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The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has today issued an "emergency directive" to all federal agencies ordering IT staff to audit DNS records for their respective website domains, or other agency-managed domains, within next 10 business days. The emergency security alert came in the wake of a series of recent incidents involving DNS hijacking, which security researchers with "moderate confidence" believe originated from Iran. Domain Name System (DNS) is a key function of the Internet that works as an Internet's directory where your device looks up for the server IP addresses after you enter a human-readable web address (e.g.,...

ORINDA — Laura Lyons was preparing food in her kitchen Sunday when the lazy afternoon took a turn for the absurd. A loud squawking — similar to the beginning of an emergency broadcast alert — blasted from the living room, the Orinda mother said, followed by a detailed warning of three North Korean intercontinental ballistic missiles headed to Los Angeles, Chicago and Ohio. “It warned that the United States had retaliated against Pyongyang and that people in the affected areas had three hours to evacuate,” Lyons said Monday. “It sounded completely legit, and it was loud and got our attention...

New York (CNN Business)Twitter suspended an account on Monday afternoon that helped spread a controversial encounter between a Native American elder and a group of high school students wearing Make America Great Again hats. The account claimed to belong to a California schoolteacher. Its profile photo was not of a schoolteacher, but of a blogger based in Brazil, CNN Business found. Twitter suspended the account soon after CNN Business asked about it. The account, with the username @2020fight, was set up in December 2016 and appeared to be the tweets of a woman named Talia living in California. "Teacher &...

Twitter has suspended an account that helped a widely publicized encounter between Catholic high school school students and a Native American man go viral. CNN Business reported on Monday that Twitter took the step after receiving questions from the news network about the account. The account, @2020fight, posted a minute-long video of the interaction on Friday night with the caption, "this MAGA loser gleefully bothering a Native American protester at the Indigenous Peoples March." According to a cached version of the video seen by CNN, the post garnered at least 2.5 million views and at least 14,400 retweets. The network...

The European Union's new Copyright Directive stands to dramatically change the way we consume news and other online content. Although originally intended to ensure creators and news organizations are fairly compensated for their work, the directive will more likely make quality news harder to find, throw financial and technical roadblocks in the way of smaller online publishers and creators, stifle free speech and negatively impact internet culture. Article 11 requires online news aggregators like Google, Facebook or Twitter to pay licensing fees to news organizations when showing snippets of their coverage, and forces news organizations to charge these fees. ....

FR Access using Comcast ISP

Facebook employees have been caught leaving glowing reviews on Amazon for Facebook's new video-chat device. Facebook released the Portal, a video-chat and smart-speaker device, in October. It's the first hardware product built and sold under the Facebook brand. The new gadget has already faced some hardship, as Facebook acknowledged that it could collect data about its owners to help the company target ads at people.

Michael Cohen, U.S. President Donald Trump's former personal lawyer, said on Thursday he paid a firm to manipulate online polling data "at the direction of and for the sole benefit of" Trump. The Wall Street Journal reported that Cohen had paid the data firm RedFinch Solutions to manipulate two public opinion polls in favor of Trump before the 2016 presidential campaign. "As for the @WSJ article on poll rigging," Cohen wrote on Twitter on Thursday, "what I did was at the direction of and for the sole benefit of @realDonaldTrump @POTUS. I truly regret my blind loyalty to a man...

The U.S. Justice Department now says that all internet gambling is illegal.A November opinion made public Monday reversed a 2011 opinion on the Wire Act, which established the law as applicable to only sports betting. The DOJ claims that the 2011 opinion misinterpreted the statute and reinterprets the Wire Act to encompass all forms of gambling that crosses state boundaries. The opinion could have wide-reaching effects in states that sell lottery tickets online or where online gambling is legal. This number has increased in recent months following the Supreme Court’s decision to legalize sports betting in the U.S. last year....

Can you imagine how scary it would be to live in a world where your livelihood depended on having the ‘correct’ politics? It’s the sort of thing you might expect of totalitarian regimes – Baathist Iraq under Saddam Hussain; everywhere that has ever tried communism; increasingly, Xi’s panopticon China – but definitely not of any liberal democracy in the 21st century. That dystopian future, though, may be much closer than you think. I only properly appreciated this recently when the podcast I’ve been doing for the last few years was mysteriously dropped by my regular employer, forcing me to seek...

After the shooting Facebook user Dana Marie posted a photo of Cpl. Ronil Singh with this caption: “This is officer Singh. he was killed by an ILLEGAL ALIEN 5 Hours after he took this picture with his beautiful wife, baby and k9! This is precisely why we need to #buildthewall! RIP hero” Via Big League Politics: Officer Singh was a legal immigrant to the United States working a job he loved! The illegal alien who murdered Singh had several prior felonies and should not have been in the US. FACEBOOK censored the post honoring Singh. Facebook does not like the...

