Internet & Websites - Page 7

Japan has just set a new world record for the fastest internet speed, absolutely obliterating the previous record by nearly double.

According to a paper presented at the International Conference on Optical Fiber Communications in June 2021, Japan has successfully managed to hit a data transmission rate of 319 Terabits per second (Tb/s) on a line of fiber optic cables that are more than 1,864 miles in length.

It is no understatement to say that data transfer speed is absolutely insane when you consider that the previous record set in 2020 was 178 Tb/s, and the previous record before that was 44.2 Tb/s. For reference, NASA uses a speed of 400 Gb/s, which is tiny compared to what engineers are pushing in Japan.

An individual has filmed a woman duct-taped to a an American Airlines plane seat after reportedly having a mental breakdown mid-flight.

TikTok user @lol.ariee was aboard American Airlines Flight 1774 that was heading to Charlotte, North Carolina, from Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas, when a woman on-board flight began to cause a commotion. @lol.ariee explained in a follow-up video that all flight attendants were running up and down the aisles but weren't telling anyone what the problem was. The pilot of the plane then informed everyone that there was "a bad situation on the plane".

@lol.ariee continued and said that a flight attendant eventually told passengers that a woman was experiencing a mental breakdown and "had an outburst". This "outburst" was an attempt to get off the plane as she was saying, "She was saying, 'I need to get off this plane,' and she went up to the exits and started banging on the doors, saying, 'You need to let me off this plane!'" @lol.ariee said.

Sometimes when you pull out your camera to record a friend, you end up recording something that you never intended or weren't expecting to happen. This is one of those moments.

Tomas Gomez, an employee at the TopGolf driving range located in Texas, was smashing some balls with his friends before the bad weather became too much. Gomez struck his last ball out into the rain while one of his friends recorded the shot. The footage shows the ball being hit out into the driving range and then being struck by a bolt of lighting, presumably completely destroyed.

The video has since gone viral on TikTok and has been featured on the TopGolf Instagram page. Gomez said to KSAT-TV, "It could have hit me...It could have hit any of us, Gomes told the news outlet. I heard the thunder and my instinct was to run... It was all a blur. It was actually pretty scary after I was thinking about it for a while." For more information on this story, check out this link here.

I was just uploading some photos from an article I just finished writing: using 4 x 4TB Sabrent Rocket NVMe PCIe M.2 2280 SSDs in an ASUS Hyper M.2 X16 Card V2 for some Chia crypto coin mining... when I posted the photos to Twitter, came back 1-2 minutes later and my feed was dead.

Twitter itself was fine, but checking profiles of my friends, companies, and everything in between turns up with "Something went wrong. Try reloading". I tried refreshing the page multiple times, not just the official TweakTown Twitter, but as I said multiple friends, companies, and other Twitter pages are all showing the same issue.

Down Detector reports that there was a huge uptick in people having issues loading Twitter in the last 15 minutes or so, and even when I Google searched "Twitter down" for this article, there was no news on it at the time of writing.

SpaceX is moving forward with rolling out its Starlink satellites that are poised to bring internet access to rural areas around the world.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has taken to his Twitter account to announce that Starlink has passed a strategically "important threshold of 69,420", making a clear reference to the internet humor surrounding the numbers "69" and "420". Musk goes on to say in a follow-up tweet that "All 72 orbital planes activate in August, plus many other improvements, enabling global coverage, except for polar regions, which will take another 6 months."

On top of that great information, a Twitter user named Viv asked Musk when airline Wi-Fi would be available with Starlink, Musk replied to the question by saying that there is regulatory approval that needs to be dealt with and that it needs to be "certified for each aircraft type". Musk says that efforts are currently being focused on the "737 & A320, as those serve most number of people, with development testing on Gulfstream."

I was sitting with my daughters and trying to put on some music to help them sleep right now on Spotify, and couldn't access it -- further checking, a ton of internet services, sites, and everything in between are down right now.

Reddit, Twitch, Amazon, PayPal, The Guardian, The New York Times, BBC, and many others are impossible to visit right now -- if you can visit them at all. No one knows why they're all down, but Anonymous did threaten SpaceX and Tesla boss Elon Musk... China is pissed about cryptocurrencies, the US is worried about a cyberattack on the US electric grid... I mean, pick a reason out of a hat.

I don't think it's a coincidence, but this is breaking -- as more happens, I'll update this post. For now, it appears to be slamming everything right now -- I can't connect to Blizzard.net and play Call of Duty: Warzone right now... sigh.

A new subscription service is coming to Twitter, and reports are indicating that Australia and Canada will be the first countries to get it.

Twitter is releasing a new optional subscription service called "Twitter Blue", which gives users some extra features. Users that choose to enroll in the subscription service will receive "exclusive" features such as folders to organize bookmarks, the option to "undo tweet", customization options for color/themes, and a "reader mode".

