The chairman never indicated that there would or would not be additional hearings, only indicated that there may be additional hearings. No decision has yet been made.

To all the commenters saying "stfu and stop whining": the thing you're missing is the false advertising on Google's part. Google doesn't tell you when you're going through their intense and selective recruiting process that your job is going to be crap.

Google managers like Paul Carff *specifically* make plans to dress up the job descriptions of what are essentially CSR positions, to lure top talent from top universities. Where they do mention CSR-type work, it's often called a "minor" or "infrequent" part of the job.

And regardless of the position, if you're accepting something on the order of 0.01 percent of applicants like Google is, and you're asking the kinds of quantitative+creative interview questions for which they're known, you are GOING to get a lot of intelligent, highly talented people. Lying to these people and putting them in dead-end positions is a recipe for disaster, which is why Google Support has such incredibly quick turnover.

You have to realize that high-caliber recent college grads are probably friends with lots of other high-caliber recent college grads. This means that, when they get lured across the country to the Bay and end up in a crappy CSR job they didn't sign up for, while their friends get much more appropriate roles in companies like Bain, Salesforce, and McKinsey, they aren't happy about it — and they shouldn't be.

I have an announcement to make: Apple corporate called. Somebody from high up the corporate ladder at Apple Computer in California, out in Cupertino, called the office.

He continues:

When did you get the message? When did they call, late yesterday afternoon? All right, they called at nine o'clock this morning, very, very, very nice guy, put my IT guy in touch with them, working — No, it was not Al Gore. Ha! No, Mr. Snerdley [his producer], it was not Al Gore. I'm not going to mention the gentleman's name because the Mac user community that hates me will start bombarding this guy. He's a West Coast guy. He called about six a.m. out there and said, "I'm here now," so our IT guy is working with him. That's cool. Yes, it's official. It's not a hacker. It was official. Don't start gumming up the works. It was really true.

We're going to have a long, serious talk with our service provider (Rackspace). They're supposed to be the best in the business, but in this instance they failed us, so we in turn failed you. We'll do everything we can to make sure that something as simple as a load balancer (or firewall or switch or any other network equipment) going bad does not cause two hours of downtime.

Unfortunately ValleyWag never contacted us for the real facts.

FWIW, we have one site administrator on duty at any given time. Their main responsibility is to monitor and review stories the digg algo/backend has flagged as pornography or SPAM. With 20M+ monthly unique visitors and tremendous traffic implications, gaming Digg is something that is attempted regularly.

So, as we have since the beginning, we'll continue to build tools and maintain staff that detect and remove spam/spammers - but most importantly, we rely upon you, the Digg community, to Digg your favorite stories and bury the ones you don't like.

Could it be that Rose's reality-distortion field is fading? Digg users normally swarm to defend their hero Rose. But his bloom may have faded. "I think we're the ones getting gamed," writes one user in response to Rose's comment. "Could you tell us anything about what criteria the human editors are using to determine whether something is actually spam or not?" asks another. Rose has not yet answered them.

Valleywag commenters have raised another issue: Digg shows which users have voted a story up, but not those who have voted it down, or "buried" the story, in Digg parlance. Conspiracy theories abound about "bury brigades" — but it's equally plausible that Digg's moderators may be abusing their powers to bury a story. Without information on who's burying what, it's impossible for outsiders to know. No surprise that Digg is not forthcoming on this point: If a Digg staffer's vote carries more weight than any numbers of users, then it's hard for Digg's users to believe their votes matter.

Until Rose actually responds to Valleywag's reporting and explains why he describes the position of moderator one way to his users and another way to people he tries to hire for the job, I propose that Digg's homepage carry this disclaimer:

"Warning: The Content in this Website May be Undemocratic."

I'm not involved with Norbum, I don't know what it is, and I would never make fun of homeless people.

• Perez posts the Liza Minelli video on his normal YouTube account.
• YouTube removes the video after a copyright holder complains. YouTube suspends his account.
• Perez posts a different video under a new account protesting YouTube's deletion of Liza and his account:

  I'm going to try not to get angry, or upset or raise my voice because thankfully I've already done enough of that without the camera rolling. My YouTube account was suspended. I've emailed YouTube, but I've yet to hear from any person there. I've just got an automated email from them.

