Blizzard Entertainment has finally announced the upcoming release of Diablo III which will the latest release in the Diablo product line after fans have waited eight long years.

Diablo III is said to be released by this coming Christmas however no official release date is yet available.

Blizzard Entertainment anticipates record sales on Diablo III, thanks to the large amount of fans the Diablo product line has attracted over the years.

The National Rifle Association has filed a lawsuit against the City of San Francisco as a challenge of it's ban against handguns in public housing.

The City of San Francisco currently prohibits citizens from possessing or maintaining a firearm in their residence if they happen to live in public housing.

The U.S. Supreme Court recently struck down a handgun ban in the Nation's Capitol and defined the right to bear arms as constitutional and one that the government cannot infringe upon.


Law professors are already predicting a win for the National Rifle Association since the Supreme Court recently ruled on a very similar situation.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom who proclaims himself a champion of civil rights says that the "City will defend it's ban on handguns" which many residents are funding hypocritical since he claims to stand up for the rights of his constituents.

But if the constitution entitles a person to bear arms then should Mayor Newsom not be backing the Nation Rifle Association or making an effort to terminate this unlawful ban?

San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera said the Supreme Court ruling didn't address gun bans on government property and that he was "confident that our local gun control measures are on sound legal footing and will survive legal challenges."

San Francisco also requires residents to keep guns in lockboxes or equip them with triggerlocks. That law, passed by the county supervisors last year, wasn't challenged in Friday's lawsuit.

A state appeals court has overturned a broader citywide gun ban passed by voters in 2005.

The NRA lawsuit against San Francisco is expected to test the ruling's scope for cities and states, a prospect that could open the door to a host of challenges to California gun control laws. The NRA has said it intends to file a similar lawsuit challenging Chicago's stringent gun control laws. Chicago and San Francisco are two of the only major cities with their own laws.

Legal experts say that many gun regulations will remain intact, but the court's decision could place other laws in jeopardy, particularly if they infringe on a person's right to own a gun for self-defense. Lawyers for gun rights advocates maintain that San Francisco's public housing gun law runs afoul of that right.

Allen Davis of the California Firearms Association says "Mayor Gavin Newsom will champion the rights of gay individuals to marry but will not defend individuals constitutional rights to bear arms?".

A group of San Franciscans have gathered enough signatures to have a initiative on the upcoming San Francisco Ballot which if passed would rename a San Francisco Sewage Plant to George W. Bush Sewage Plant.

This is no joking matter the group gathered 3,000 more votes than they needed and city/county government is partially supporting this change in name.

Activists from the Presidential Memorial Commission of San Francisco, a mischievously-named group behind the move, will ask supporters to participate in a "synchronised flush".

It may sound like a student prank, but the proposal is almost certain to be passed. Democrats usually secure between 70 and 80 per cent of the vote in San Francisco – and in 2006 passed a proposition to impeach Mr Bush and his Vice-President Dick Cheney by a majority of almost two to one.

"In 50 years from now, we want people to see George Bush's name on that plant, and ask each other what went wrong," said Brian McConnell, the Memorial Commission's organiser. "We want them to be reminded of the Iraq war, and his other dramatic mistakes, and this is the perfect way to do it."

Instead of President Bush getting a library or monument namesake he will be getting a sewage plant.

If you have read the newspaper lately or watched the news you would be aware that California has several hundred wildfires active right now and more than 20% of these fires are not even being fought by firefighters due to lack of firefighters.

We have fire crews from other states and just about ever town or city in California has sent most of its firefighters in addition to State and Federal fire crews.

Northern California is currently the worst place when it comes to wildfires most towns have smoke so thick it is hard to drive let alone breath.


Weather forecasts are predicting more lightening which will likely start many more fires and with resources stretched thin California needs all the help it can get.

Syndicated Elitist effective immediately will donate 100% of it's revenue from advertising to the American Red Cross for use in it's fire relief efforts and disaster services. We will continue to donate 100% of our revenue from advertising until such point as the fires are contained.

We just switched over to Project Wonderful which uses a Infinite Auction system for Ad sales and we have already donated our first batch of funds to the American Red Cross.

If you are not interested in advertising but still want to help we strongly encourage you to donate to the American Red Cross which is providing essential services to the residents of California.

Syndicated Elitist is currently in the planning phase for a Meetup and BBQ in which our readers, advertisers, business partners and other interested parties can come and enjoy good food and some good company.

We are projecting this event to occur in late July or early June as of yet a permanent date has not been scheduled but once we all check our schedules for any conflicts we will be able to set a precise date.

