Free Republic

Don't worry, your Internet isn't running slow. Some of your favorite websites like Craigslist and Wikipedia have gone black for the next 24 hours in protest of anti-piracy legislation. If you have been trying to find the most correct answer on Wikipedia's English site about who won the Oscar for "Best Leading Lady" at the 1980 Academy Award this morning, nine times out of 10 you have realized the site isn't currently working. How about how many Harry S. Truman parks there are in the United States? Looking for an apartment for rent in the City of Hazelwood on Craigslist...

Today, the Wikipedia community announced its decision to black out the English-language Wikipedia for 24 hours, worldwide, beginning at 05:00 UTC on Wednesday, January 18 (you can read the statement from the Wikimedia Foundation here). The blackout is a protest against proposed legislation in the United States—the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the PROTECTIP Act (PIPA) in the U.S. Senate—that, if passed, would seriously damage the free and open Internet, including Wikipedia. This will be the first time the English Wikipedia has ever staged a public protest of this nature, and it’s a...

FCC might end sports blackout ruleBy Brendan Sasso - 01/13/12 03:19 PM ET The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on Thursday issued a formal request for public comment on a proposal to end its sports blackout rule. The rule, first adopted in 1975, prohibits cable and satellite providers from carrying a sports event if the game is blacked out on local broadcast television stations. Dropping the rule would have the most effect on the National Football League, which requires broadcasters to black out games if the local team does not sell out the stadium. The rule is meant to encourage fans...

REDMOND, Wash. - The world's largest email provider, Microsoft, was struggling to restore its services Friday after outages that reportedly affected up to 365 million users worldwide. The service disruptions affected a variety of Microsoft email products including Office 365, MSN.com, Live@edu and Windows Live Hotmail. The extent of the disruption was unclear, but Microsoft confirmed problems in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. "We're rolling out a fix that we believe will resolve issues with Hotmail, SkyDrive, and our other Live properties," the company tweeted around 2:00am ET. Read more: http://www.myfoxny.com/dpp/your_money/crash-affects-millions-of-microsoft-users-20110909-ncx#ixzz1XTx8HlYo

Transmitting lines were severed, causing power outage Officials were unable to say when power would be restored. More than 1.4 million San Diego Gas & Electric customers wre without power, with millions of people affected by the outage. All other service providers around the state have power. The California Independent System Operator is helping to bring power back on, an SDG&E official said. "We expect power to be out well into the night and into tomorrow in some areas," a spokesman for the utility said shortly before 5 p.m. A transmitter line between Arizona and California was severed, causing both...

SAN DIEGO (AP) — A major power outage knocked out electricity to up to 5 million people in California, Arizona and Mexico on Thursday, bringing San Diego and Tijuana to a standstill and leaving people sweltering in the late-summer heat in the surrounding desert. Two nuclear reactors were offline after losing electricity, but officials said there was no danger to the public or workers. San Diego bore the brunt of the blackout that started shortly before 4 p.m. PDT (7 p.m. EDT, 2300 GMT); most of the eighth-largest U.S. city was darkened. All outgoing flights from San Diego's Lindbergh Field...

The meteorologists at WeatherBELL Analytics believe we have an extremely dangerous situation on our hands. It is important that everyone in the potential path of this storm understand the consequences of Hurricane Irene's track. While there is still some variation in the computer models, the possibility of a devastating hurricane on Long Island and New England is very real. The European computer model has Irene north into New Jersey, New York and up the Hudson River and so even NYC is not out of the woods yet. The HWRF model is similar to the GFS model with a track over...

A nuclear power plant located in Louisa County, the epicenter of the earthquake in Virginia, has shut down. The North Anna Power Station, operated by Dominion Power, has two reactors. The plant declared an "unusual event" in the wake of the 5.9 magnitude quake, which is the lowest stage on the plant's emergency scale. As a result, the plant has been shut down. The AP reports the plant is being run off of four emergency diesel generators, which are supplying power for critical safety equipment. Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokesman Roger Hannah says the agency was not immediately aware of any...

The decision by Bay Area Rapid Transit officials to cut off cellphone service Thursday evening – to forestall a planned protest – raises a fundamental question: Do Americans have a basic right to digital free speech or to digitally organized assembly? Because July protests against BART police shootings had turned violent, BART officials took the unusual step to protect public safety, they said. The tactic may have worked: No protests took place Thursday night at BART stations. Temporarily shutting down cell service and beefing up police patrols were "great tool[s] to utilize for this specific purpose," BART police Lt. Andy...

