It's been a tough year in the news. White supremacists are committing acts of domestic terrorism. North Korea is threatening nuclear war. How are brands supposed to have fun on social media when all this bad stuff is happening?! The great American solar eclipse is how.

Unsuspecting Aussies have lost almost $28,000 in the last year to scammers pretending to be from NBN, with over 300 reports made to Scamwatch.

Here's how they are catching people out, and what you need to do if you think you've been scammed.

From snapping photos with a mobile phone to streaming music through a browser, much of the tech trickery we take for granted in 2017 looks simple on the surface but involves a complex series of computations and calculations behind the scenes to make the magic happen. As an example, take Google.com.

Two trains leave their stations and travel towards one another. Michelle is on Train A and is scrolling through her Instagram feed. Ben is on Train B and listens to Spotify while reading the news. Forty-five minutes later, the trains pass one another. Who has used the most data?

Uber is closing in on a pick to replace its former CEO Travis Kalanick, who departed the ride-hailing giant under a storm of allegations he tolerated a widespread culture of sexual harassment and mistreated drivers.

When you see a video online that seems a bit too wild to be true, chances are it probably is. Along with fake news stories, fake viral videos are all over Facebook and YouTube, a lot of them made by people who know what they're doing, which makes it hard to determine whether or not they're on the up and up. Fake videos like that one of a bald eagle snatching a child, or the video of a friend accidentally causing another's death, can be alarming when you don't realise they're stunts.

Microsoft claims Bing, its search engine for people who have just unboxed a new computer and are trying to find out where to download Chrome, is bigger than you think.

According to a newly released Foreign Policy report, leaked communications show Wikileaks declined to release a cache of hacked Russian documents in the winter of 2016, dismissing the only partially published records as "already public". While there will be plenty of talk about this being proof of founder Julian Assange's loyalties to Russia, it most prominently displays his general hypocrisy and self-interest.

After a week of silence, Dell CEO Michael Dell has finally addressed the violence in Charlottesville. As CEOs fled Trump's toxic Manufacturing Council and denounced the US president's racist responses, Dell pledged to stand by the president. Now, the council has been dissolved and at 6PM on a Friday in the US (8AM Saturday in Australia), Dell has some inspiring words.

US President Donald Trump announced on Friday that the Pentagon's cyberware unit will be elevated, forming the US military's tenth unified command. In a statement, he vowed to "strengthen our cyberspace operations and create more opportunities to improve our Nation's defence".

A leading US supplier of voting machines confirmed on Thursday that it exposed the personal information of more than 1.8 million Illinois residents.

In the wake of Donald Trump's refusal to simply condemn the actions of white supremacists at a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, business leaders, politicians, pundits, and many more have issued statements making it clear that racism can not be tolerated. But not everyone has called out the man who is emboldening white supremacists with his tacit approval. Apple CEO Tim Cook just did.

Nearly all the major technology services we've come to rely on have been negligent in enforcing their own user protection guidelines. Repeated calls to act on the Terms of Service these companies outlined for themselves without any meaningful response has arguably emboldened the worst elements taking root on them — with years of simmering hatred brought to boil this weekend in Charlottesville.

Ben Curtis, AKA the "Dude, you're getting a Dell" guy, served as Dell Computer's pitchman for years and remains one of the most iconic symbols of the company. Yesterday, Dell CEO Michael Dell insisted on remaining part of a (now-dissolved) presidential council while many others resigned in protest following Trump's vigorous defence of a white supremacist rally that left a young woman dead. So we decided to ask the former face of the company how he feels about the situation.

Streaming media player Roku has begun to crack down on those among its more than 1000 privately operated channels which are distributing pirated content, TechCrunch reports, and is warning users that subscribe to them that it can shut down the channels any time it chooses.

Today, Facebook CEO and much-rumoured presidential hopeful Mark Zuckerberg posted to his personal page explaining why the company would renew efforts to crack down on hate speech across the site, citing the terrible violence that transpired at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia last weekend.

Right now, the Senate is busy trying to work out whether Pauline Hanson is allowed to wear a burqa in the Federal Senate.

Internet companies typically take a hands-off approach to offensive content on their networks, erring on the side of maintaining an open internet. But this approach sometimes ends in PR disaster. For Twitter, the debate has bubbled up in the form of rampant harassment, and the company has responded by slowly, grudgingly blocking high-profile harassers from its platform. For YouTube, the debate has focused on ISIS propaganda and other extremist videos. After a violent weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia that ended with a protester being killed, that fight has focused on GoDaddy, Cloudflare, and other companies that provide web hosting and DDoS protection for neo-Nazi websites such as The Daily Stormer.

New research shows most Aussie shoppers spend far more in an online store than in a bricks and mortar one.