Vine, one of the many properties owned by Twitter, is dead, after the company tried unsuccessfully to find a buyer for the struggling service.

If you’re a Vine regular, you’ve probably sensed the move coming for quite some time. As part of Twitter’s constellation of products, it was one service among many, and never really got the time or attention it deserved.

There’s a new viral link making the rounds on Twitter that you should advise your staff to steer clear of. If you see a link that begins with “goo.gl,” don’t click it. If you do, not only will it crash your Twitter app if you’re on your smartphone, but after it does that, it will place a call to 911.

Worse, as soon as the first call ends, it will keep dialing back.

It has been widely reported that cybercrime is one of the fastest growing types of crime on the planet today, but new statistics published by MarkMonitor’s Online Fraud Barometer indicate that it’s a lot worse than previously imagined.

Close to half (45%) of all consumers have, at some point, fallen victim to cybercriminals.

If you’re a VDSL user, there’s good news on the horizon. Recently, Nokia has announced some amazing increases in its XG.fast speeds, achieving up to 5Gbps (about 625MB per second) over 70 meters of conventional copper telephone wire.

That’s huge, but it gets even better.

The Internet of Things has been getting a lot of bad press in recent weeks. Not long ago, an army of enslaved smart devices was used to bring much of the internet in the United States to its knees for several hours. A few weeks before that, an exploit in a “smart” insulin pump was demonstrated that could potentially allow a hacker to kill the patient relying on it by ordering an insulin injection when none was needed.

You probably noticed that at various points during a day not long ago, you couldn’t get on the internet. If you could, a lot of the sites you’re used to visiting were simply unavailable for extended periods of time.

The reason you couldn’t get on the internet was because a company you’ve probably never heard of, called Dyn, came under a massive DDOS attack.

Yet more evidence that the federal government’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is cracking down on HIPPA violations, the agency recently levied a hefty $2.14 million dollar fine against St. Joseph Health System for what it describes as an egregious breach of security.

The Linux exploit called Rowhammer is back in the news. This time, it’s targeting Android devices.

If you missed the news about Rowhammer, or need a refresher, the exploit basically works like this: if you can engineer a piece of malware that will consistently access the same row of memory on an installed chip, hammering at it, it will cause electricity to leak to the adjacent row of memory, which is expressed as a bit.

Qualcomm has made a bold announcement in advance of this year’s 4G/5G Summit in Hong Kong. Their newest offering, the X50, will ship in the second half of 2018, and is being billed as a 5G modem. It will feature download speeds of up to 5GBps where networks support them, and represents a big leap forward by any reckoning.

File this one under “public service warning.” If you’re a fan and regular user of Facebook, beware of a new virus that’s making the rounds inside the social media giant.

If you see a video on your wall titled “My First Video,” don’t click on it to play it.