BART officials acknowledged this afternoon that they shut down cell phone and wireless data service in its downtown San Francisco stations to disrupt a planned protest. Their announcement sparked denunciations from civil libertarians and the apparent threat of a cyber-attack on the BART website. A statement posted on the transit agency's website said the communications blackout was ordered in the interest of public safety: "Organizers planning to disrupt BART service on August 11, 2011 stated they would use mobile devices to coordinate their disruptive activities and communicate about the location and number of BART Police," the statement reads. "A civil...

A shocking report prepared by Russia’s Federal Atomic Energy Agency (FAAE) on information provided to them by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) states that the Obama regime has ordered a “total and complete” news blackout relating to any information regarding the near catastrophic meltdown of the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Power Plant located in Nebraska. According to this report, the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Plant suffered a “catastrophic loss of cooling” to one of its idle spent fuel rod pools on 7 June after this plant was deluged with water caused by the historic flooding of the Missouri River which resulted...

When the news was just coming out that Sarah Palin was going to speak before the CLSA. I was asking Will Sarah Palin Punk the Living Borat out of the CLSA?Well a spokesman (Jonathan Slone) has come out and put blame on Palin for the news black-out. There are other sites like Conservatives 4 Palin who are peddling the Breitbart version of Slone's remarks, but the bottom line on the story is the CLSA didn't have to say what Palin said. Period. These sites had better ask, what did Sarah say if there is no press and who will leak...

TEPCO: Rolling power cuts to last at least a year 2011/03/23 Tokyo Electric Power Co. will likely continue its rolling blackouts in the Kanto region for at least a year due to damage at two large thermal power plants, a senior company official said. The prolonged power outages through this summer and winter will deal a blow not only to residents of Tokyo and surrounding prefectures but also add to business woes.

Thursday, March 17, 2011 Govt Warns Of Massive Blackout In Tokyo Area On Bigger Power Demand TOKYO (Kyodo)--The government warned that an unpredictable massive blackout could occur in the Tokyo area from the evening through the night Thursday as power demand in the region has increased overnight due to cold temperatures. To prevent such a situation, the Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism Ministry asked railway operators serving the metropolitan area to reduce the number of trains during the time frame, when the use of electricity is expected to peak for the day amid the commuter rush, as an emergency measure....

WICHITA FALLS — The electric grid operator for Texas is urging consumers and businesses are encouraged to reduce their electricity use during peak demand hours over the next few days from 6 – 9 a.m. and 4 – 8 p.m. to help reduce the risk of electricity emergencies or the need for rotating outages. “The National Weather Service is anticipating severe cold weather statewide this week, as another arctic air mass is expected to reach deep into Texas, dropping temperatures back into the teens and twenties,” said Trip Doggett, CEO of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. "In anticipation of...

Forget all the concern about al Qaeda terrorists using explosions to take out our power grid or foreign hackers disabling it from afar - in Texas a cold front can apparently do the job. As the lights flickered and went dark across Texas on Wednesday in response to a state-mandated rolling blackout plan, Lt. Governor David Dewhurst was clearly irritated. He wasn't the only one. "This should not happen," Dewhurst told reporters on Wednesday. Dewhurst said that cold weather knocked 50 of the 550 power plants in Texas offline. That, coupled with increased demand, turned out the lights. "Lack of...

DALLAS – They are the critical care safety nets for North Texas: Parkland, Baylor, Methodist and Presbyterian Dallas. So, during Wednesday’s rolling outages, why was the power cut to these vital hospitals? Jorie Klein runs disaster management for Parkland Hospital, and is still upset that her hospital was included in the rotating outages. “We were not happy,” she said. “You can’t just go down for 15 minutes and come back up. It really does disrupt hospital care.” “We are sorry this happened. We are in a process of refining our processes, so in the unlikely event of future mandates for...

Gaza residents have been without electricity for most of the day this week due to the Palestinian Authority’s halt in fuel shipments through Israeli crossings. Unlike previous blackouts allegedly caused by limited Israeli shipments of diesel, the international community generally has remained silent. The PA in Ramallah, headed by the Fatah party, is demanding back payment of millions of dollars for electricity. The rival Hamas party, which controls Gaza, claims that most of the money wasn’t paid because it is used for operating costs of the Gaza generator

Twitter is the rage at the White House...Obama hasn't held a wide-ranging press conference since July and rarely talks to the small press pool following him around. Obama aides say it's because they don't want to craft "message events," only to have the press ask about something else that makes news and steps on their spin. Gibbs and other top administration imagemakers argue their direct-marketing strategy is not an anti-First Amendment ploy or an attempt to make the White House press corps obsolete. Instead, they say it's simply about controlling the message.

