Thursday, October 7, 2021

!!!NEW BLOG ALERT!!! YouTube removes 2 R. Kelly channels after guilty verdict.

 

The video sharing giant has taken down RKellyTV and RKellyVevo, after a federal jury in Brooklyn, New York, found the 'Ignition' singer guilty of all nine counts of racketeering and sex trafficking last month.

Kelly - whose first name is Robert - is no longer allowed to create any new channels on the site, which is owned by Google.

YouTube said in a statement: "We can confirm that we have terminated two channels linked to R. Kelly in accordance with our creator responsibility guidelines."

However, videos of the 'I Believe I Can Fly' hitmaker uploaded by others will remain on the site, and, at the time of writing, his tunes remain on audio-streaming platform YouTube Music.

An online campaign, MuteRKelly, has called on streaming services to remove Kelly's music from their platforms.

He is due to be sentenced in May next year.

Kelly had pleaded not guilty to racketeering and violating a federal law making it illegal to transport people across state lines for prostitution, but the five women and seven men of the jury found him guilty on just their second day of deliberations.

He is still awaiting child pornography and obstruction charges in Illinois, for which a trial can now be scheduled as the New York proceedings are complete, as well as other state-level sexual misconduct charges in both Illinois and in Minnesota.

The singer has pleaded not guilty to all criminal charges against him and has repeatedly claimed he is innocent of any alleged sexual misconduct over the years.

In 2008, he was acquitted of child pornography charges.

Tuesday, October 5, 2021

!!!NEW BLOG ALERT!!! Facebook says sorry for mass outage and reveals why it happened.

 

Facebook has apologized for the mass outage that left billions of users unable to access Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger for several hours.

“To all the people and businesses around the world who depend on us, we are sorry for the inconvenience caused by today’s outage across our platforms,” said Santosh Janardhan, Facebook’s vice president of infrastructure, in a blogpost late Monday.


The outage, which prevented users from refreshing their feeds or sending messages, was caused by “configuration changes on the backbone routers,” Janardhan said, without specifying exactly what the changes were.

The changes caused “issues” that interrupted the flow of traffic between routers in Facebook’s data centers around the world, he added.

“This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt,” Janardhan said.

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp stopped working shortly before noon ET, when the websites and apps for Facebook’s services were responding with server errors.

Just after 7 p.m. ET, around six hours after the platforms went offline, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook page: “Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger are coming back online now.”

He added, “Sorry for the disruption today – I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about.”

The outage marked the longest stretch of downtime for Facebook since 2008, when a bug knocked the site offline for about a day, affecting about 80 million users. The platform currently has around 3 billion users.



In 2019, a similar outage lasted about an hour. Facebook blamed a server configuration change for that incident.

The outage came one day after the whistleblower who leaked private internal research to both The Wall Street Journal and Congress revealed herself ahead of an interview with the CBS program “60 Minutes.” The documents, first reported in a series of Journal stories, revealed that the company’s executives understood the negative impacts of Instagram among younger users and that Facebook’s algorithm enabled the spread of misinformation, among other things.

Facebook shares closed down almost 5% on Monday but they were up modestly nearly 1% in early trading on Tuesday.  

— Additional reporting by CNBC’s Samantha Subin.

!!!NEW BLOG ALERT!!! All the wrestlers who weren’t drafted this year.

With the 2021 WWE Draft in the books, and rosters set for both Monday Night Raw and Friday Night SmackDown, it’s time to take a look at who wasn’t chosen on either of the two nights of picks. This includes all the supplemental picks made on Talking Smack and Raw Talk.


Per WWE’s own rules, these wrestlers are all considered free agents.

From looking at the roster pages on WWE.com for both Raw and SmackDown, here are all the wrestlers who weren’t selected by either brand:

Brock Lesnar

Goldberg

Asuka

Elias

Eva Marie

Lacey Evans

Gran Metalik

Lince Dorado

MVP

Slapjack

Titus O’Neil

Bayley

Maryse

It should be noted it seems clear the WWE website isn’t fully updated yet, as some moves that were announced have yet to be reflected on said roster pages, though the majority have been changed over.

For what it’s worth, Lesnar, Asuka, Elias, Eva Marie, Gran Metalik, Lacey Evans, Lince Dorado, MVP, Slapjack, and Titus O’Neil are all listed under the Raw roster page while Bayley and Maryse are listed under the SmackDown roster page.

Goldberg, for his part, isn’t listed on either.

Many of these are easy to explain, like the part-timers, or those who are out injured, or are inactive, or asked to be released, or having a child. Then you have the likes of Eva Marie, who is only selling an injury and was at Raw tonight prepared for something, Asuka, who has simply gone missing (though she did recently get her teeth fixed), Elias, who had a character turn coming that was seemingly forgotten about, and Slapjack, who is apparently lost somewhere since RETRIBUTION disbanded.