  Apparently, the Liza Minnelli video that I posted on Monday was in violation of someone's copyright which is really confusing to me because the person who took the Liza Minnelli is a reader of my website gave me permission to use the clip and I still have mutliple emails from that person sending me the video and giving me permission to use it.

  The only thing I can think of is someone at Liza Minnelli's record company was upset that this video showing her being drunk or on drugs allegedly is out there and they wanted to get it removed from YouTube. Well, as a result my account was suspended.

• His protest video gets removed along with his second YouTube account.
• 
  
• Hilton writes bitchy post complaining about YouTube and censorship.

This is not the video that got Perez banned, but it is footage from the same event, found on YouTube.

Rackspace is falling apart again. To my understanding, the whole infrastructure has failed and they now have emergency generators and chillers for the past two or three weeks in the parking lot. This must be vary bad for the remaining customers to go through this again and again, not to mention that Rackspace is not a true redundancy A-B side as they advertise to the public. This company is a bad investment!

(Photo by kylemac)

The most likely explanation: Facebook's $15 billion valuation has sparked a round of fear and greed inside the company. Early employees, themselves large shareholders, are agitating to have Zuckerberg let them take money off the table and sell some of their shares. Exploiting the rumor mill is a way for them to gain leverage with Zuckerberg, whose 27 percent stake in the company is worth $4 billion.

Indeed, one variation of the rumor I'd heard said CTO Adam D'Angelo, cofounder Dustin Moskowitz, and vice president Matt Cohler — Zuckerberg's 20something inner circle — selling shares alongside Zuckerberg, bringing the insider-sale total to $100 million. Also not true. But telling in its detail. If Zuckerberg's braintrust is seen to be selling, then others eager to cash out can argue they should, too.

So it seems I've been played by overeager Facebookers. Patience, young ones. Your turn will come soon enough. Facebook's employee rolls are growing so fast that it will soon cross the 500-employee mark — a milestone that, by next year, should force it to start filing financial reports like a public company. At that point, not going for an IPO would be foolish. At some point, Facebook's investors will demand an IPO. And then everyone will be able to sell.

This isn't the first rumor I got wrong. It won't be the last. All I can promise is that when I hear something, you'll hear about it. Isn't that the point of running a gossip rag?

As the sole reviewer puts it:

This is a rather embarrassing electronic version of Time Magazine. There are NO pictures, no charts, no illustrations. Instead whenever you run into an article that has these in any decent amount, they've inserted an entry telling you to go get a PDF or print version. The salvation here is that their MOBILE web site at least has some images (even if impossibly small) and seems better formatted and organized. It looks and feels like some cheap RSS reader collected this rather than being an electronic version of the magazine. To fix it they should include all major article pictures, along with a full-screen copy of the cover. Time without pictures, is like the Braille-edition of Playboy. No wonder it is just $1.49 a month.

Kindle supporters may be willing to overlook this flaw, but Amazon cannot afford to. Amazon is depending on subscription revenues derived mostly from newspapers, magazines, and blogs to subsidize its free Internet connectivity. If image-rich content, including most magazines, fail to catch on, it could be a serious blow to Amazon's plans to make Kindle profitable.

Of course, all Kindle subscription content comes with a free 14-day trial, so we may soon see the text-heavy Times falling next week as well, since the free Web version is also accessible from the device. (The Journal, whose website still charges for now, may hold out longer.) Can books, a one-time purchase, keep Kindle lit? Jeff Bezos must hope so. The modern day Charles Dickens has yet to make an appearance.

At approximately 12:30 p.m. PT today, local law enforcement authorities here determined that a suspicious package delivered to eBay's mailroom on the Hamilton Avenue campus was determined to be harmless. Beginning at approximately 8:55 a.m. today, more than 200 employees had been evacuated from one of the buildings on the eBay campus. The affected areas of campus have since been reopened. As before, our eBay, PayPal and Skype services remain unaffected.

MVA- a man driving a ford truck ran a stop sign and went into a parking lot hitting a power transformer. Prior to our arrival the Southlake FD was on scene. They had made contact with the PT and found that he had low blood sugar. When we arrived we cleared the seen [sic] of all personell [sic] because of the possibility that the transformers may still have power to them. The PT was still in the truck. He was conscious and talking. Once the power company arrived and informed use [sic] that the power was off. We removed the pt to a back board and then to the cot. he was treated in the Mobile Intensive Care Unit and transported to BRMCG by M561 with consent. Management informed IC that a clean up company was contacted to respond to clean the mineral oil spill from the transformer. The scene was released back to management and electric company on scene.