<p>RIO DE JANEIRO — Brazil's two largest cities have been hit by a massive blackout that has also affected other parts of Latin America's largest nation.</p> <p>Media reports say problems at a huge hydroelectric dam are to blame for the electrial outages affecting large parts of Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and other cities in several states.</p>

In an explosive interview by Dr. Laurie Roth on her syndicated West Coast radio show on August 7th, Douglas Hagmann—a respected journalist, director of the Northeast Intelligence Network and longtime private investigator, and Judi McLeod, a prolific journalist and the managing editor of Canada Free Press—the reason for the media blackout about the birth-certificate issue was nothing less than organized Mafia-like dire threats to members of the media issued not only from the heads of major TV and radio stations but also from Federal Communication Commission officials!

More info: http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local-beat/Cal-ISO-Declares-Power-Emergency-64172852.html

The article at the link cites other publications like Le Monde, L'Union, and La Provence discussing the state induced media blackout - the press has been ordered not to report what appears to be record levels of violence. Police ambushes, burning cars, neighborhood fires etc.

Deployments of smart grids should be slowed until security vulnerabilities are addressed, according to some cybersecurity experts, citing tests showing that a hacker can cause a major blackout after breaking into a smart-grid system. The idea behind smart grids, a burgeoning energy sector in which even Google is playing a role, is that automated meters and two-way power consumption data can be used to improve the efficiency and reliability of an electrical system's power distribution. A washing machine in a household hooked up to a smart meter, for instance, could be set up to run only at lower-cost, off-peak hours,...

February 4, 2009 Dear Mr. Secretary: Since the Committee last convened in early November, the contraction in economic activity has deepened and broadened, while financial markets have remained under duress. The unprecedented volatility present in capital markets when the Committee last met has diminished somewhat but conditions still are exceptionally challenging. Policy efforts have begun to unlock credit for select high-quality borrowers. But the magnitude of wealth destruction, the still heightened cost of economy-wide capital and the impaired system of financial intermediation continue to cast a dark cloud over the economic outlook. Monetary and fiscal policy action now being implemented...

POSTED: 5:29 am HST January 5, 2009 UPDATED: 9:20 am HST January 5, 2009 Gabbard Wants Answers On Cause, Length Of Outage HONOLULU -- Some powerful state senators are seeking an explanation for why the power went out the day after Christmas and why it took so long to restore it. The chairman of the Senate committee on energy and environment announced Sunday he'll hold a hearing later this month to look into the power outage. Parts of Oahu were without electricity all night Dec. 26 and into the next day. On Sunday, Sen. Mike Gabbard called a news conference...

Oahu was without power overnight, possibly from a lightning strike, and Hawaiian Electric Co. officials said to expect it to last until morning. The outages, which began hitting various parts of the island at about 6:30 p.m., also affected the Kailua neighborhood where President-elect Barack Obama is staying. Mayor Mufi Hannemann said at about 10:10 p.m. that Honolulu police had talked to Obama. “He said he is fine and he and his family are going to bed,” the mayor said on KSSK. Gov. Linda Lingle advised all residents to do the same. She said Heco officials advised her that it...

HONOLULU (Reuters) - The resort and much of the island of Oahu where President-elect Barack Obama is vacationing was hit by a major blackout on Friday evening but it was not immediately clear if his compound had a backup source of electricity.

Some stuck without power powerless to fight bank fees Friday, September 19, 2008 By Margaret Harding THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH When his power returned without Internet service Monday, Tom Perry had a bit of a financial freakout. "It was kind of a panic-stricken moment there: 'Oh, no, what am I going to do?' " said Perry, whose credit-card and mortgage payment were both due that day. Perry, like many others, pays his bills online. Online banking and bill payment are pushed as the easiest and most efficient ways to handle such transactions, but a power outage such as the one central...

<p>Five years after the worst blackout in North American history, the country's largest power providers say the problems that turned out the lights on 50 million people have largely been resolved, but they fear that larger, systemic issues could soon lead to even bigger and more damaging outages.</p>

WASHINGTON -- Thousands homes and businesses are without power and Dupont Circle and Metro Center Metrorail stations are closed after a major outage in northwest D.C. on Friday. Officials said the outage was due to a failure at a substation on 10th Street. About 12,000 customers were without power at 10:30 a.m. Pepco said the outages stretches from as far north as U Street N.W. to F Street N.W., the Dupont Circle area to the west and Third Street N.W. to the east. Many downtown workers have been waiting outside on city streets because their offices are dark. Power is...