In addition to good food and discussions regarding the blogosphere and Syndicated Elitist in general we will also be giving away gift bags.

Please also note that we attend a number of events annually and starting next year we will start having booths at some conventions. Feel free to use our contact system if you ever want to see if we are going to a specific event.

BlogExplosion although still semi-functioning seems to be a thing of the past. Apparently BlogExplosion is not approving new blogs and users have waited months for their blogs to be approved for this service.

In fact staff and forum moderators have criticized the owners of BlogExplosion on it's official forums and when we attempted to contact the owners of BlogExplosion for comment we found out their contact phone number was no longer in service.

What is the fate of BlogExplosion? Will it return to glory?

Are you considering using ResellerClub to offer domains to your clients? You should read this first!

ResellerClub (A Directi Service) offers some of the most competitive reseller prices for domains available. ResellerClub is owned by Directi a company based out of Mumbai, India.


Does ResellerClub charge a setup fee?

Yes. ResellerClub falsely advertises on their website that they do not require a setup fee but before you can ever use any of their reseller services you will have to deposit around $199 which they will try to tell you is not a setup fee but it is in fact a well disguised setup fee.

Does ResellerClub provide a stable and reliable solution?

No. ResellerClub has had technical difficulties with it's service since it first launched and is plagued with slow loading control panel, platform errors and more.

Does ResellerClub provide efficient support?

No. ResellerClub has it's staff in India and they speak broken English and sometimes confusing and unrecognizable words. In addition to this if you were to inform them of their service being slow or down or any issues they will usually reply with a "canned" response informing you everything is fine on their end.

Does ResellerClub have a support forum?

No. They did for awhile but customers seemed to complain about the service so much that they perhaps pulled their forums offline as a result of complaints in an effort to avoid bad publicity.


Is ResellerClub helpful when a domain name dispute occurs?

No. ResellerClub is notorious for not getting involved in situations where a reseller of theirs deletes or hijacks one of it's customers domain names. In fact Directi in 2003 allowed one of it's largest reseller customers account to be not only hijacked but sold to another party and that customer lost of his domains, customers and funds as a result of ResellerClub's actions.

Ultimately if you want to take a risk than ResellerClub is the way to go..... But if you want a solid fair service then you might want to look at Enom or Godaddy's reseller programs.

FastHosts which claims to be the UK's number one web hosting provider had a handful of it's customers dedicated servers hacked into this evening including Devstars.
At the time of publishing this post FastHosts had yet to reply to our e-mail requesting comment and informing them that their clients servers had been hacked.

Click here to see a screenshot of DevStars.eu's website at the time of publishing which was apparently hacked by a group of hackers from Turkey.

Well it seems I am worth a lot of money according to Human For Sale and its a darn shame I didn't put myself up for sale early. Too bad I am married now, right?

Well I found this site and it was interesting so I made a small post about it.

So where do you go when you want to "act a fool" for everyone to see in real time? LiveVideo of course.

I was invited by one of LiveVideo's developers to checkout their site and I spent around a half hour on the site and saw total strangers doing bad things.

I saw women and men alike sing horribly and saw people pick their noses and saw a baby get slapped in the face all in real time. It is amazing what webcam technology enables people to expose about themselves.

People who use webcam's should be very careful about what they allow their webcam to capture as you will be judged and not by few but instead by many.

It is unlikely you will see me doing a webcam show anytime soon but who knows I might be putting my foot in my mouth!

BloggerPros.com a forum community specifically for bloggers launched at 1:00A.M. the site provides a open forum for bloggers to discuss anything a blogger might want to discuss.


Will BloggerPros.com be the next best thing in the Blogosphere?

Two federal inmates at United States Penitentiary at Atwater, CA stabbed a Jose Rivera a rookie prison guard to death Friday.

It is a well known fact nationwide throughout the Federal Prison system that the guards, administrators and other staff at USP Atwater are under attack on a daily basis.

Atwater is one of the most dangerous federal prisons in California after Victorville and Lompoc.

Guards have been complaining for months that the prison has became too dangerous and many guards and staff are quitting and finding new jobs as a result which has left the penitentiary even further understaffed.

Part of the reason that guards are under attack is because the Federal Prison system is notorious for allowing guards to gang up on inmates and assault them with flashlights and other devices and do things that are very close to torture.

In fact a former corrections lieutenant who worked the prison was indicted in May by a federal grand jury for allegedly beating an inmate with a flashlight.

