Internet & Websites - Page 4

Google is down right now, I repeat: Google is DOWN.

I use the search engine hundreds of times per day for my job, so the very nanosecond that there was a blip in the Google radar, I felt it. Google seems to be down in some parts of the world, after a quick search on Twitter I noticed that #GoogleDown was in the top tweets, so I knew it wasn't just me.

People are getting "500. That's an error" that continues "the server encountered an error and could not complete your request. If the problem persists, please report your problem and mention this error message and the query that caused it. That's all we know", explains one of the largest companies in the world. Google.

The head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, has announced that Instagram is testing a new subscription service that allows creators to monetize their followers.

Mosseri took to his personal Instagram account to announce that the new subscription service that has been in testing since January 2022 will be getting an expansion of features. For those who don't know, Instagram has tested a subscription service similar to OnlyFans or Patreon, where followers can pay for access to a creator's exclusive content. In January, the service was only being tested on ten creators but has now rolled out to more than 10,000 creators.

Twitter is experiencing some issues across the world right now, with users in multiple countries including the US, UK, Mexico, Brazil, and Italy experiencing issues accessing Twitter.

Down here in Australia, I've got no problems on both accessing Twitter.com on my desktop PC, or on my Android smartphone. But there are over 50,000+ people with issues in the US along according to DownDetector. The outage kicked off at around 8AM ET, where people were having issues logging into the site, or accessing it from their phone.

Some users are getting error messages like "Tweets aren't loading right now. Try again" while others have no issues at all. Twitter doesn't get outages often, so when they happen they are headlines across the world. I'm sure that once you even read this news, Twitter will be back and operational.

The iconic music livestream stopped on July 10th, 2022.

The stream had amassed over 688 million views after starting on February 23rd, 2020. The Lofi Girl channel received a DMCA takedown request by FMC Music, a Malaysian company, leading YouTube to take the video down and issue one copyright strike to the channel. A second stream by the channel was also taken down on the same day, which had amassed 129 million views, and began streaming only three days after the other, back in 2020.

Lofi Girl claims they are "false copyright strikes," marking another episode in the ongoing saga of abuse of YouTube's copyright system. YouTube confirmed on July 11th that the takedown requests were malicious and subsequently terminated FMC Music's account. Though the strike has been removed from Lofi Girl's channel, and the videos will be reinstated, a new stream will need to begin, marking the end of an era for one of the platform's biggest ongoing livestreams. The new live stream will be going live here, if you're interested.

Joe Rogan, the host of the largest podcast in the world, "The Joe Rogan Experience," appeared on the Lex Fridman podcast, where he discussed various topics, including what he experienced at the height of his controversy.

The UFO commentator and host of the Joe Rogan experience sat down with his good friend Lex Fridman for a lengthy discussion that ranges across various topics such as the role discipline plays in Rogan's life, what he did to manage with his attempted cancellation following interviews with polarizing medical professionals, UFOs, Putin, the CIA and more.

At the beginning of the nearly two-hour discussion, Fridman asks Rogan how he survived being publicly attacked over publishing podcasts with medical professionals that gave a controversial opinion on the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the n-word highlight video.

If you've been itching to watch every single episode of Seinfeld, well then we have just the website for you: Watch Seinfeld Online is a dedicated website to streaming every episode of Seinfeld.

As each episode of Seinfeld is streaming, you won't have any options of rewinding or skipping through episodes, but you also don't have to put up with ads flashing up or any commercials. That's not bad considering the same can't be said for TV or anywhere online: although, Netflix did secure themselves a 5-year streaming deal for one of the most successful TV shows in history.

Personally, I've finished the latest season of HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm, written and stars Larry David... the co-creator of Seinfeld along with comedian Jerry Seinfeld. Curb Your Enthusiasm is fantastic, but I have to admit: I haven't watched Seinfeld. I couldn't do it... but I really want to, and need to start from the very beginning.

Tesla and SpaceX CEO took a several-day hiatus from Twitter but how now returned in a series of tweets following his birthday celebrations.

Musk recently celebrated his 51st birthday on June 28, and coincidently the world's richest individual managed to pass a milestone number of Twitter followers on the same day - a nice little birthday present. Musk's official Twitter account reached 100 million followers on June 28, and has since climbed to 100.2 million followers, a gain of approximately 200,000 new followers in just four days.

Musk stopped posting on Twitter on June 22 and seemingly took several days to himself to enjoy his birthday and work on his myriad of other projects. He has now returned on June 2 by firstly posting a meme followed by a simple, "Feeling... perhaps... a little bored?"

Mark Zuckerberg has informed Meta employees that company performance goals will be increasing in order to discover underperforming staff.

