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Facebook, Google, and Twitter Are Tracking You

26Jan

By Bob BarcusNo Comments

Internet, Tech Talk

Facebook, Google, and Twitter Are Tracking You

If you're online, you're being tracked. Simple as that. I think a lot of people are experiencing the illusion of anonymity. You may think that everything is private, but it's not. But it's not the government that may be tracking you. The vast majority of that tracking is actually being done by corporations seeking valuable data on what you're searching for and how you move across the world wide web. Online tracking is primarily used for marketing purposes and to make your online experience a more valuable one. Online tracking really doesn't bother me, but I can understand why some people would feel a little uneasy online. Everything you do is being tracked. The stuff you search for, the videos you watch, the posts you make on social media. This is, by all means, not meant to ...

You Weren’t Alone – Google Was Down Yesterday

If you were having trouble accessing Google services yesterday (Gmail, YouTube, Google Docs, etc.) you weren't alone. Google experienced a widespread outage on December 14, 2020. It has since been reported that the issue was related to an authentication problem. According to Google's Cloud Status page: Google Cloud Platform and Google Workspace experienced a global outage affecting all services which require Google account authentication for a duration of 50 minutes. The root cause was an issue in our automated quota management system which reduced capacity for Google's central identity management system, causing it to return errors globally. As a result, we couldn’t verify that user requests were authenticated and served errors to our users.https://status.cloud.google.com/incid...

Outages Caused Problems in 2020

The internet is a magical place. In fact, it's so magical that I don't think that any of us really understand how it works. Apparently, I'm not alone. Even the big guys have experienced outages throughout the year. Let's look back at some of the biggest outages of 2020. Microsoft Microsoft Azure had a failure on March 3, 2020, that lasted more than six hours. It impacted Microsoft's East US region and was caused by a "malfunction in building automation control caused temperatures in multiple rooms of a data center in the East US region to spike impacting Storage, Compute, Networking and other dependent services." This was followed up by another outage impacting European customers between March 24th and 26th. This "outage" was caused when Microsoft's system were overwhelmed by...