We’ll likely get answers soon enough.

Monday, October 4, 2021

BREAKING BLOG ALERT!!! Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram suffer worldwide outage.

 

Associated Press -- Facebook along with its Instagram and WhatsApp platforms suffered a worldwide outage Monday that has extended more than three hours. Facebook's internal systems used by employees also went down. Service has not yet been restored.

The company did not say what might be causing the outage, which began around 11:40 a.m. ET. Websites and apps often suffer outages of varying size and duration, but hourslong global disruptions are rare.

“This is epic,” said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis for Kentik Inc, a network monitoring and intelligence company. The last major internet outage, which knocked many of the world’s top websites offline in June, lasted less than an hour. The stricken content-delivery company in that case, Fastly, blamed it on a software bug triggered by a customer who changed a setting.

Facebook's only public comment so far was a tweet in which it acknowledged that “some people are having trouble accessing (the) Facebook app” and that it was working on restoring access. Regarding the internal failures, Instagram head Adam Mosseri tweeted that it feels like a “snow day.”

But the impact was far worse for multitudes of Facebook's nearly 3 billion users, showing just how much the world has come to rely on it and its properties — to run businesses, connect with communities of affinity, log on to multiple other websites and even to order food.

It also showed that, despite the presence of Twitter, Telegram, Signal, TikTok, Snapchat and a bevy of other platforms, nothing can truly replace the social network that has evolved in 17 years into all but critical infrastructure. Facebook's request Monday that a revised antitrust complaint against it by the Federal Trade Commission be dismissed because it faces vigorous competition from other services seemed to ring a bit hollow.

The cause of the outage remains unclear. Madory said it appears Facebook withdrew “authoritative DNS routes” that let the rest of the internet communicate with its properties. Such routes are part of the internet’s Domain Name System, a central component of the internet that directs its traffic. Without Facebook broadcasting its routes on the public internet, apps and web addresses simple could not locate it.

So many people are reliant on Facebook, WhatsApp or Instagram as a primary mode of communication that losing access for so long can make them vulnerable to criminals taking advantage of the outage, said Rachel Tobac, a hacker and CEO of SocialProof Security.

“They don’t know how to contact the people in their lives without it,” she said. “They’re more susceptible to social engineering because they’re so desperate to communicate.” Tobac said during previous outages, some people have received emails promising to restore their social media account by clicking on a malicious link that can expose their personal data.

Jake Williams, chief technical officer of the cybersecurity firm BreachQuest, said that while foul play cannot be completely ruled out, chances were good that the outage is “an operational issue” caused by human error.

Madory said there was no sign that anyone but Facebook was responsible and discounted the possibility that another major internet player, such as a telecom company, might have inadvertently rewritten major routing tables that affect Facebook.

“No one else announced these routes,” said Madory.

Computer scientists speculated that a bug introduced by a configuration change in Facebook’s routing management system could be to blame. Colombia University computer scientist Steven Bellovin tweeted that he expected Facebook would first try an automated recovery in such a case. If that failed, it could be in for “a world of hurt” — because it would need to order manual changes at outside data centers, he added.

“What it boils down to: running a LARGE, even by Internet standards, distributed system is very hard, even for the very best,” Bellovin tweeted.

Facebook was already in the throes of a separate major crisis after whistleblower Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager, provided The Wall Street Journal with internal documents that exposed the company's awareness of harms caused by its products and decisions. Haugen went public on CBS's “60 Minutes" program Sunday and is scheduled to testify before a Senate subcommittee Tuesday.

Haugen had also anonymously filed complaints with federal law enforcement alleging Facebook's own research shows how it magnifies hate and misinformation, leads to increased polarization and that Instagram, specifically, can harm teenage girls' mental health.

The Journal's stories, called “The Facebook Files,” painted a picture of a company focused on growth and its own interests over the public good. Facebook has tried to play down the research. Nick Clegg, the company’s vice president of policy and public affairs, wrote to Facebook employees in a memo Friday that “social media has had a big impact on society in recent years, and Facebook is often a place where much of this debate plays out.”

Twitter, meanwhile, chimed in from the company’s main Twitter account, posting “hello literally everyone” as jokes and memes about the Facebook outage flooded the platform. Later, as an unverified screenshot suggesting that the facebook.com address was for sale circulated, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted, “how much?”

Tuesday, February 9, 2021

PHCW Wrestling: Rumble Warfare LIVE! This Sunday March 7th only on Pay-Per-View.


PHCW Wrestling presents..... StarrBrawl LIVE! This Sunday March 7th at the 901 Underground Arena in Memphis, Tennessee only on Pay-Per-View.




Copyrighted © 2021 PowerHouse Championship Wrestling, Inc. Trademarks & Copyright © 2021. All rights reserved.


Sunday, February 7, 2021