Reuters has learned that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has spoken to Meta staff during a recent Q&A meeting where he said that Meta will be focusing on plugging any financial holes following slower than anticipated revenue growth. Zuckerberg explained that he will be introducing new performance targets for employees that will be harsh as the company will axe employees that cannot meet them. The Meta CEO said that, realistically speaking, "there are probably a bunch of people at the company that shouldn't be here".

Audio from the Q&A was heard by Reuters, and Zuckerberg described the increasing performance goals will be "turning up the heat a little bit" where employees may realize that Meta isn't the right place for them, "and that self-selection is OK with me," said Zuckerberg. To illustrate how Zuckerberg is reeling back Meta's aggressive growth amid unexpectedly reduced revenue, the company brought its hiring target of 10,000 workers all the way down to 6,000/7,000.

A study on Facebook clickbait titled "Click me...! The influence of clickbait on user engagement in social media and the role of digital nudging" has been published in the journal PLoS ONE.

Researchers from the University of Duisburg-Essen studied four thousand Facebook posts from various news organizations to gauge what constituted clickbait and how effective various techniques were than others. Though clickbait increases attention to certain articles, some previous studies have suggested that it erodes readers' trust in a given source.

The team collected the posts over seven consecutive days in 2017 from ten news outlets' Facebook pages based in the United States and the United Kingdom, which included "reputable" and "tabloid" sources. They found headlines including typical clickbait phrases were associated with about a quarter of reactions, shares, and comments compared to those without, e.g. "this will blow your mind."

A video posted to the TikTok account @daddystrange333 shows a man aboard a plane being accused by flight attendants of sending lewd images of himself to passengers.

@daddystrange333 explains that she was aboard a flight when she noticed that she had an AirDrop request on his phone. The man that was seated next to @daddystrange333 that she was speaking to told her not to open the request, but she was curious as she could see that the AirDrop request was coming from a man she calls "Larry". @daddystrange333 realized that Larry was sending the images with his iPad, and once she accepted the request, she immediately notified staff aboard the flight.

Flight attendants approached Larry and asked him if he sent explicit images of himself to passengers, to which he agreed to doing by nodding. The flight attendants then followed up by asking him why he would do that, and he said he was "just having a little fun". @daddystrange333 can then be heard saying directly to Larry, "It's sexual harassment, disgusting, it is assault". Before the video ends, Larry can be heard apologizing for his actions.

Mark Zuckerberg has announced that Meta is releasing a new online clothing store for avatars where users will be able to purchase outfits.

Zuckerberg, along with Instagram's vice president of fashion partnerships, Eva Chen, took to Instagram Live to announce "Meta Avatar Store" is coming to Facebook next week and will allow users to explore a virtual store across Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. Users will be able to purchase digital clothes for their avatars, and it will feature notable brands of clothing such as Prada, Balenciaga, and Thom Browne. According to TechCrunch, the price for these outfits has yet to be revealed.

Meta has been very public about its push to create a product that directly competes with Byte Dance's hit app TikTok.

A leaked internal meme from Meta revealed that Mark Zuckerberg and other Meta executives want to roll out several changes to Facebook to make the application more like TikTok. The redesign overhaul would concentrate on Facebook's main feed section and change it, so the feed shows content from pages, users, and people that the account isn't following. The memo described this algorithm change as "Discovery Engine".

Now, Instagram is testing a new TikTok-style redesign of its main feed, which Mark Zuckerberg shared on his personal Instagram account story, where he wrote, "We want to make it easier to discover content and connect with friends." Adding that Instagram is currently working on full-screen photos appearing in the feed and that some individuals will start seeing "this test soon". It seems that Meta as a whole is pivoting towards a more TikTok-style user interface.

Facebook has been busted for receiving sensitive medical information from hospital websites, raising the question if the social media giant has broken federal law.

Ars Technica, partnered with The Markup, a non-profit that focuses on data-driven journalism and the impacts of technology throughout society, investigated the websites of the top 100 hospitals across the United States and found that 33 of them featured a tracker called the Meta Pixel. This tracker is designed to send Facebook a packet of data whenever an individual clicks the "Schedule Online Now" button.

An example of what this packet of data can contain is the University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center website, where the Meta Pixel will send Facebook a data packet that contains the doctor's name, and the search term the team used to identify the patient, which was "pregnancy termination".

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has sat down with Twitter employees to answer a series of questions regarding his acquisition of Twitter and any potential coming changes.

Elon Musk has previously explained in small portions what he believes Twitter should transform into. He has mentioned implementing an expansion of freedom of speech on the platform and rolling back some of the current moderation. Musk has previously said that he is against permanent bans and that he would unban former President Donald Trump and other banned accounts while also removing any form of content moderation that is outside of the written law.

Musk was asked for his thoughts on freedom of speech at the recent meeting, where he explained that for Twitter, there is "freedom of speech or freedom of reach". The Tesla CEO then used an example of an individual being able to legally able to "walk into the middle of Times Square and deny the Holocaust", but that doesn't mean that individuals message should be reached by millions of other people. Adding that he believes people should have the right to say "pretty outrageous things that are within the bounds of the law".