Dear [redacted],

It has been a long day and hard day here at Rackspace. We know it's been a long day for you. We are deeply sorry for the events that have taken place at our Dallas/Fort Worth data center. Your satisfaction is what every Racker works towards every day, especially today.

To those affected by the outage, I apologize. We all apologize. We understand the frustration and uncertainty you have gone through. We take full responsibility for what happened and we will work with you to reach a remedy that satisfies you.

We have made the latest status update to the myrackspace.com customer portal. Please continue to visit it regularly for our most recent updates.

As always, your Account Manager and Support Team are available to help in any way. Likewise, please feel free to contact me if you have any questions or needs.

Sincerely,

Lanham Napier
CEO
Rackspace

Nov. 12th 11:30PM CST — As of 10:50 p.m. CST, all DFW servers that were proactively powered down earlier this evening, to avoid overheating, have now been powered back up. The Data Center Engineering team has been working to resolve the power issues caused by tonight's traffic incident. The team is preparing to transfer machines affected by tonight's power outage from generator power back to utility power. The servers and devices that were affected by the unrelated event over this past weekend will remain on generator power. We anticipate transferring the machines affected this evening back to utility power within the hour and expect the transfer to be non-disruptive to customer environments. We apologize again for the inconvenience these events have caused and have all hands on deck working fanatically to minimize the impact on your business.

Will be using this situation as both a wake-up call and a learning experience. While our systems are engineered to chug through major failure, this "perfect storm" chain of events beat both our set-up and our data center's sophisticated back-up systems. We will work hard to further diversify our systems in order to make an future downtime event like this even more rare.

Threadless

As you noticed Threadless took a little nap this evening. Apparently a truck jumped a railing and attacked our data center. I think their may have even been an explosion. I hope so.

This is the first time we have had power outage like this in the 9 years that we have been in hosting (8 of which at Rackspace).

*crickets*

Monday Nov. 12th 8:00PM CST — Thank you for your patience today as we work through a root cause analysis of the power issues in the DFW data center. The Data Center Engineering team is continuing to work on the plan to move back to utility power without any further interruption in service. Rackspace will notify you in advance before we move to switch back to utility power.
In the meantime, here is a brief timeline of events:

Sunday, Nov. 11, 2007 4:19 a.m. CST — A problem in the internal utility power distribution grid caused an outage to cabinets in one section of the DFW data center. 6:49 a.m. CST — Power was fully transferred to generator power. Based on building monitoring systems, outage times varied for every customer. DC engineering worked to isolate the internal utility problem and restore the integrity of the internal distribution system. 6:32 p.m. CST — A separate incident occurred when a breaker in the generator power grid tripped, causing one of the Power Distribution Units (PDUs) in the same section of the DFW Datacenter to fail, affecting a much smaller group of the customers in this section. All customer devices with dual power supplies in this section of the datacenter remained online and were not affected. Customer devices with single power supplies in this area were affected. Data Center technicians immediately acted to minimize the impact on these customers by moving these devices manually to alternate power supplies - resulting in just a few minutes of downtime. 7:40 p.m. CST — The breaker problem was diagnosed and resolved, bringing the down PDU back online.

Monday, Nov. 12, 2007
4:00 a.m. CST — The Data Center engineering team had the initial utility distribution grid realigned and resynchronized. All systems reported ready for operation.
4:30 a.m. CST — Transfer of power was initiated and affected devices were slowly moved off of generator power and back to internal utility distribution power.
5:10 a.m. CST — Transfer of power was completed.
5:25 a.m. CST — Unfortunately, the internal distribution grid failed again. Data Center engineering was able to transfer all affected devices back to generator power in under 15 minutes.
5:40 a.m. CST — All affected devices were back on generator power. The Data Center environment is stable and is designed to be able to run indefinitely on generator power. Data Center engineering is continuing to diagnose the problem and engaging all vendors onsite.

