Trace your family history If you’ve always fancied delving into your family history but were put off by the time and effort involved, we’ve got news for you. No longer does researching your ancestry involve spending ages travelling the length and breadth of the country in search of information held in parish records and at local record offices. Instead of searching through paper records that could be located many miles from home, all this information and so much more can now be accessed online....

12 simple steps to safer social networking Confession time: I’m an inveterate social media junkie. From Facebook to Instagram to Diaspora, whenever a new communication platform rolls around–or comes back around–I’m ready to leap aboard. But social networks are amazing and terrifying in equal measure. You can reach thousands of people worldwide with a single Twitter update, but cybercriminals can use the same tools to pick the perfect victim. It’s impossible to remain completely anonymous while you’re using social media–anonymity would defeat the point–but every network has a few key, commonly overlooked privacy settings that take only minutes to set up and drastically improve the security of your shared data....

South Korea bank attacks should prompt rethink in U.S. The simplicity of the malware that paralyzed the computer networks of three banks and two broadcasters in technically sophisticated South Korea is a warning that U.S. corporations need to rethink security. The cybercriminals did nothing out of the ordinary in penetrating the organizations’ defenses on Wednesday. They used existing malware called “DarkSeoul,” changed its signature to evade the organizations’ firewalls and antivirus software, and targeted a well-known vulnerability in Internet Explorer (CVE-2012-1889)....

Zynga to let users play games without Facebook Zynga’s network of users has historically been tightly linked to Facebook’s social graph, but now the gaming giant is looking to branch out. On Thursday, Zynga rolled out changes to its homepage allowing users to create an account on the site just for playing games without having to log in first through Facebook, as has been the custom previously. The moves are part of a larger company plan to further distance itself from Facebook in an effort to expand and solidify its own user base....

EC pressed to charge Google in antitrust case Eleven complainants sent an open letter to European Union’s Competition Commissioner Joaquín Almunia urging him to formally charge Google with breaching competition law. “The Commission opened proceedings more than two years ago, and we are becoming increasingly concerned that effective and future-proof remedies might not emerge through settlement discussions alone,” the complainantswrote to Almuniaon Thursday. Among them are U.K. search engine Foundem, which was involved in the first round of complaints, online shopping platform Twenga, travel site TripAdvisor, the Federation of German Newspaper Publishers (BDZV) and the German Federation of Magazine Publishers (VDZ)....