Google on Friday said Chrome 25, now in development, automatically blocks browser add-ons installed on the sly by other software.

The measure mimics what rival Mozilla did for Firefox over a year ago.

Auto-blocking has already appeared in Chrome 25 for Windows on the "dev" channel -- Google's least-polished public version -- which debuted last month. By the browser's semi-regular release schedule, Chrome 25 will reach the final "stable" channel, and thus the bulk of users, in the second half of February 2013.

With 4,280,000 downloads for a single episode, Game of Thrones has the honor of becoming the most pirated TV-show of 2012.

Over the years the number of TV-show downloads on BitTorrent has leveled off a bit, but this year we saw a small increase again.

The majority of TV-show piracy, more than 80 percent, occurs outside the US and lacking availability is the top reason why people turn to BitTorrent.

After some Winter cleaning, Google announced the immediate discontinuation of Google Sync and Google Calendar Sync. These applications were designed to synchronize Gmail accounts with Outlook, various devices and other software via Microsoft's Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) protocol.

Popular alternatives to Exchange ActiveSync, like IMAP and POP, give users access to email but do not provide the same rich synchronicity that EAS affords. The technology also allows users and devices to syncs contacts, notes and calendars under a single protocol.

As the second major tech site to experience widespread downtime today, Facebook appears to be recovering from an outage that has lasted for more than an hour. Early into the interruption, users believed the problem pertained to a DNS issue. Although the main site (facebook.com) wouldn't resolve for millions of users, subdomains such as m.facebook.com, touch.facebook.com and beta.facebook.com loaded fine.

Although a purported member of Anonymous quickly took credit for causing outage, Facebook has since chalked the issue up to a botched traffic optimization test and not nefarious deeds. As part of its tinkering, the company made a DNS-related change and that resulted in many users being misrouted. The company says that the largest downtime occurred in Western Europe, but that Facebook should be fully operational now.