We will continue to provide updates via the MyRackspace portal. In addition, you will receive notification of any maintenance windows. We are committed to supporting your business and minimizing any impact on your hosted environment.

DFW Datacenter Power Update

Nov. 12th 8:30PM CST

In a completely unrelated incident to this weekend's power problems in DFW, a traffic accident caused damage to a power transformer which provides utility power to our DFW data center. Here is the current sequence of events:

* At approximately 6:00 p.m. CST utility power was lost to the DFW data center
* Power automatically switched over to backup generators without disrupting service for any customers
* When generator power was established two chillers within the data center failed to start back up
* Utility power was re-established through a secondary utility source
* As a result of temporary data center temperature increases, we proactively shutdown a number of customer servers to protect them from overheating

At this point, the chillers are back up and running and we are operating on generator power throughout the data center. We have contractors on site to repair the damage and will be in contact with all customers who have been affected by this outage. We apologize for any disruption to your business operations and will work diligently to restore your service.

Hey, that Rackspace outage? It also caused Internet service disruptions as far away as College Station, Texas... where I am ... my intertubes went down last night for a while, and then tonight they went out again. I just thought my ISP sucked, but when I finally got through to them they blamed Rackspace for the outages ... Apparently a bunch of services (DNS, RADIUS, etc) for SuddenLink are hosted out of there.

MerchantCircle is continuing to spam local businesses, despite promised by CEO Ben Smith that it would stop. Smith still hasn't addressed complaints that his company autodials merchants with false claims, a full year after he told John Battelle that "he's on it." Even to this day, MerchantCircle's targets complain in the comments on Battelle's Searchblog. MerchantCircle says it plans to reach an additional 750,000 businesses over the next year. Local businesses make money through their phone lines. Telemarketers, they'll gladly tell you, take bread from their tables. Is this a merchant-first business model? Or MerchantCircle-first?

We've learned that Hinnefeld, referred to as the "IU watchdog" for the Herald-Times, left the newspaper for a media relations position at ... Indiana University. Surprise, surprise. It's reassuring to know that Nick Denton isn't alone in hiring his critics. When Owen Thomas tires of me writing about ChaCha, I look forward to a comfy desk job in lovely Bloomington, Indiana.

"Facebook Music" will be the next salvo fired at MySpace. The platform will give musicians, as we suspected, their own miniature network where users can become "fans," watch videos, listen to music, interact with the band and other users and get tour information.

We still think a partnership with iTunes makes the most sense for Facebook, as iTunes is by far the largest digital music distributor. But, a standalone Facebook music store wouldn't be out of the question. Look for some fancy in-house applications as well, possibly competing with music-focused iLike, one of the most popular apps on Facebook.

Advertising and promotion of new artists and albums could tie in to SocialAds or the enhanced Facebook Flyer system. If a band shares fans with Green Day, for example, they could focus their ads and attention on Facebook users who list Green Day as their favorite bands. (And we, meanwhile, could make sure to unfriend those people.)

Thank you for your message. My name is Lindsay, and I appreciate you taking the time to contact Comcast.

I understand you have some concerns over recent web gossip that has suggested Comcast is blocking or hindering customer access to BitTorrent. I will be happy to assist you. We do not block access to any P2P (Peer To Peer) applications, including BitTorrent. We respect our customers' privacy and don't monitor specific customer activities on the Internet, or track individual online behavior, such as which websites are visited. Therefore, we do not know whether any individual user is visiting BitTorrent or any other site.

Additionally, Comcast does not "throttle" bandwidth (limit throughput on the network). Comcast also is not traffic shaping or packet shaping. We have a responsibility to manage our network to ensure that our
customers have the best broadband experience possible. That means we use the latest technologies to manage our network to provide a quality experience for all Comcast subscribers. This is standard practice for network operators around the world. I do not have specific information to provide to you regarding the details of how we manage our network, or vendors that may be used.

If you have any more questions feel free to reply to this e-mail, or you can chat with one of our Online Customer Support Specialists who are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week at

http://www.comcastsupport.com/chat

To assure the proper tracking of this issue, we have created the following customer service ticket: ####.

Please refer to this number should you contact us regarding this same issue.

Thank you for choosing Comcast.

