Twitter and YouTube accounts belonging to the military’s US Central Command were hacked. Hackers supportive of the terrorist group Islamic State, also known as ISIS, took credit and issued a warning to the US military.

The hackers posted images of spreadsheets that purported to contain the home addresses and other contact information for retired US Army generals and other images purporting to be US military maps and plans. The Pentagon appeared to confirm the authenticity of the information, telling reporters that the exposed information was not classified and that the images came not from the government but from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

You can tell your kids to stay off the social networks and you can tell yourself that they’ll listen, but chances are they’ll find a way on, anyway. So we’re going to address reality and do our best to ensure that their Facebook and Twitter accounts are secure and private and that they use the networks as safely and responsibly as possible.

Of course, Twitter and Facebook are data brokers. This means they make money selling anything and everything you post there to third-party marketing and advertising firms. It’s also safe to assume they are tracking any web-browsing you do while logged in, but you can at least try to prevent this.

With Google processing 40,000 search queries a second — or 1.2 trillion a year — it's a safe bet that many of those doing the Googling are kids. Little surprise then that beginning next year the tech giant plans to create specific versions of its most popular products for those 12 and younger.

The most likely candidates are those that are already popular with a broad age group, such as search, YouTube and Chrome. Google would not offer a timetable for the rollout. Google wants to be thoughtful about what we do, giving parents the right tools to oversee their kids' use products. So the better approach is to simply see to it that the tech is used in a better way.

Twitter users will be alerted to a change in the type of data the social network is collecting on them, and will be offered the option to opt-out by adjusting their settings. The data in question is a list of the apps you have installed on your mobile device.

The company says it’s using the app data to help “build a more tailored experience for you on Twitter,” which includes things like improving your “who to follow” recommendations by connecting you with those who have similar interests; showing your relevant promoted content; and adding content to your timeline like tweets and accounts that Twitter thinks you’ll find interesting.

Using Skype, Twitter and other western services harms the security of the country, says the head of Chechnya. Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov said that the spread of western communication services on the Internet harms national security.

Their use encourages the ongoing double standards west policy, Kadyrov said. He considers situation to be unacceptable in which the West controls Russian users, and Russia is far from the steering information. The main problem is lack of control. Kadyrov also offered to turn off the Internet, as a global network, in his opinion, interfere with the proper education of youth.

Twitter just sued the federal government over restrictions the government places on how much the company can disclose about surveillance requests it receives. For months, Twitter has tried to negotiate with the government to expand the kind of information that it and other companies are allowed to disclose. But it failed.

Twitter asserts in its suit that preventing the company from telling users how often the government submits national security requests for user data is a violation of the First Amendment. The move goes a step beyond a challenge filed by Google and other companies last year that also sought permission on First Amendment grounds to disclose how often it receives national security requests for data.

A major insight into human behavior from pre-internet era studies of communication is the tendency of people not to speak up about policy issues in public—or among their family, friends, and work colleagues—when they believe their own point of view is not widely shared. This tendency is called the “spiral of silence”.

Some social media creators and supporters have hoped that social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter might produce different enough discussion venues that those with minority views might feel freer to express their opinions, thus broadening public discourse and adding new perspectives to everyday discussion of political issues.

Activists just got another reason to worry about what spooks might be able to learn about them, with boffins demonstrating that a decent traffic fingerprint can tell an attacker what's going on, even if an app is defended by encryption.

The researchers from the Universities of Padua and Rome have found that for activities like posting messages on a friend's Facebook wall, browsing a profile on a social network, or sending an e-mail, there's no need to decrypt an encrypted data flow. The researchers note that even in the hands of a knowledgeable user there are opportunities for “malicious adversaries willing to trace people … the adversary can still infer a significant amount of information from the properly encrypted traffic.”

The Department of Defense of the USA makes experiments on social networks users. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency provides monitoring of microblog service and Internet users‘ posts on such large social networks as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Kickstarter.

The Pentagon invests large amount of money for carrying out experiments which are connected with users‘ mood and its manipulation. Technological Department of Defence and scientists of university hold the Pentagon project, called Social Media in Strategic Communication. It provides monitoring of Twitter microblog service and Internet users‘ posts on large social networks.

USA Secret Service reported that wants to buy analytical computer programs that are able to synthesize data from social media and provide this information in a visual form.

The orders ask for a long list of specific tools, including the ability to identify social media influencers, analyze data streams in real time, access old Twitter data and use heat maps. And it wants the software to be compatible with Internet Explorer 8. Then there's the request to sift through the heaps of snark on Twitter and other social media services: "Ability to detect sarcasm and false positives," the request reads.