Bo (woof) In Commentary: I’ve always known that mice can’t read, but this story makes me wonder whether the same is true of cats. (A cat chasing a mouse in Tirana’s main power station caused a 72-hour blackout across parts of the Albanian capital, the electricity company said on Friday (local time). “A cat and a mouse ran into the high-voltage cables,” a company spokeswoman said, showing pictures of the electrocuted animals.) What part of the DANGER - High Voltage sign did Mittens not understand? (con't @ http://boknowsonline.com/2008/05/21/442/#more-442 )

The brand spanking new Airbus 340-600, the largest passenger airplane ever built, sat in its hangar in Toulouse, France without a single hour of airtime. Enter the Arab flight crew of Abu Dhabi Aircraft Technologies (ADAT) to conduct pre-delivery tests on the ground, such as engine runups, prior to delivery to Etihad Airways in Abu Dhabi. The date was November 15, 2007. The ADAT crew taxied the A340-600 to the run-up area. Then they took all four engines to takeoff power with a virtually empty aircraft. Not having read the run-up manuals, they had no clue just how light an...

HOUSTON, Feb 29 (Reuters) - FPL Group's (FPL.N: Quote, Profile, Research) Florida utility Florida Power & Light said preliminary results of the investigation into Tuesday's four-hour blackout indicated that human error was the primary cause. The blackout affected about 584,000 FPL customers in South Florida, the Juno Beach-based company said in a release on Friday. A total of about 1 million customers of four utilities across the state lost power as emergency safety systems were activated to prevent long-term damage to power plants and transmission equipment. FPL said preliminary findings indicated that a field engineer diagnosing a problem switch at...

<p>Widespread power outages were reported Tuesday from Miami to Jacksonville on Florida's east coast and as far north as Tampa on the Gulf Coast, police and utility officials said.</p> <p>As many 800,000 Florida Power & Light Co. customers are without power Tuesday afternoon, the company said.</p>

(IsraelNN.com) Arab journalists quoted in the Jerusalem Post on Thursday said that many pictures showing Gaza reportedly suffering from a massive blackout had been staged. Gaza-based journalists said that on two occasions they were asked to cover Hamas events in which senior officials sat in dark rooms with lit candles. Both events took place during the daytime, journalists said, with curtains drawn to give the impression of a blackout. Hamas claimed earlier in the week that Israel’s refusal to allow fuel shipments through Gaza crossings had led to a widespread blackout that had created a humanitarian crisis. The group held...

Fox is saying on cable TV that Duncan Hunter is having a press conference today at 2:00. They are speculating that he is dropping out. Nothing on the web yet.

LOS ANGELES (AP) - Parts of Southern California sweltered in triple-digit temperatures Monday as a heat wave stretched into the seventh day and contributed to power outages that left thousands without air conditioning. Temperatures soared in the San Fernando Valley with Woodland Hills reporting 102 degrees and Van Nuys at 99, according to the National Weather Service. Downtown Los Angeles also was expected to see temperatures climb above 100. Southern California Edison said 20,000 customers in Los Angeles, Orange, Ventura, Riverside and San Bernardino counties had no electricity, spokesman Steve Conroy said. San Diego Gas and Electric Co., which serves...

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) -- A nationwide blackout hit Colombia on Thursday, with authorities struggling to determine the cause of the electrical grid's collapse. President Alvaro Uribe told journalists in the southern city of Cali that authorities would "know in a few minutes" the cause of the blackout, which took place at about 10:15 a.m. local time. He said the blackout "appears to have affected the entire country." Luis Alarcon, manager of state-controlled electricity distributor ISA, told Caracol Radio that the power outage appears to have begun with an undetermined technical glitch at a substation in Bogota and quickly spread to...

Comet McNaught has just made its appearance in the SOHO (SOlar and Heliospheric Observatory) "LASCO-3" field (at about the 11:00 position) -- and it is very bright!! The real-time image is viewable at http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/LATEST/current_c3small.mpg. In the next couple of days, the 48-hr MPEGs of the SOHO LASCO-3 field at http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/LATEST/current_c3small.mpg should be well worth watching. ~~~~~~ (The above URL is for the small (256 X 256) MPEG. The larger (512 X 512) MPEG at http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/LATEST/current_c3.mpg appears to have a problem at present.)

