With Facebook’s recent announcement that they will allow video ads to automatically play in your news feed, three things are clear. The first is that the entire Internet just took an enormous step backwards into the 1990s (think GeoCities and webpages with music). The second is that most of us will either surf with our speakers turned off, or at least keep our fingers poised over the mute button. And the third is that bandwidth consumption is going to climb, no, skyrocket as more and more sites follow suit.

Since advertising seems to be the only reliable way to make money on the Internet, we should have seen this coming, but I for stopped going to CNN when they started playing their news videos automatically and and at full volume; so this is a trend that bothers me. And when you pay for bandwidth consumption because you are on a metered connection or mobile device, it’s not just the websites that are going to make money from advertising! But what can you do about it? Quite a bit, actually!

Over the past few weeks we have seen data on cloud storage services being compromised. Celebrities’ personal photos were stolen from Apple’s iCloud service. Then Snapchat was compromised, with both photos and videos were stolen. Now, Dropbox is reacting to what they say is a compromise of another service’s credentials store that is being used to compromise Dropbox accounts of users who use the same username and password on multiple services.

A common theme across all of these is clear… cloud services are being compromised. Does this mean you should not trust cloud services? Pull all your data back down to local storage and cancel your Internet connection? Go off the grid and return to the trees? Of course not! Cloud services are a major component of our connected lives, and it is not at all true that they are inherently unsafe or vulnerable. They are, however, accessible from literally anywhere in the world, so most people should take more precautions with their data than they may be accustomed to.

It sometimes seems as if we’re abdicating more and more of the control over our everyday lives and handing it over to computers. Machines are analyzing the data and making many of the decisions that used to be the province of human beings. In some cases, this has had very positive results; in others, not so much.

A study conducted by Oxford University about a year ago said that almost half of the jobs currently occupied by people in the U.S. could be performed by computers. The combination of computers and robotics has already infiltrated many fields, with technology taking the place of pharmacists, legal researchers and document reviewers, reporters and more.

Last month, we got a bit of a break as Microsoft issued only four security bulletins and unlike the July and August patches, none of the September patches resulted in widespread problems (those with long memories might recall that the company wasn’t so lucky the previous year, when the September 2013 patches caused numerous reports of problems.

October is traditionally the month for fans of horror stories, so we’re crossing our fingers and hoping this month’s updates won’t bring any Halloween-like surprises. We have a medium-sized slate of patches: nine in all, three of which have been given a severity rating of critical; all of those are remote code execution issues – as are the vast majority of critical patches. One is rated moderate, and the remaining five are classified as important.

For infographic based on the UK survey results click here.

A decade ago, unsolicited email aka spam, was a big problem. It filled inboxes with infected attachments, malicious links and claims of riches that required a simple reply (and your bank details).