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DENVER — Comcast’s internet service, Xfinity, is reportedly experiencing outages across the country, according to multiple reports. A look at the map on DownDectector.com shows the outage hitting major cities like San Francisco, Boston, and Seattle.

Facebook estimates 200 million users may be fake: report By Josh Delk - 11/04/17 10:50 AM EDT acebook now estimates that nearly 200 million of its users may be fake accounts. Facebook, Twitter, and Google testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee in a three-day session this week, providing investigators information on the efforts of foreign actors to meddle in U.S. politics. One of the investigators' concerns, according to the New York Times, is the widespread use of "fake" social media accounts. Twitter also reports that nearly 5 percent of its user base, or more than 16 million people, are fake...

U.S. President Donald Trump's @realdonaldtrump Twitter account was deactivated by a Twitter Inc employee who was leaving the company on Thursday and was down for 11 minutes before it was restored, the social media company said. "We have learned that this was done by a Twitter customer-support employee who did this on the employee's last day. We are conducting a full internal review," Twitter said in a tweet. "We are continuing to investigate and are taking steps to prevent this from happening again," the company said in an earlier tweet. A Twitter representative declined to comment further.

Cord-cutting, or at least the speed at which people are ditching pay TV, is on track to be the biggest upset of the year. There’s finally a collection of cheap-ish streaming services widely available, and as you’d imagine, people are jumping ship from cable as fast as humanly possible.

In the absence of rigorous antitrust enforcement, the consumer internet has become too concentrated in a few dominant companies, creating easy targets for bad actors. There is a reason Congress did not have to investigate foreign meddling after the 2008 or 2012 elections. Back then the internet was still a diverse, decentralized network...This older form of online community building has largely been supplanted by tools provided by the dominant players... Google used to be the engine that drove the open web... Over time, Google’s philosophy shifted [to] making the internet less open and pluralistic than even a few years ago...Facebook’s...

Alibaba (BABA - Get Report) co-founder and executive vice chairman Joseph Tsai on Tuesday discussed the future of the Chinese e-commerce giant and how it plans to expand within the U.S. Alibaba intends to create 1 million jobs in the U.S. through "leverage," efficiently providing access to millions of Chinese consumers, Tsai said at the WSJ D.Live Conference 2017 on Tuesday. Tsai also laid out the company's plans for expanding its presence within the artificial intelligence space, via his "Cigar theory." Cigar is the vice chairman's "CUBA" acronym standing for cloud computing, use case, big data, and algorithm. The move...

America’s tech companies have a problem: Their leaders fancy themselves visionary, untouchable geniuses who can remake the world into the stuff of utopian fantasy through the power of algorithms, software, and technology, and are surrounded by sycophants willing to offer them endless theoretical proof of this fatal conceit.In practice, however, this conceit actually can become fatal. The truth is, tech’s robber barons know precious little about the world beyond their lines of code, and rely on the insular priests of political correctness in media and academia to keep them informed. Thus, we bore witness last week to Google actually shutting...

French President Emmanuel Macron and Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar say they are ready to discuss the contentious issue of taxing internet giants after a meeting in Paris. Macron is leading the tax charge in Europe, saying it’s not fair that internet companies don’t pay taxes where they make most of their money. Countries that serve as tax shelters for companies like Apple, including Ireland, have resisted the proposed measure. …

Who knew how brave they could be when not consoling each other in hug groups on campus? It seems that when university campus ‘snowflakes’ terrified of Donald Trump are not taking advantage of grief counsellors, hugging teddybears, taking to crayons or play doh, they’re calling for ‘shooting’ the president. Who knew how brave they could be when not consoling each other in hug groups on campus?

Three senators are putting pressure on internet giants like Facebook and Google to be more transparent about who is buying political ads on their sites in the wake of revelations that Russian-linked operatives placed ads on social media networks to sow division in the runup to the 2016 election. On Thursday, Republican Sen. John McCain announced he is joining Democratic Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Mark Warner to co-sponsor the Honest Ads Act, which would require political ads sold on the internet to follow the same rules as ones sold on television, radio, and satellite networks, all of which have to...

Alibaba executive vice chairman Joseph Tsai said Tuesday he expects to boost US jobs by expanding the Chinese firm's e-commerce platform -- not by hiring American workers. Tsai, speaking at a California tech conference, made the comments to follow up on a headline-grabbing pledge earlier this year by Alibaba founder Jack Ma and US President Donald Trump that the Chinese internet firm would create one million US jobs. The pledge by Ma was seen at the time as more of a public relations move than a promise to hire in the US. When asked what Alibaba was doing to deliver...