Elon Musk has sat down with Twitter staff and answered a series of questions regarding what he believes Twitter will become under his control.

Musk entered into a $44 billion acquisition of the world's second largest social media platform, and since then Twitter employees have been concerned about what his acquisition means for their positions (once its gone through) and how handing over the reins to the company will impact it.

Now Musk has sat down for an all-hands meeting where he explained that he personally uses Twitter to express himself, "Some people use their hair to express themselves. I use Twitter" and that there is a line between being able to express ones self and how many people that expression reaches. Notably, Musk praised China's platform WeChat and how that platform is the center point for social media as users "basically live on WeChat".

TikTok has announced that it will be rolling out a new feature that is designed to stop young users from infinitely scrolling the app.

The new feature, which is very similar to what is currently present on Netflix and Instagram, will prompt users aged between 13 and 17 years old if they spend more than 100 minutes on the app in a 24-hour period. Notably, TikTok also announced that it will be rolling out an insight tool that will allow users to be able to see your screen time summary each day, how many times the app was opened, and more.

This new feature is similar to Netflix's "are you still there?" screen prompt and is intended to add a level of protection to the platform that will help prevent phone addiction. Separately, Asurion, a private insurance company that provides insurance for smartphones, tablets, and consumer electronics, recently published a study that found that the average American checks their phone 353 times a day.

Podcast listeners weren't able to put on their favorite podcasts as all of the shows hosted on Spotify's Megaphone platform went offline.

A spokesperson for Spotify told The Verge that the music streaming platform, unfortunately, suffered from an issue "related to our SSL certificate". The spokesperson explained that throughout the duration of the outage, Spotify users weren't able to access any podcast hosted by Megaphone publishers. Podcasts such as The Joe Rogan Experience, The Ringer, and more were temporarily unavailable from 8PM ET on Monday until 6AM Tuesday.

Notably, Megaphone is a service that adds advertisements into podcasts, and Spotify purchased the company for $235 million in 2020. Furthermore, Engadget explains that an SSL certificate is used to verify an authentic connection between a server and browser or application, and as the publication points out, Spotify is a large technology company that relies on secure connections. Having its SSL certificate expire and not be renewed for several hours is the equivalent of an MLB player dropping stock-standard fly-ball.

Apple takes in a considerable amount of money per year for Google to be the default search engine on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac... but that could soon change, with Apple reportedly gearing up to unveil a new search engine competitor.

In a fresh series of tweets, industry veteran (amongst a laundry list of achievements, companies and websites founded, and connections in the tech industry) Robert Scoble teased "oh, and a new search engine is coming too. Will Siri finally get "smart?" Hmmm". The series of tweets were all about Apple's new AR headset tease at its WWDC 2022 event.

Scoble was asked if the "New search engine is your guess or you've actually heard through the grapevine from sources" to which he replied: "Heard it from many places. Had dinner six years ago with head of Siri at Apple and he laid out why Siri would need to be rebuilt. We haven't seen that rebuild yet. It will come with the headset".

TikTok's Live Creator page has published a new video that teases an upcoming feature that will allow creators to receive donations from viewers.

The upcoming feature is called "Live Subscription" and will introduce TikTok live streamers and viewers to a new program that allows fans to initiate a monthly subscription to a creator to receive a range of perks that will differentiate them from "normal" viewers. These perks are similar to perks seen on streaming platforms such as Twitch, such as subscriber-only chat, custom emotes, badges, and more.

Within TikTok's video, the company states that creators will be able to have a "predictable monthly income", which, if executed properly, will be a massive leg-up for the company as making money directly from TikTok has been extremely difficult since the platform's creation. TechCrunch reports that TikTok's subscription packages will also be similar to Twitch's in terms of pricing, with the basic package being priced at $4.99 a month and multiple tiers that range up to $24.99 a month.

In the wake of Elon Musk's announcement that he wants to find out how many fake accounts are on Twitter's platform, an audit has been done on a very influential Twitter account.

In a new report from Newsweek, an audit conducted by software company SparkToro found that nearly half of President Joe Biden's Twitter followers, which is currently at 22.2 million, are fake accounts. Notably, the software company found that 49.3% of accounts following Biden's "@POTUS" Twitter account were "fake followers". SparkToro defines a "fake follower" as "accounts that are unreachable and will not see the account's tweets (either because they're spam, bots, propaganda, etc. or because they're no longer active on Twitter)."

Twitter has estimated in its last 11 quarterly reports that approximately 5% of users are spam/fake accounts, which Musk has now thrown into question following several recent tweets where Musk has proposed new ways to estimate the number of bot accounts, and asked the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) to get involved. Furthermore, SparkToro found that 70.2% of Musk's 93.3 million Twitter followers are fake accounts.