In late 2017 I signed a thirty year mortgage on a house in Melbourne's northern suburbs, in an area due to be connected to the NBN in "early 2018". With the ink barely dry on the contract, NBN Co announced it was halting all planned rollouts until further notice. Cable was not available in the area, so I assumed my only option was ADSL.

I started my writing career off over a decade ago at a site called DownloadSquad. We covered “Web 2.0” companies back when “Web 2.0 companies” was a term people used. I wrote a zillion posts for them, or at least a few thousand. The amount of those articles that are still online: zero.

Trying to find the perfect iOS apps can be tough, and we’re willing to bet that your iPhone or iPad is full of pages and pages of apps. There’s just so much out there, it’s hard to come up with a short list of favourites. We understand. Allow us to help you with our freshly updated Lifehacker Pack for iOS.

There are so many Windows apps out there, that picking a list of the very best, most must-install software for your desktop or laptop feels daunting. We've pored over pages of recommendations, countless forum posts, and lots of comments to come up with this year's Lifehacker Pack for Windows, a list of software champions across four categories: productivity, internet/communications, music/photos/video and utilities.

Which Android app is worth a spot on your new smartphone or tablet? Trying to find the very best of the best is a challenging process, because there are millions of apps to pick from on the Google Play Store. Even if you just scan Google’s “top free” or “top paid” list on a daily basis, you’ll miss out on a lot of digital gems. Allow us to help you out with our freshly updated Lifehacker Pack for Android.

Free DNS provider Cloudflare recently released a brand-new app for iOS and Android, “1.1.1.1,” that makes it incredibly easy to route all of your device’s DNS requests through the service’s speedy servers, not your ISP’s (likely slower) servers. In other words, this should make your web browsing feel faster. Better still, Cloudflare says it doesn’t store any data about what you’re browsing—unlike your ISP, potentially. What’s not to love about that?

By 2020, every household in Australia is expected to connect to the NBN - and those who don't will have a raft of telecommunications products and services switched off. The Australian Communications Consumer Action Network (ACCAN) has put together an infographic explaining five things you need to know to ensure the big switch runs as smoothly as possible.

Ads and in-app purchases have become so prevalent in the games our kids play on their tablets that experts are calling them more than just distracting—they’re labelling them as “unfair” and “deceptive.”

Even in a world of face unlocking and fingerprint scanning, we still haven't escaped the password just yet. They're still a necessity and they're still annoying to remember. There are now numerous browser features, third-party tools, and even hardware dongles designed to help keep your login credentials safe and secure. Here's how to make sure you're doing passwords right in 2018.

The World Wide Web is officially old enough for us judge what it's produced. That's right, it's time for the world to start building a canon of the most significant websites of all time, and the Gizmodo staff has opinions.

Even when you're covering your tracks by opening a new incognito window, your web browsing history might not be as private as you think. Information about what you do online, down to every single URL, can likely be purchased on the web by anyone who wants it. And while in most cases people are making those purchases for marketing reasons, they could choose to use their newfound knowledge maliciously as well.

Has your NBN connection been less congested in the last year or so? Unfortunately I've got some bad news for you: At the end of October NBN Co will conclude a temporary promotional deal on extra bandwidth for retailers, and that's expected to bring back some of that dreaded congestion.

The Internet was intended to be a vast public network with the World Wide Web designed to be a way for everyone to share information in an open and free way. But the massive growth of Facebook, Google, Amazon and others has resulted in a centralisation of the web with vast swathes of our data in the control of a relatively small number of parties. The creator of the web, Tim Berners-Lee wants to change that with a new project he has launched.

Whenever you click that easy "Sign in With Google" button on a company's website, you're granting the app or service access to some of your information. While in some cases that might just be access to your name and email address, for others you're giving that company the ability to read your email as well.

Good news for anyone wholly fed up with waiting for the NBN, or having the NBN and still experiencing terrible connection speeds. Another company is stepping in to offer their own super-fast wireless network, one that's not wholly broken from being tossed around in an endless game of political football. There's a catch, though: you might have to move if you want to get connected.

Following from the ACCC's Service Standards Inquiry, NBNCo has agreed, voluntarily, to offer a $25 rebate whenever they miss an appointment. And there's no need to go through a lengthy or painful claim process as the process should be automatic.

The company behind the National Broadband Network has updated its searchable rollout map to coincide with its revised three-year timetable. Want to know when the NBN is coming to your suburb? All you need to do is type your address into the website.

It’s frustrating to make a typo when you’re trying to visit a website for the first time. Then, because your browser hates you, it will attempt to autocomplete to the wrong website — like netflux or faceboik — whenever you start to type the correct address into your address bar.

It's probably been a while since you signed up for internet service, but you should have an idea of how fast your plan is. If not, give your ISP a call. Write down your plan's maximum download and upload speeds. You can then use these speed-testing websites to see just your wifi's actual performance stacks up to what you're theoretically paying for.