Facebook's massive, secret rulebook for policing speech reveals inconsistencies, gaps and biases... A Message from Yahoo Search What is psoriatic arthritis? Look for symptoms, causes & more What is psoriatic arthritis? Look for symptoms, causes & more The rulebook's details were revealed Thursday night thanks to a Facebook employee who leaked over 1,400 pages of the speech policing rulebook to the Times because he "feared that the company was exercising too much power, with too little oversight — and making too many mistakes."

In late November, the Justice Department unsealed indictments against eight people accused of fleecing advertisers of $36 million in two of the largest digital ad-fraud operations ever uncovered. Digital advertisers tend to want two things: people to look at their ads and “premium” websites — i.e., established and legitimate publications — on which to host them.The two schemes at issue in the case, dubbed Methbot and 3ve by the security researchers who found them, faked both. Hucksters infected 1.7 million computers with malware that remotely directed traffic to “spoofed” websites — “empty websites designed for bot traffic” that served up...

A transformer explosion in Queens sent an eerie blue light flooding the nighttime sky over New York City Thursday night, startling residents. Con Edison says a couple of transformers tripped offline at the substation at 20th Avenue and 32nd Street, sparking a fire. The explosion lit the sky so brightly that it briefly appeared to be daytime in neighborhoods like Astoria and Woodside, residents reported. Smoke arose from the source of the blue light, visible from as far as Manhattan.

Are you having trouble accessing your CenturyLink internet or phone service today? Well, you're not alone. CenturyLink customers across the country have been reporting issues with their service Thursday. Downdetector.com indicated issues began being reported a little before 4 a.m. EST. CenturyLink released a statement to Newsweek explaining that it's network "is experiencing a disruption affecting customer services." "We know how important these services are to our customers and we are working to restore services as quickly as possible," CenturyLink's statement continued. While Downdetector.com noted the majority of the reported problems were related to internet service, some were also having...

In September, Eric Schmidt, the former Google chief executive and Alphabet chairman, said that in the next 10 to 15 years, the internet would most likely be split in two — one internet led by China and one internet led by the United States. Mr. Schmidt, speaking at a private event hosted by a venture capital firm, did not seem to seriously entertain the possibility that the internet would remain global. He’s correct to rule out that possibility — if anything, the flaw in Mr. Schmidt’s thinking is that he too quickly dismisses the European internet that is coalescing around...

For those who don’t pay particularly close attention to politics – those on the Left lie. A LOT. They lie about Donald Trump-Russia collusion. They lie about their Russia collusion. They lie about green energy being green and energy – it’s neither. They lie about government-run health insurance. They lie about government-run medicine. They lie about tax cuts. They lie about tax increases. We could cite examples of Leftists lying…until the crack of Doom

"Democratic operatives created thousands of Twitter accounts posing as Russian bots in order to boost Alabama Democratic Sen. Doug Jones in the October 2017 special election by linking his Republican opponent, Roy Moore, to Russian influence campaigns." "The operatives, who were funded by liberal billionaire Reid Hoffman independently of Jones’s campaign, created more than a thousand Russian-language accounts that followed Moore’s Twitter account overnight, The New York Times reported Wednesday evening."Link to Daily Caller article: https://dailycaller.com/2018/12/19/democrats-russian-bots-false-flag/Link to Sara Carter Tweet mentioning this article: https://twitter.com/SaraCarterDC/status/1075754546054512643Is Fake News going to ignore this huge developing story?

Back in the day, I was one of the first people to start using Google as a search engine. I liked it’s clean interface, and simplicity. Of course, over the years, other people also found this to be the preferential search engine. Unfortunately, Google became big, powerful and yes, evil. They siphon up your personal information with zero regard to fourth amendment protections. They sell the information to the highest bidder, and give it away for free if the person is part of a government agency. Unfortunately, people like myself VALUE privacy. And that means that I no longer can...

A wave of bomb threats were reported Thursday against businesses, schools, hospitals and other places across the country — causing panic and evacuations, although all appeared to be hoaxes. Police in cities nationwide reported threats, some emailed, some phoned in. The FBI in a statement said they were "aware of the recent bomb threats made in cities around the country, and we remain in touch with our law enforcement partners to provide assistance. As always, we encourage the public to remain vigilant and to promptly report suspicious activities which could represent a threat to public safety." Authorities in New York...