At the moment, Twitter Blue features aren't available on desktop and are currently locked to mobile, but I believe Twitter will change this in the future to accommodate Twitter desktop users. Twitter Blue will first roll out to Australia for $4.49/month and Canada and for $3.49/month. Twitter hasn't said when the new service would be rolling out in the US and other countries. But, Twitter has said that this is just the "first iteration" of Twitter Blue, suggesting that there is much more to come with the service, which no doubt includes expanding it to more regions.

Facebook has rolled back some of its restrictions around posting misinformation about COVID-19 on its platform.

Back in February, Facebook cracked down on any misinformation regarding the origins of COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccines. The social platform announced that any posts claiming that COVID-19 was "man-made or manufactured" could be removed or restricted, and if a person repeatedly shared content that violated the new policy, they could be banned from the site entirely. Now, Facebook has rolled back those restrictions "in light of ongoing investigations into the origin".

An announcement on Wednesday revealed, "In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of Covid-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that Covid-19 is man-made from our apps. We're continuing to work with health experts to keep pace with the evolving nature of the pandemic and regularly update our policies as new facts and trends emerge."

The first four days of the new category hitting Twitch it has garnered more than 1.4 million hours of watch-time.

Twitch decided it was launching a new category on Friday, May 21. That new category is called "Pools, Hot Tubs, and Beaches", and as you may have already guessed, the category if filled with predominately female streamers sitting in a pool or a hot tub interacting with their audiences. As for the "beaches", funnily enough the sixth most-watched channel in the new category was actually MarineMammalRescue.

The new category's viewership managed to placed it in the same league as games such as Teamfight Tactics, Genshin Impact, PUBG, and Overwatch. As for it's overall popularity, according to data by research firm Rainmaker and StreamElements, Pools, Hot Tubs, and Beaches is currently ranked at 26th out of all content on Twitch. Hot Tub streamer Amouranth, seen in above image, had nearly 500,000 hours watched out of overall total.

Twitter could be about to change things up massively with the rumored introduction of a subscription service, with new rumors suggesting it will be called Twitter Blue and it will cost $2.99 per month (for now).

The new Twitter Blue subscription service would offer things that you don't get in Twitter normally because you know... you'd be a premium user now. So you would get a cool new "undo tweet" feature, a new bookmarks collection for premium Twitter Blue users.

This means you can go all OCD and bookmark everything you want to read later and use Twitter more similarly to a scrapbook. I'm a Google Keep guy myself, but potato potahto. We're told to expect more features that will also be coming from recent Twitter acquisitions, including Scroll and Revue.

YouTube is planning on paying YouTube Short creators out of its soon-to-be-released $100 million creators fund.

YouTube Shorts will be what YouTube will be using to combat the extremely popular app TikTok. According to Amy Singer, the director of global partnership enablement for YouTube Shorts, the fund's announcement is the "first step in our journey to build a long-term monetization model for Shorts on YouTube". Additionally, Singer says that the creator's fund is a "top priority for us", but it will "take us some time to get it right."

It should be noted that anyone who creates YouTube Shorts can be a part of the fund, and not just creators who are enrolled in the YouTube Partner Program. The only requirement to be a part of the creator's fund is that the creator must create original content and follow the community guidelines outlined by YouTube. YouTube is going to be reaching out "to thousands of creators whose Shorts received the most engagement and views to reward them for their contributions."

I can still remember visiting LiveLeak all the way back when it first popped onto the much freer internet at the time 15 years ago, but now LiveLeak has been shut down.

The news that video-sharing site LiveLeak was being shut down was shared on Twitter by LiveLeak founder Hayden Hewit, who said that the "very pressures of doing what were a large part of the reason for moving on. It wasn't exactly a Wordpress blog on $2.99 hosting". The cost of hosting LiveLeak seems to have been too much in the end.

LiveLeak was shut down on May 5 and has been replaced with a new project from Hayden and his team called ItemFix, which is similar to other platforms where it allows people to post and edit videos, images, and audio. LiveLeak was much more liberal in what people could upload, whereas ItemFix will be clamping down on all of those things that made LiveLeak a destination for millions of people.

In an exclusive report from Fox News, former President Trump has officially launched a brand new communications platform that will eventually allow him to communicate directly to his follower-base.

The new communication tool is on the www.donaldjtrump.com/desk website and is touted as a place that as a "place to speak freely and safely". The tool has been named From the Desk of Donald J. Trump, and what we can see on there are many different posts from Trump that go back as far as March 24, 2021. As you probably gathered from the name, this space will be for Trump to directly communicate with his followers via images, text, and video.

