The Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear an appeal by a veterinarian who was fined by Texas authorities for giving online advice to pet owners. The veterinarian was trying to challenge a Texas law that requires vets to examine animals in person before giving advice.

Facebook's WhatsApp is blocking links to rival chat app Telegram.me, The Verge reports. When Telegram.me URLs appear in messages, they aren't clickable; they also can't be cut and paste into other apps. The blocking appears to have started this morning.

In the last 18 months, Google has received almost 350,000 requests from European citizens who want links about them removed from the search results. To date, Google has removed around 42% of those links.

The Campaign for Commercial-Free Childhood and the Center for Digital Democracy have filed Federal Trade Commission complaints over junk food ads on YouTube. The advocacy groups are seeking an investigation of food marketers, video programmers and Google.

Reddit won't load any third-party analytics trackers when it encounters users who have activated do-not-track requests, the company said on Friday. The new policy will take effect in January.  

Copyright holders are now sending Google more than 2 million takedown notices per day, up from just several hundred a day in 2011, according to TorrentFreak. In the last month alone, Google received notices from more than 5,600 copyright owners, who sought to remove 65 million links. "Most of the reported URLs indeed point to pirated content and the associated links are often swiftly removed from Google’s search results," TorrentFreak writes. "However, with the massive volume of reports coming in, mistakes and duplicate requests are also common."

Dell has shipped some computers with a preinstalled certificate that "makes it easy for attackers to cryptographically impersonate Google, Bank of America, and any other HTTPS-protected website," ArsTechnica reports. Dell says that it's investigating the matter.  

YouTube will now cover the legal bills for a small number of content creators, if they're sued over clips that make fair use of copyrighted material. "With approval of the video creators, we’ll keep the videos live on YouTube in the U.S., feature them in the YouTube Copyright Center as strong examples of fair use, and cover the cost of any copyright lawsuits brought against them," Google's legal director for copyright, Fred von Lohmann, says in a blog post.

Yahoo Mail is preventing some people who use ad blockers from accessing their email. Those users are shown a message telling them to disable ad-blocking software in order to access their accounts. A Yahoo spokesperson says the messages are a "test," which the company is running "for a small number of Yahoo mail users in the U.S."

Forbes reporter Thomas Fox-Brewster looks at SilverPush, which uses inaudible sound beacons to track people. The company places the sound in a TV ad that can be recognized by a mobile app with SilverPush's beacon. "Once the sound is heard, the application knows what the user is watching," Fox-Brewster writes. The tracking technology, which has riled privacy advocates, is currently used only in India, according to Forbes.