The Award Winning Place for Plain English Explanations of Internet Stuff
Yesterday we reported on the nationwide CenturyLink outage – an outage which is still going on in many parts of the country, more than 24 hours later. We also reported that as a result of this outage, many 911 emergency services were and are unreachable. Now the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is investigating the CenturyLink outage, calling the breadth and duration of it “unacceptable”.
Millions of people across the U.S. woke up to a nationwide, coast-to-coast CenturyLink outage. Hardest hit are New Mexico, Colorado, Idaho, Wyoming, and Washington state, however Centurylink is down in other states including California, Oregon, and the Northeast.
Computer scientists at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Oregon have determined that the United States’ Internet infrastructure is at serious risk of being flooded owing to the rising sea levels. According to Paul Barford (UW) and Ramakrishnan Durairajan (UO), this is because much of the land-based underground fiber optic cabling through which the Internet is carried is in shallow underground trenches along the coasts.
As the frenzy over the FCC’s December 14, 2017 vote on whether to repeal the Open Internet Order (OIO), which is being equated to the end of Net Neutrality, reaches a fevered pitch, here’s what the average Internet user needs to know. In our view, the furor over the possible (some say inevitable) repeal is akin to the Y2K hysteria, and the actual outcome probably just as anticlimactic. The sky is not going to fall.
If you have domains registered with GoDaddy, you may find that somehow ‘auto renewal’ of your domains has been magically turned on, and you may want to turn off autorenew for your domains. Figuring out how to cancel autorenewal of your GoDaddy domains is not straight-forward, even though it’s not difficult once you know how, so here is how to turn off auto-renewal of domains at GoDaddy
Verizon and Yahoo have been sleeping with each other in one way or another since at least 2005 (when the domain verizon.yahoo.com was launched), but now Verizon is finally going to make an honest woman of Yahoo. Yesterday it was announced that Verizon has acquired Yahoo for $4.83 billion. Now we just need to agree on what the Hollywood-style name for the new couple should be – should it be Veriz-hoo or Yahoozon?
If you run in certain circles, you may be hearing people swooning over the Starry Wireless Internet appliance and service. “Starry is a radical new Internet service!” “The Starry router requires no cable, no contract, no technician.” Starry “will revolutionize how we connect to the internet.” “When you move, you just take it with you!” Not so much, at least not yet.
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The United States is worrying about something that they consider a new Russian threat: increased Russan submarine activity around the undersea fiber optic cables that carry Internet communications, and the potential that those submarine cables could be severed, crippling U.S. Internet operations. Whether you see this as promoting Russia as a bogeyman, or a real possibility, the reality is that history has demonstrated that undersea Internet cables can be cut, and that it wreaks havoc.
Just when you thought it was safe to go into the interwebs, along comes the newest ridiculous top level domain (TLD): .sucks
GoDaddy’s 2015 Superbowl commercial featuring a lost puppy has been pulled from the Superbowl XLIX lineup over controversy and howls of outrage from animal lovers and animal rights activists. Here’s why.
If you go just about anywhere online today, September 10th, 2014, you will find yourself encountering all sorts of banners and graphics of spinning disks (or spinning discs, take your pick), that exhort you to affix your name to a petition to support net neutrality.
The Borg are the dreaded, unstoppable enemy that was introduced to us first in Star Trek: The Next Generation. And of course many are familiar with Jeri Ryan’s Borg character, Seven of Nine as she appeared in Star Trek Voyager. The concept of the Borg, what made them so scary, was that they were basically all consuming and couldn’t be stopped. They took new technology and assimilated it into their “collective.” And what was considered inferior was discarded or otherwise ignored.