The website has been created by Campaign Nucleus, a "digital ecosystem made for efficiently managing political campaigns and organizations". The site also has a sign-up feature that allows users who have signed up to receive notifications whenever Trump posts a new message to the board. Senior advisor Jason Miller told Fox News, "President Trump's website is a great resource to find his latest statements and highlights from his first term in office, but this is not a new social media platform. We'll have additional information coming on that front in the very near future."

A new report from the Washington Post and Kentik reveals that the Defense Department has given a company 175 million IP addresses.

The director for the Pentagon's Defense Digital Service, Brett Goldstein, said that the IPv4 addresses were given to the Florida startup Global Resource Systems (GRS) for a "pilot effort" that will be a study on preventing unauthorized use of the military's IP addresses. Brett Goldstein also said that the study will spot "potential vulnerabilities".

The Department of Defense has said that Global Resource Systems began managing the addresses on January 20th, and despite it giving the addresses to GRS, the Department of Defense says it still owns them. What is peculiar about this whole situation is that GRS was only established in 2020 and doesn't even have a public website available. For more information on this story, check out this link here.

It's not often that you see an official U.S. government Twitter page seemingly type out a tweet with their elbows.

The strange tweet comes from the U.S. Strategic Command Twitter account. It was posted on 7:48 pm, March 28th, and read as follows; ;l;;gmlxzssaw. Confusing right? The tweet was retweeted more than 11,000 times before a follow-up tweet was issued, stating, "Apologies for any confusion. Please disregard this post." Then, the U.S. Strategic Command Twitter account removed the entire tweet.

The tweet was only live for around half an hour, but that was plenty of time for people to screenshot the tweet and provide their own theories to what the U.S. Strategic Command was talking about. People humorously theorized that the U.S. Strategic Command was attempting to communicate with aliens or was revealing a "nuclear launch code", both of which are very unlikely. For more information on this story, check out this link here.

Former President Donald Trump has been somewhat silent on his plans about potentially running for office again in 2024, but now a new clue has surfaced that indicates that Trump may be running.

On Monday, a brief statement came out of the former president's office, and it was an announcement for the launch of "the official website of the 45th President of the United States". The website URL is 45office.com, and at the moment, it appears to be relatively small in size as there are only a few pages to explore.

So far, individuals can submit comments to the former president, request a personalized greeting, or even book the pair for private events. The website homepage states the following, "Through this office, President Trump will remain a tireless champion for the hardworking men and women of our great country - and for their right to live in safety, dignity, prosperity, and peace." If you want to check out the website for yourself to contact the former president, a link can be found here.

Facebook has said that it's removed 1.3 billion "fake accounts" between just October and December of 2020, with over 35,000 people working on sorting through misinformation on the largest social network in the world.

But it's not just the 1,300,000,000 fake Facebook accounts that were deleted, but over 12 million pieces of content regarding COVID-19 and vaccines that were flagged by global health experts as misinformation have also been removed. Guy Rosen explained on an official FB blog post: "Let's start with fake accounts. We take a hard line against this activity and block millions of fake accounts each day, most of them at the time of creation".

He continued: "Between October and December of 2020, we disabled more than 1.3 billion of them. We also investigate and take down covert foreign and domestic influence operations that rely on fake accounts. Over the past three years, we've removed more than 100 networks of coordinated inauthentic behavior from our platform and keep the public informed about our efforts through our monthly CIB reports".

Pornhub has just removed millions of videos from its website, with a new blog post detailing the entire deal detailing why the website "enacted the most comprehensive safeguards in user-generated platform history".

The website has announced it has banned unverified uploaders from posting new content, Pornhub has "eliminated downloads" and have partnered with "dozens of non-profit organizations, among other major policy changes". There's more to read about on that particular subject, here.

But it goes beyond that: Pornhub announces that part of their new policy to ban new uploads means that they have now "suspended all previously uploaded content that was not created by content partners or members of the Model Program. This means every piece of Pornhub content is from verified uploaders, a requirement that platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat and Twitter have yet to institute".

I'm working late tonight here in Australia and went to visit YouTube to look at something and realized it was down, I posted on my social media and a few friends from around the world quickly replied and confirmed the news.

YouTube is down right now and after some very quick digging while I was getting this article ready that Gmail, Google Drive, and other Google services are all down right now. Google hasn't explained what is going on, but I hope they're getting right onto it -- millions of people are going to be waking to this in the US right now.

I'll update the article once we have more news.

It seems we're a few steps away from full disclosure at this point, between The New York Times and its report from The Pentagon on UFOs being 'off-world vehicles not made on this Earth' -- blowing up because Joe Rogan shared it on social media.

And now? President Trump has said that we should have "full transparency" on UFOs in a recent chat with Lou Dobbs on Fox Business.

Dobbs questioned President Trump, asking: "Your administration, you promised would be transparent and you have done your level best to do that despite the Deep State's efforts to bury everything about as deeply as they could. But I have one question as we conclude here".