot be a one-size-fits-all policy. There will always be exceptions, and this is something highlighted by ReadWrite.

As Selena Larson points out, there are many people who choose to use "pseudonyms online for both safety and personal reasons". And yet the site is trying to force Sister Roma -- a drag artist and member of Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a "leading-edge Order of queer nuns" -- to use her birth name rather than what is being regarded as her stage name. Who is Facebook to try to interfere with this? This is the site that only recently was encouraging its users to boost their privacy by checking the settings they had in place. It smacks of giving with one hand and taking with the other.

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At its seventh Uncarrier event in San Francisco, T-Mobile unveiled plans to clutter up the internet for everyone -- T-Mobile customers and non-T-Mobile customers alike. On the face of it, things sound great. The T-Mobile Personal CellSpot offers free Wi-Fi calling and "fast data". The Cellspot is essentially a router which can be yours for a deposit of $25 but the difference is that it has been tweaked so that it prioritizes HD Wi-Fi calls over other traffic on the network. If you live in an area with poor mobile reception -- which can be just as frustrating as having to put up with a terrible internet connection -- this might sound like wonderful news, but when you look at the bigger picture, it is really such good news?

Let's try to ignore the fact that in order to get hold of one of the Personal CellSpots, you need to stump up a refundable deposit -- whoever heard of renting their router? -- and ask the first question: who actually needs "HD" phone calls? Pictures are HD, and there really have been very few complaints about the overall quality of voice calls on mobiles over the years. This is just gimmicky and inefficient. T-Mobile CMO Mike Sievert indicated that customers would enjoy the portability of the device -- easy to take on the road and set up anywhere. But how many people take a router away with them? Is this really going to become the norm?

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It's transparency time once again! After Edward Snowden opened the can of NSA surveillance worms, internet users' collected attention has been focused on online privacy. We still don’t know the full extent of the monitoring that took place, but more information continues to leak out. All of the big names -- Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and the rest -- have slowly trickled out little snippets about government data requests. A new blog post from Yahoo's general counsel Ron Bell sheds further light on the resistance the company put up against requests for data.

Just like Google and Microsoft, Yahoo is keen to let it be known that it tried to stick up for the privacy rights of its customers. A new cache of documents -- stretching to War And Peace baiting 1,500 pages -- from seven years ago shows just how much of a fight Yahoo tried to put on its users' behalves. Way back in 2007, the US government started to request information about users from a number of online companies. Yahoo was one of the companies who -- initially, at least -- refused to comply, and tried to fight the government in court.

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With a visual impairment, using any software or service can be anything from tricky to impossible. Windows and other operating systems have long included features that make them easier for blind and partially sighted people to use, and now Google is adding similar playing-field-levelling features to Google Drives and Docs. While traditional desktop software has been quick to adopt new methods of opening up to as many people as possible, the same cannot be said of online tools -- Google is looking to change that.

Starting today, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawings and Forms all feature support for Alt tags for images, as well as better text-to-voice conversions. Tweaks include support for vocalized spelling correction suggestions, as well as the ability to listen to comments that have been added to shared documents. The arrival and departure of collaborators something else that's now spoken aloud. Changes are also to be found in the many keyboard shortcuts -- additional shortcuts are now available to provide access to a wider range of tools and option than before, including the editing of charts and pivot tables.

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A lot of Google services have transitioned to gain the title of "apps", and the same is true of a large number of extensions for the Chrome browser. These online tools are essentially cross-platforms apps that work identically Now Google is taking another step to break out of the confines of making apps available to a single platform. Android apps are, quite rightly, associated with smartphones and tablets, but now a small number of these mobile apps are finding their way onto Chromebook.

The (usually) cheap and cheerful Windows laptop/Mac Book alternative (did someone say netbook?) can now start to benefit from a handful of well-known titles from Android devices. It is very early days but as of today there are four Android apps available to Chromebook owners -- Duolingo, Evernote, Sight Words, and Vine -- but we can expect to see this list expand over time. The quartet of crossover apps were introduced today by Ken Mixter and Josh Woodward. A short blog posts penned by the pair explains that the Chromebook support comes thanks to the App Runtime for Chrome (Beta) project.

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A couple of weeks ago it looked as though Microsoft was lifting the 2GB file size limit for OneDrive users. Although no announcement was made, some users of the cloud storage service found that they were able to sync files larger than 2GB. Now, the increase in supported file size is official. OneDrive users can now upload files up to 10GB in size, bringing Microsoft's service in line with Dropbox and Google Drive. This is the latest example of Microsoft responding directly to user feedback, specifically a UserVoice thread in which users called for the 2GB file size limit to be banished.

