It's July 4th weekend, so light your fireworks in the comment section below. Everyone here at Broadband Reports wishes you a fantastic holiday.
The
Washington Post reports that the Obama administration is "proceeding with a Bush-era plan" that would use the NSA to more closely inspect the traffic traveling between government networks and the private-sector. According to the report, the aim of the classified "Einstein 3" project is to better protect the government from external cyber-threats, particularly those originating at private-sector contracted firms. AT&T was chosen by the Bush Administration to help participate in the project, and the trial has seen delays as AT&T "is seeking legal assurance that it will not be sued for participating in the pilot program." Meanwhile, the Salt Lake Tribune reports on a
new $2 billion NSA data center in Utah.
Canadian cable operator Cogeco was supposed to start billing customers in June after they implemented a new metered billing model. However, as we
noted last week, many users found Cogeco's meters didn't accurately reflect usage. Customers have complained that Cogeco's daily usage portal seems broken, and that automatic warning e-mail alerts don't match the portal. Cogeco reached out to us to note that they're working on the problems, while at the same time downplaying the breadth of the issues.
"Cogeco is confident that their high speed customers have an accurate means of gauging their on-line consumption and that their invoicing reflects the consumption displayed on the customer usage measurement tool provided by the company," Cogeco's Marie Carrier tells us. Carrier insists regular performance checks indicate that their tracking system is accurate, and "the vast majority of customers are satisfied with their consumption tracking and rates."
"However, anomalies can occur in the best of software applications – and we are addressing those mentioned in Broadband Reports," she says.
Illustrating the continued fragility of the modern Internet, threads in both the
Zen Cart and
Web Hosting Talk forums indicate that one of the country's largest credit card authorization networks has gone completely offline. From what we can gather, a "perfect storm" was created by the combination of a fire in their primary Seattle data center and the July 4 weekend holiday -- resulting the company going completely dark for more than five hours and counting. The company's phone lines and this
Authorize.net website remains offline as of this writing, though they seem to be
using Twitter to confirm the problem. If your weekend beer purchase didn't go through, now you know why....
update: Less noticed perhaps was the fact the same data center outage took Popcap's popular Bejeweled Blitz Facebook application offline. Not as important as a financial transaction of course, but still...
BBR text mode
story continues..