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"Past scandals, bad photos, critical comments: the internet has a long memory. As the EU considers the 'right to be forgotten', we investigate the growing business of online reputation management - and learn how you can airbrush your own past"

" Some search engines, including Bing and DuckDuckGo, give an entire first page of spurious results (see image in upper left). Most of the results are for pages obviously designed to obfuscate, throwing banal dust into the eyes of the search engine and leaving a casual searcher with the incorrect impression that there's nothing to see here. "

"Google is not obliged to delete personal information from its search results, even when that information damages an individual's reputation, an adviser to the European court of justice has decided."

"Turkey restricted access to Twitter hours after its prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, threatened to "root out" the social media network where wiretapped recordings have been leaked, damaging the government's reputation ahead of local elections."

"Many younger people just don't think in terms of their future employability, of identity theft, of legal problems if they're being provocative. Not to mention straightforward reputational issues." (Paris Brown, Phippen adds, "clearly never thought what she tweeted when she was 14" might one day stop her being Britain's first youth police commissioner.)"

"Ddos attacks have been used to cause both financial and reputational damage to businesses and services from Sony to government websites. The attacks can last from hours to days, and typically use computers or internet routers infected with viruses to make innocent users unwitting parties to the attack. The Lizard Stresser tool was used effectively by Lizard Squad during cyber attacks on Microsoft's Xbox Live and Sony's PlayStation Network online gaming services in December last year."

Apple is offering a free case to tackle the iPhone 4's antenna problem, but will the fault damage the technology giant's reputation?Apple called a press conference at which the case offer was made in response to ongoing speculation about the phone's problems, and boss Steve Jobs also offered a full refund for the handset.

"Unskilled manual laborers have felt the pressure of automation for a long time - but, increasingly, they're not alone. The last few years have been a bonanza of advances in artificial intelligence. As our software gets smarter, it can tackle harder problems, which means white-collar and pink-collar workers are at risk as well. Here are eight jobs expected to be automated (partially or entirely) in the coming decades. Call Center Employees call-center Telemarketing used to happen in a crowded call center, with a group of representatives cold-calling hundreds of prospects every day. Of those, maybe a few dozen could be persuaded to buy the product in question. Today, the idea is largely the same, but the methods are far more efficient. Many of today's telemarketers are not human. In some cases, as you've probably experienced, there's nothing but a recording on the other end of the line. It may prompt you to "press '1' for more information," but nothing you say has any impact on the call - and, usually, that's clear to you. But in other cases, you may get a sales call and have no idea that you're actually speaking to a computer. Everything you say gets an appropriate response - the voice may even laugh. How is that possible? Well, in some cases, there is a human being on the other side, and they're just pressing buttons on a keyboard to walk you through a pre-recorded but highly interactive marketing pitch. It's a more practical version of those funny soundboards that used to be all the rage for prank calls. Using soundboard-assisted calling - regardless of what it says about the state of human interaction - has the potential to make individual call center employees far more productive: in some cases, a single worker will run two or even three calls at the same time. In the not too distant future, computers will be able to man the phones by themselves. At the intersection of big data, artificial intelligence, and advanced

"Marlinspike's Textsecure has an impeccable reputation as a secure platform, and Whatsapp founder Jan Koum attributes his desire to add security to his users' conversations to his experiences with the surveillance state while growing up in Soviet Ukraine. However, without any independent security audit or (even better) source-code publication, we have to take the company's word that it has done the right thing and that it's done it correctly."

"Yik Yak has come in for a lot of criticism for being a breeding ground for rumour and bullying - and more serious content. Myriad threats of violence, sex crimes and hate crimes have been reported, including a mass shooting threat and the circulation of a sex tape. It wouldn't be unfair to say it has gained a reputation for being a scourge among parents."

"Second Life, Thinking Worlds, Unity3D and others were all making inroads into the realm of corporate learning and there was a buzz about it in the L&D market, which, at the time, had a reputation for churning out spectacularly boring and poorly designed compliance-based eLearning. One major mobile phone network with whom I worked back in 2008 had a vision of enlivening their learner experience by providing a 3D avatar-based portal into their learning management system, which at the time hosted solidly 2D page-turner eLearning of a very pedestrian nature."

"The "battle for Telegram" pits one of Russia's most popular messaging apps - with more than 13 million users - against the internet censor Roskomnadzor, in a public cat-and-mouse game to block traffic that has put the agency's reputation on the line. Telegram is widely used by the Russian political establishment, and prominent politicians and officials have openly flouted or criticised the ban. Data from the app showed several Kremlin officials had continued to sign in on Tuesday evening, four days after a court ordered the service to be blocked over alleged terrorism concerns."

"But it wasn't just one day of high engagement. A new study from Cybersecurity For Democracy found that far-right accounts known for spreading misinformation are not only thriving on Facebook, they're actually more successful than other kinds of accounts at getting likes, shares and other forms of user engagement. It wasn't a small edge, either. "It's almost twice as much engagement per follower among the sources that have a reputation for spreading misinformation," Edelson said. "So, clearly, that portion of the news ecosystem is behaving very differently.""

"The disclosure points to a problem security researchers have been warning about for years: that despite its reputation for building what is seen by millions of customers as a secure product, some believe Apple's closed culture and fear of negative press have harmed its ability to provide security for those targeted by governments and criminals. "Apple's self-assured hubris is just unparalleled," said Patrick Wardle, a former NSA employee and founder of the Mac security developer Objective-See. "They basically believe that their way is the best way. And to be fair … the iPhone has had incredible success. "But you talk to any external security researcher, they're probably not going to have a lot of great things to say about Apple. Whereas if you talk to security researchers in dealing with, say, Microsoft, they've said: 'We're gonna put our ego aside, and ultimately realise that the security researchers are reporting vulnerabilities that at the end of the day are benefiting our users, because we're able to patch them.' I don't think Apple has that same mindset.""

"But the technology raises important issues of governance, justice and fairness. In recent months, the Black Lives Matter movement has taken action to address what it sees as an abuse of police power and surveillance technology. Facing reputational and financial costs, several major tech companies stopped developing facial recognition or selling it to the police. Microsoft went as far as petitioning the US Congress to legislate against it."

"This article discusses the legal implications of a novel phenomenon, namely, digital reincarnations of deceased persons, sometimes known as post-mortem avatars, deepfakes, replicas, holographs, or chatbots. To elide these multiple names, we use the term 'ghostbots'. The piece is an early attempt to discuss the potential social and individual harms, roughly grouped around notions of privacy (including post-mortem privacy), property, personal data and reputation, arising from ghostbots, how they are regulated and whether they need to be adequately regulated further. For reasons of space and focus, the article does not deal with copyright implications, fraud, consumer protection, tort, product liability, and pornography laws, including the non-consensual use of intimate images ('revenge porn'). This paper focuses on law, although we fully acknowledge and refer to the role of philosophy and ethics in this domain."

"Wikipedia lives and dies by its references, the links to sources that back up information in the online encyclopaedia. But sometimes, those references are flawed - pointing to broken websites, erroneous information or non-reputable sources. A study published on 19 October in Nature Machine Intelligence1 suggests that artificial intelligence (AI) can help to clean up inaccurate or incomplete reference lists in Wikipedia entries, improving their quality and reliability."