Sofia Elizabella Wyciślik-Wilson

The latest web service to fall victim to a hack attack is Buffer, the social sharing tool that can be used to schedule posts to multiple social networks. Although it looks as though customers' passwords and billing details are safe, the problem was noticed late Saturday morning when spam type posts started to appear on users' Facebook and Twitter accounts. The Buffer team has been quick to take action and notified users via Facebook.

Buffer co-founder Leo Widrich posted saying "hey everyone! We greatly apologize for this big mess we've created. Buffer has been hacked." Shortly after this Facebook postings were disabled in a bid to stop the spread of spam and Buffer assured users that "We're continuing to work on this and trying to investigate and fix".

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It is now four months since Google Reader shut up shop. At the time, Google cited a declining interest in the product and many people were quick to suggest that RSS was a technology past its sell-by date used by very few. But this seems to be contradicted by the staggering number of Google Reader alternatives that popped up to cater for the large numbers of RSS fans who bemoaned the loss of Google's tool.

One tool that quickly gained a large following is Feedly. In fact, so many people switched to Feedly that servers were unable to cope, and the service briefly collapsed under the weight of its own popularity. This was a temporary blip and things were soon back up and running. I was one of thousands of people who made the jump -- in fact I had a period of crossover using Feedly and Google Reader simultaneously to help ease the transition -- and things went fairly well.

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Apple took center stage this week. At a special event the new iPad Air, iPad mini, Mac Pro and a raft of free software were all revealed, and we liveblogged through the whole thing. Not to be outdone by Microsoft, Apple decided to give Mavericks away free of charge along with iWork and iLife. But it was the iPad Air and mini that stole the show, sharing the same innards as the recently announced iPhone 5s, but boasting a redesigned exterior -- at least in the case of the Air.

Of course, no tablet launch would be complete without matching cases. There was also the interestingly designed Mac Pro which looks delightful and is a serious powerhouse, but has a price tag to match. After the big launch of the iPhone 5s, Apple showed off the latest addition to the iPhone range in a TV commercial.

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Google's ad-supported model is one that we're now all familiar with. Spend any amount of time online and, unless you have installed some form of ad-blocker, you'll see text advertisements littering numerous websites you visit, including in your search results.

Sponsored search results are nothing new, but Google is now experimenting with large banner ads which show up when certain searches are performed.

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One of Yahoo's most popular and successful products is Flickr. Adding to its list of acquisitions, the company is now taking LookFlow under its wing.

This California-based startup, which specializes in image recognition technology, is joining forces with Yahoo to "build a new deep learning group". It is likely that we'll see image based searching added to Flickr in the near future.

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It was a feature-packed morning of announcements where it seems as though Apple was going to give away everything for free. Sadly the freebies are limited to software and the new range of hardware has to be purchased in the regular way. The big news for tablet fans is the iPad Air. Borrowing its name -- in part at least -- from the MacBook Air range, thinner and faster are the adjectives of the day.

Phil Schiller said: "Thinner, lighter, more powerful than ever before, and incredibly, excitingly new that it deserves a new name: iPad Air". Boasting the same A7 processor as the recently announced iPhone 5s, the iPad Air is just 7.5mm thick and weighs 1 pound -- compare this to 9.4mm and 1.4 pounds for the previous model. Despite the thinner design and smaller battery size, we can still expect 10 hours of usage from the tablet which offers up to eight times the performance of the original iPad, and up to 72 times the GPU performance.

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It's only a matter of weeks since the last big Apple event at which the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c were announced. Today we have another event to look forward to and while we're not absolutely certain of what's going to be unveiled, the clever money is on the iPad 5, a new iPad mini, new Mac and release details for Mavericks.

Who knows… maybe there'll even be "one more thing"!

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In a bid to foil plans to create a backup of the site, isoHunt closes its doors ahead of its planned shutdown. On 16 October, isoHunt founder Gary Fung struck a deal with the MPAA, bringing to an end a series of court battles that have waged for several years.

Fung agreed to pay damages of $110 million and to shut down isoHunt -- along with TorrentBox, www.podtropolis.com and www.ed2k-it.com -- within seven days.

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Access to the internet and the ease of communication it affords us is something we now take for granted. In a sense this is how it should be -- access to the internet really should be seen as a right. But in all too many countries around the world, citizens find that government and dictatorships block or restrict access to the internet, or close down sites that speak out against regimes. This is something Google is keen to be involved in stopping, and this week launched a series of tools to help in the fight.

It's an idea which echoes of the Alliance for Affordable Internet campaign to make internet access cheaper, and Internet.org's dream of connecting the world, but there is a rather more political edge to it.

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Apple's first TV ad for the iPhone 5s shows off the gold version of the phone, but fails to mention the existence of the space gray and silver models. Backed with Goldfrapp's Ooh La La, the commercial seems to draw inspiration from the liquid metal effects seen in Terminator 2. There have already been ads for the cheaper iPhone 5c but this is the first time the premium version of the iPhone has been showcased on television.

In the ad, ribbons of liquid gold swirl and intertwine before converging and melding together to form the body of the iPhone. Shortly after airing, the advertisement was also uploaded to Apple's YouTube channel. As is the norm with Apple, comments are disabled, but it's likely that views and shares will rocket over the coming day.

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Just about everyone with a desktop, laptop or even a Surface Pro running Windows 8 has been busy updating to Windows 8.1 over the past couple of days.

But things aren’t so rosy for anyone with a Surface RT. After a number of users took to Microsoft forums to complain about problems updating their tablet/laptop hybrids to the latest version of Windows, the update was pulled from the Windows Store.

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This was another week in which Microsoft managed to steal the show, this time with the public release of Windows 8.1. Here at BetaNews we were fully prepared for the upgrade and showed off what's new. While we're generally impressed with the update, there's still a little room for improvement. Of course the Start menu (or lack thereof) is still a sticking point, but you can get this back. The operating system update was preceded by a raft of updates to Window's built in apps.

Windows 8.1 may be where it's at right now, but there are still plenty of people running Windows XP. Google announced that Chrome users on XP would be supported for a year after the OS is retired.

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Microsoft is using an interesting technique to ensure that websites such as BetaNews (or FileForum in particular) list only the latest versions of its software. Rather than just contacting websites who link to software that is no longer available, Microsoft is invoking the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to force websites to remove the links. BetaNews has been contacted by Google after one such complaint from Microsoft.

In the complaint -- which can be read on the Chilling Effects website -- Microsoft refers to our listing for Microsoft Project (although the page is no longer live). Microsoft contacted Google who in turn contacted us to say that "Google has been notified, according to the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), that some of your materials allegedly infringe upon the copyrights of others".

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Apple is recalling 64GB and 128GB flash storage drives after discovering that the units are at risk of failure. Affected system were sold between June 2012 and June 2013, and there is a free replacement program in operation for anyone who finds they have one of the potentially failure-prone drives. There is a firmware update available that can be used to determine whether or not your MacBook Air is affected.

A MacBook Air Flash Storage Drive Replacement Program has been set up and this directs MacBook Air owners to download a firmware update from the Mac App Store. The MacBook Air Flash Storage Firmware Update 1.1 can be used to test your drive and, if necessary, you'll be redirected back to the replacement program page.

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Google's Nexus 5 is a hotly anticipated handset, and over the past few weeks there have been numerous leaked images purporting to show what the device looks like.

Now it looks as though the speculation can come to an end after Google accidentally listed the device in the Play store, complete with pricing details. The temporary listing -- which has now been removed -- showed the 16GB model costing $349, and featured the tagline "capture the everyday and the epic in fresh new ways".

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