Remember NBN's address checker tool? Despite a series of upgrades, the site never did a great job of providing an accurate answer on when you were getting connected. Now, NBN has rolled out yet another tweak to the search engine that actually makes it useful.

Contrary to popular opinion, some tweetstorms are good, but reading them on Twitter can be a pain in the arse. Thread Reader reformats a tweetstorm into a readable essay, while preserving links and images. You can even send the storm to Instapaper and read it later.

Internet service providers are promising they will spend more money to ensure higher speeds for customers using the National Broadband Network, but it remains unclear how much difference that will actually make.

Users of the high-speed network have become increasingly vocal about congestion problems, especially during evening periods when thousands of people are watching streaming services like Netflix. That problem can occur even if customers are paying extra for one of the faster speed tiers the NBN provides.

Something I like is popular now, and that is bad. Thanks to GIF databases such as Giphy, the reaction GIF, once a careful and elaborate art form, is now a bland mass market dominated by a handful of outlet-approved celebrity faces. Today Giphy sped up the medium's slide into mediocrity by adding view counts to GIFs from "from an official Artist or Partner".

Are you ready for Australia's spring rain broadband blues? It's been a dry winter, but the spring downpours are set to trigger the seasonal ADSL slowdown as Telstra's pits flood – drowning the country's ageing copper network. Unfortunately, there's not a whole lot home users can do about it.

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.

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.

We can think of more than a few dead or long-ignored websites we want dusted off and brought back to life. Here are the seven sites we miss the most. Let's surf the web of nostalgia.

For as much as we all want a stable, blazing-fast internet connection at home, for a lot of people, fixed connections are just not working out. If this sounds painfully familiar, it might be time to consider mobile broadband.

NBN needs to abandon copper-based Fibre to the Node (FTTN), says lobby group Internet Australia. In its latest attack, the organisation is claiming it's "essential for Australia's economic and social development" to abandon the technology in favour of Fibre to the distribution point. And no, it says, it's not too late.

One of the cardinal rules of engagement on the internet is Don't Read the Comments. But if, like us, you spend the better part of your day scouring the internet for tips on the best way to eat a sandwich or which organisational tool will help you get your chores done, this sanity-saving tactic could be working against you.

It's not a secret that people are mean on the internet and, if you live your life online in any appreciable way, you are most likely going to experience some sort of online harassment, and it will most likely suck. There are, however, some steps you can take to bounce back.

Days after taking to YouTube with an ad marking the halfway point of the national broadband network rollout, and not long after we cheekily pointed out the speedtest result in the ad, NBN Co has pulled its own ad.

In the same hotel where Alexander Graham Bell once demoed coast-to-coast telephone calls, Microsoft will announce plans for a new white space internet service today. This ludicrous technology sends broadband internet wirelessly over the unused channels of the television spectrum. It's also ingenious.

The current incarnation of the NBN, which was meant to be better, faster and cheaper but seems to be less reliable, slower and more expensive to deploy has crossed a new threshold - more than half the population can now access Australia's "bleeding edge" mashup of copper, coaxial and fibre to connect to the Internet according to NBNCo.

I was having a chat with Tegan the other day about a bit of a sore point - our future internet connection. Just before we moved into our new place, the glorious address checker on the NBN told us that, yes indeed, we would be getting "fibre to the premises". Beauty. But now that we've moved in, our suburb has been "upgraded" to the not-quite-so-fast technology of fibre to the curb (FTTC).

The deep web and its inner recess, the dark web — those less well-trodden parts of the internet beyond the reach of Google and Bing — are not for the faint-hearted or untrained. With the right tools, however, there's little to fear and plenty to discover. Here's how you can start exploring the deep web without having to worry about your digital well-being.

Last week, NBN Co began installing Fibre-To-The-Curb (FTTC) broadband internet to various suburbs around Australia. (Originally, most of these homes were slated to receive the inferior Fibre-To-The-Node (FTTN) technology.) In all, more than one million Aussie premises are expected to receive substantial online performance boosts due to this rollout change. Here are all the suburbs that have been added to the FTTC list.

Before you take a baseball bat to your WiFi router, there are a few apps which might help bring your home wireless network back from the dead.