Phoenix Motorcars has developed what could possibly be the perfect electric car. Classified as a Sport Utility Truck (SUT), this vehicle “can cruise on the freeway at up to 95 m.p.h. while carrying five passengers and a full payload.” The Phoenix Motorcars SUV will be introduced in late 2007, having a range of 130 miles, and can be recharged in less than 10 minutes with an off-board charging unit or trickle-charged overnight when plugged into a 220V power source, similar to the SUT. The estimated cost to recharge the battery pack is a small fraction of equivalent gasoline costs. Phoenix...

All Western Europe touched by the electric breakdown PARIS - All Western Europe was struck Saturday evening by electric breakdowns related to an important failure of the German grid system of electricity, indicated in the night of Saturday to Sunday the Grid system of French electricity RTE. Some five million French, is approximately 10% of the population, were private of electricity on this occasion. "They are approximately 5 million consumers who were private" of current, with AFP a door of RTE declared. They "were gradually réalimentées between 22H30 and 23H00", it added. "Of the similar cuts took place in...

TOKYO - A power outage hit wide swaths of Tokyo and nearby Chiba early Monday, halting train service in some areas, news reports said. DEVELOPING...

News blackout imposed on American arms flights refuelling at British bases By Thomas Harding, Defence Correspondent (Filed: 02/08/2006) The Government refused last night to give details of the flights entering Britain containing American arms destined for Israel. There was also a suggestion that all arms flights via Prestwick airport, near Glasgow, were suspended following pressure from Scottish Labour MPs afraid of the political impact in their constituencies. An Atlas Air Boeing 747 cargo jet at Prestwick Airport Although Government officials have admitted that two flights, carrying GBU28 bunker-busting bombs, arrived at Prestwick the weekend before last and several others came...

Push to declare Queens blackout a disaster Almost a full week of no power (Astoria-WABC, July 23, 2006) - A group of Queens political leaders urged Gov. George Pataki on Sunday to designate a section of the borough suffering from a massive power outage a disaster area, making it eligible for federal aid. "Anywhere else it would be," said Rep. Joe Crowley, D-N.Y., at a news conference in Sunnyside. "If this were an area of 100,000 people in upstate New York, the governor would have declared it a disaster area." A spokeswoman for Pataki, Joanna Rose, said the governor has...

LOS ANGELES -- Flights in and out of three Southland airports have been halted because of a power failure affecting radar and the Southern California air traffic control system.The affected airports are [Los] Angeles International Airport, Bob Hope Airport in Burbank and Ontario International Airport.

Practically all Georgia has remained without an electricity The new misfortune has fallen upon Georgia. As a result of failure on LEP "Imeretia" practically all country has remained without an electricity. Now the power supply system of the country works in an extreme mode. As have informed RBC in the Ministry of fuel and power of Georgia, failure has occured today approximately at 1:00 Moscow time. Under the preliminary information, because of a strong wind the transmission line "Imeretia" connecting power supply systems on which the electric power acts from the Western Georgia in central and east regions of...

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Insurgents sabotaged power lines, knocking out electricity across Baghdad area Friday and plunging the capital into darkness on the eve of a landmark vote on a constitution aimed at defining democracy in a nation once ruled by Saddam Hussein (search). For most of the day, Iraqis were hunkered down in their homes, with the streets of the Iraqi capital almost empty hours before a 10 p.m. curfew and the country sealed off from the outside world as borders and airports were closed for Saturday's referendum. The approximately 140-article charter — hammered out after months of bitter negotiations...

A POWER outage at United Nations headquarters disrupted the General Assembly session today, forcing the evacuation of the main building and foreign ministers of the world's five most powerful countries to change their luncheon venue. The power failure, caused by an electrical malfunction in a switch generating unit in the 39-floor secretariat building, led UN security to order all staff except essential personnel and those supporting operations of the General Assembly to evacuate the main glass tower. UN chief Kofi Annan and the foreign ministers of the UN Security Council's five permanent members - Britain, China, France, Russia and the...

LOS ANGELES -- Los Angeles Department of Water and Power officials said an outage Monday afternoon was linked to human error at a receiving station. Power officials reported outages from the San Fernando Valley to downtown Los Angeles. Workers connected the wrong wires, causing a surge of power that led to shutdowns at three power generating stations, according to officials. Receiving stations take high-voltage power from generating stations and convert it to lower voltage. It can then be used throughout the city. Ron Deaton, general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, said the system is designed...