Sincerely,

Lindsay
Comcast Online Customer Support

The Fortune piece includes the tale of how ChaCha came to be:

The trigger to launch ChaCha came when Jones was preparing a speech for the National Academy of Sciences at Stanford in 2005. To fill in some technical gaps in his talk, he phoned several venture capitalists and technology experts for help in tracking down information. Each pointed him to a specific website. "I thought, 'Holy s—-! I can actually do it now! If I recruit an army of experts, I could actually do what I was considering doing 20 years ago.'"

Wheeler said the potential for the partnership struck him when, writing a speech, he struggled to track down a vaguely remembered quote. He was impressed when IU's Ask a Librarian service found the quote, from former Harvard President James Bryant Conant, within hours. But a ChaCha guide got it in two minutes.

"That's where my head about exploded," he said. "I realized this is our core problem for the 21st century."

Jones is a millionaire inventor. And I suspect he's equally good at inventing the story behind his company. He almost has me believing that if there were more public speakers in the world, maybe ChaCha would actually have some users. That is, besides those students forced to use ChaCha because their university's president is buddies with Jones.

Word is that the CEO Rusty Rueff is responsible for getting snocap into this ****ed up situation. It didn't help that the former CTO Dave Rowley made a mess of engineering before he was fired a few months ago (and given time to find a new position so that he could make it look like he "left for better opportunities" but he was fired).

When the relationship broke down, Snocap began sending emails to CD Baby customers, trying to sign them up directly and cut CD Baby out. Other musicians began reporting Snocap stores appearing in their MySpace profiles without approval. Others yet were complaining that Snocap wasn't providing its artists with any payout after five months. Things only got stranger with official statements from the companies.

When the deal fell apart, Snocap acted as if it was at its behest. Said Snocap CEO Rusty Rueff:

These experiences have shown us that Snocap works best when used directly by artists without the extra support of CD Baby. To use or continue using the Snocap MyStore to sell your music on MySpace, you must create a direct account with Snocap.

I'll give a public and detailed account soon. For now, just know that the ending of the relationship between CD Baby and Snocap was our idea, and done for your benefit (as well as our sanity).

5.1 Suspension/Termination. AT&T respects freedom of expression and believes it is a foundation of our free society to express differing points of view. AT&T will not terminate, disconnect or suspend service because of the views you or we express on public policy matters, political issues or political campaigns. However, AT&T may immediately terminate or suspend all or a portion of your Service, any Member ID, electronic mail address, IP address, Universal Resource Locator or domain name used by you, without notice, for conduct that AT&T believes (a) violates the Acceptable Use Policy; or (b) constitutes a violation of any law, regulation or tariff (including, without limitation, copyright and intellectual property laws) or a violation of these TOS, or any applicable policies or guidelines. Your Service may be suspended or terminated if your payment is past due and such condition continues un-remedied for thirty (30) days. Termination or suspension by AT&T of Service also constitutes termination or suspension (as applicable) of your license to use any Software. AT&T may also terminate or suspend your Service if you provide false or inaccurate information that is required for the provision of Service or is necessary to allow AT&T to bill you for Service. [emphasis mine]

The entire mismanaged process can be viewed in Pay Per Post's discussion boards. Pay Per Post failed to include the bumper in the original call for posts. When the company realized its error, Pay Per Post continued to allow posts to be created without it, hoping to email the bumper after the fact.

At TiVo's request, Pay Per Post's "Director of Customer Love" Karen Allen sent emails asking posters to remove all videos, but the email didn't explain why, how , or when. Despite the takedown requests, Pay Per Post continued to list the "opportunity" in its directory of advertisements. Said one user:

Why is that post STILL available then? It's looking at me and WINKING! Saying ... take me! Feign ignorance! Get the money!

There was another opp that was supposed to be removed and I had taken it, but didn't realize that until I got the payout with an apology weeks later. Weird.

But really, the mismanagement of the TiVo campaign is beside the point. Certainly, Pay Per Post's antics didn't help matters. But more to the point, why would TiVo even have to pay bloggers to express faux affection for its video-recording devices? While TiVo's gadgets remain superior in their user interface, cable and satellite-TV providers are renting similar devices for much less. Having gone from life-changing to run-of-the-mill, TiVo no longer evokes genuine passion. The fact that it's now paying for fake testimonials from bloggers merely reinforces that it's getting no real love.