Today Jason Moore, Group Program Manager of OneDrive, responded to the demands with a simple message: "We're proud to announce OneDrive now supports up to 10 GB files". While this is not quite the unlimited file size some people were looking for, it is a big improvement and something that will be widely welcomed. Considering the free version of OneDrive offers 15GB of storage, it is now possible to fill up your account with just two files. If you're an Office 365 customer with access to 1TB of space, you'll need to upload at least 100 files.

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Microsoft has its listening ears on these days. When it comes to Windows Phone, Xbox One, and Office, the company has been far more responsive to user feedback than ever before. For Windows users who found Windows 8.x to be a disappointment, this bodes well for the follow-up release. Windows 9 (we can drop the Threshold placeholder now, I think) is now not all that far away -- we could see a preview release in just a couple of weeks. Now that Apple's iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus and Apple Watch announcements are out of the way, this is going to be the next big launch in the world of tech, and the computing world eagerly anticipates what the operating system may have to offer.

One of the biggest complaints people levelled at Windows 8.x -- and there have been many -- was the lack of Start menu. Sure, there's the Start screen, but for Windows stalwarts it's just not the same. These complaints do not necessarily stem from an unwillingness to try something new, more that the Start menu's successor seems less powerful, poorly thought through, and a road hump to established workflows. Rather than helping to improve production and efficiency, many users found that it actually slowed them down.

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Apple launch events are normally about getting people to part with their cash rather than giving things away for free. So as not to buck this trend too much, the not entirely inexpensive Apple Watch, iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus were announced but there was also something of a treat for fans of Irish rockers U2. As well as performing at the launch event in Cupertino, Bono and bandmates gave away their new album, Songs of Innocence, free of charge to all iTunes Store users.

This is not the first time U2 has teamed up with Apple. The band was also involved in the launch of early iPod, offering official endorsement to a special edition of the music player. But this is a much larger scale collaboration. Giving away the eleven-track album to more than half a billion people is a big, headline grabbing gesture -- and regardless of your opinion of U2 musically, it's something that's hard to ignore. The album is available for the next five weeks in 119 countries.

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The focus of Apple's event today was the iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, and the Apple Watch, but one of the more understated stars of the show was Apple Pay. This is not hardware, but a new mobile payment platform which Apple is billing as "your wallet, without the wallet". It works in conjunction with the new handsets to provide a new means of contactless payment and it supports credit and debit cards from American Express, MasterCard and Visa. There's backing from the likes of Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and Capital One Bank, and users need to just add their credit or debit card to their iTunes Store account to start paying for goods and services with their phone -- or Apple Watch.

A number of big names have already jumped on the Apple Pay bandwagon, including McDonald's, Staples, Disney Store, and Whole Foods Market, as well as the 258 US Apple stores. Apple Pay can also be used in the App Store as well as more than 220,000 locations that support contactless payment. In addition to the benefits of contactless payment, Apple is really pushing the security aspects of Apple Pay. Eddy Cue, Apple's senior vice president of Internet Software and Services says:

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Running counter to many of the rumors circulating ahead of the Cupertino event, Apple today announces the Apple Watch, not the iWatch. Unlike the Moto 360, Apple's offering takes the squarer form adopted by many other manufacturers, but there are differences. Taking design cues from older iPhones -- think 3GS period -- the Watch was relegated to the infamous "one more thing" slot after the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus were announced. Rather than the unibody design that some had expected, the Apple Watch features six different straps, comes in two sizes (38 mm and 42 mm -- his and hers essentially), and will be available in three different finishes.

Just like the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, the Apple Watch's display is made from sapphire crystal but there's something interesting to the right of the screen. More usually found on a traditional mechanical watch, there's a crown -- but this is not used for winding up a spring. Instead, this is a new form of input that can be used to scroll around the interface, zoom in and out, and doubles up as a home button. Despite the squared surround, the Apple Watch's UI is very round in flavor, mimicking the look of a traditional watch.

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A shocking new report looking at online advertising shows that there has been a huge increase in the number of internet users making use of ad blocking tools. The report describes ad blocking as having gone mainstream, but it also suggests that the loss of ad revenue threatens the life of many websites.

Pagefair worked with Adobe putting together the report and found that 4.9 percent of internet users make use of ad blockers, including more than a quarter (27.6 percent) of those in the US.

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In one of the strangest joining of forces imaginable, Reddit (of recent Fappening censorship fame), Mozilla (the browser folks) and other well-known names are teaming up with porn sites. The net neutrality debacle is one that has been rumbling on for some time now as more and more ISPs reveal plans to provide faster internet access to those willing -- or able -- to pay more. This creation of a two-tier internet is something that has been met with disgust from many quarters, including lots of big online names.

Tomorrow, 10 September, the likes of Pornhub and Redtube will join Etsy, FourSquare, KickStarter and more in a day of protest.

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