Anti-free speech liberals have long sought to regulate and restrict Americans’ freedom of speech on the Internet. Now, their longtime champion, FEC Commissioner Ellen Weintraub, has found her latest excuse to restrict American citizens’ free speech on their own websites, blogs, YouTube, and social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Speaking about Russian meddling in the last election at a recent meeting of the FEC (at minute 10:55), Weintraub stated: If you’re interested I’m happy to talk about it but I’m not here proposing that we reopen the entire Internet rulemaking from 2006. I think that’s something we might want...

After strong stock-market performance in the year to date, several big U.S. tech firms have begun to receive some negative attention from the public, as well as from regulators and politicians. Alphabet (GOOG) and Facebook (FB) have gotten the most scrutiny, with European regulators leveling accusations of unfair search advantages against GOOG, and U.S. lawmakers drawing FB into the controversy surrounding alleged Russian efforts to influence the outcome of last year’s election. Amazon (AMZN) has not been above the fray. The company’s recent acquisition of Whole Foods Market led to a few muted pieces of press coverage that mentioned “antitrust,”...

Benjamin Faulkner, 26, and Patrick Falte, 27. Two men who sexually abused a child and uploaded photographs to their child pornography website were each sentenced Friday to life in prison. Benjamin Faulkner, 26, and Patrick Falte, 27, pleaded guilty in federal court in Richmond earlier this year to the aggravated sexual abuse of a minor. They were taken into custody after Faulkner, of Canada, and Falte, whose address is unavailable but is from out of state, traveled to an undisclosed address in Hanover County — which had no apparent connection to the offenses — and then to Northern Virginia...

Both men stiffen as VG confronts them. – Go ahead and publish what you know about us now, if you think it’s true, but be prepared for the consequences, says Jon. Next to him in a Brisbane hamburger pub sits Paul. VG has just told them what we’ve uncovered: that they run the world’s largest online forum for child sexual exploitation, “Childs Play”. Jon, the Australian, turns pale. Paul, who is British, flushes crimson. It is January 2017. At this point the two have been running the Childs Play website for three months. Under their supervision, thousands of members have...

Facebook insisted it did not allow either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton's campaigns to "hand pick" who would work with them at Facebook, appearing to dispute what Trump campaign digital director Brad Parscale told "60 Minutes." In an extensive interview, Parscale said he insisted only Republicans work with them. "I wanted people who support Donald Trump from their companies," including Google and Twitter, Parscale told Lesley Stahl of "60 Minutes." In a statement Sunday night, Facebook did not directly address Parscale. But, the company said "the campaigns did not get to 'hand pick' the people who worked with them from...

On the same day that Rush Limbaugh read my recent column on air, YouTube — in the dead of night — demonetized a large percentage of videos on my channel. My YouTube channel has been around for years with many recordings of very boring village meetings highlighting local Chicago-area corruption. Recently, I started doing reaction videos and comedy and gained a bunch of new subscribers and it's been fun. I don't swear (certainly no "F" words) and there's nothing really controversial unless you count making fun of gender-confused rabid leftists with blue hair "controversial." Yesterday, October 5, after Rush read...

Liberals are getting crushed by the right’s agitprop, and Verrit will not save them. Democrats, and the center-left more broadly, are obsessed with numbers games. They are animated more than anything by facts, by a consensus reached among themselves that they possess an exclusive monopoly on empirical reason. They blurt out facts and stats among one another, devoid of any context but the conviction that if God is not on their side, then reason is, and so long as that’s the case they’re bound to win. It is no surprise, then, that when the world’s most thankless Clinton hype man,...

No one asks if the ads were fake news or real news. Did they contain news stories or photos of Killary demeaning Bill's rape victims? Nothing irritates a politician more than the truth and not being able to control the message. How are these ads any different than the propaganda pushed by the media or a political campaign? Answer - there is no difference except Russia wasn't paid.

Facebook, Google, and Twitter all directly advised campaigns on how to influence voters — and the help may have been decisive. Facebook’s role during the 2016 presidential election has come under extraordinary scrutiny in recent weeks. Most notably, attention has swirled around a Kremlin-backed troll farm’s purchase of $100,000 worth of ads on the platform during the election cycle. This came on the heels of controversies over the proliferation of "fake news" during the campaign. But our research shows another, less discussed aspect of Facebook’s political influence was far more consequential in terms of the election outcome. The entirely routine...