Inmates at a U.S. Penitentiary in Lompoc have complained for months that guards lock inmates in rooms out of view of cameras and then assault them. Lompoc has a long history of assault on inmates and has had a couple serious riots in the past few months.

Google has now realized Google Trends for Websites which is very similar to Alexa.

Many loyal users of Google are hoping that Google Trends will give webmasters a better idea of their traffic trends for their site.

Alexa and Compete have been considered inaccurate and ineffective for years and now Google is taking a crack at this important function.

Some website owners will be disappointed to find out that Google itself has excluded all of its sites and services from the service meaning you will not be able to find stats for Google.com or even Youtube.com and bloggers who have blogspot based blogs or people who use Google Pages will also not be able to track their stats.

Google has prevented website owners from removing themselves from Google Trends but obviously Google doesn't feel that policy applies to itself since Google already excluded all of its sites and services from the service.

Iran's Majlis (Means Council in Arabic) Speaker Ali Larijani said on Saturday a possible Israeli attack against the Islamic Republic would be a "grave mistake," the official IRNA news agency reported.

"If they make such a grave mistake, they will pay a high price for it," Larijani was quoted as saying on the sidelines of the commemoration ceremony for late martyr Mostafa Chamran.



In his reaction to a report on a possible Israeli attack against Iran's nuclear installations, Larijani said "We are ready to face any situation."

Dr. Amr Mohsen an Egyptian born expert on the middle east said that Iran is in great shape for any military conflict that Israel could present.

Some American officials said the Israeli exercise appeared to be an effort to develop the military's capacity to carry out long-range strikes and to demonstrate the seriousness with which Israel views Iran's nuclear program.

More than 100 Israeli F-16 and F-15 fighter jets participated in the maneuvers, which were carried out over the eastern Mediterranean and Greece during the first week of June, U.S. officials said.

The exercise also involved Israeli helicopters that could be used to rescue downed pilots. The helicopters and refueling tankers flew more than 900 miles (1,450 km), which is about the same distance between Israel and Iran's uranium enrichment plant at Natanz, American officials said.

A spokesman for the Israeli military said Israel's air force "regularly trains for various missions in order to confront and meet the challenges posed by the threats facing Israel," declining to discuss details of the exercise.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who visited Washington in early June, said "the Iranian threat must be stopped by all possible means," indicating that military resort can not be excluded.

His remarks about Iran's nuclear threat are believed to be the strongest ever the Israeli leader has made on the issue.

David Allen of DefenseThink, said "The Israeli military is failing to realize that Iran's military abilities are far more sophisticated then they anticipate".

Due to comment spamming over the last 48 hours we will be suspending anonymous posting of comments until further notice. Although all comments must go through a moderation process we find it to be tedious to have to sort through dozens of comments that violate our "Terms of Usee" and are intended to annoy or harass our staff members.


We do believe fully in the ability to post comments anonymously so long as the comment is not abusive in the sense that it needs to be on-topic and non-annoying and also is not used to advertise another site or service (spam/promotion).

We have initiated a investigation to determine who is responsible for the comment spam and will take appropriate action to prevent further misuse. We actively monitor our site and all of its components and pursuant to our "Privacy Policy" we do gather identifying information such as IP addresses and other information which can be used in pursuit of legal remedy.


Please note that this does not mean that all commenting is suspended if you choose you may identify yourself or use a OpenID or Google Account and post a comment if you so choose.

If you have any questions or concerns please use our contact form located at the top of our site in the menu bar.

U.S. Marshals are on a manhunt for Samuel Israel who lead the Bayou Group hedge fund who was found guilty by a federal court of defrauding investors.

Mr. Israel pleaded for leniency and was ordered to self surrender to prison and instead he fled. If he has in fact made it to Canada which is probably his best bet since it is closer then Mexico.

He will need to then try to get into an country which has no extradition treaty with the United States. But this case is getting so much attention that I would anticipate that U.S. Marshals have him in custody in two weeks time.

Click here to see his official Most Wanted Poster and if you see this guy he is considered Armed and Dangerous and you should report any sighting to the U.S. Marshals immediately at 1-877-WANTED2

Recently we paid the $75 fee to advertise on the EntreCard.com official blog. The owner of EntreCard (which claims to be a corporation but no record could be found) Mr. Graham Langdon asked me to send him more money after our advertisement had already been up on EntreCard's blog for a week.

I replied to his e-mail and advised him that payment was already sent and provided him with a PayPal transaction ID. A few hours later I received an E-mail from Paypal indicating that the EntreCard Paypal account was under review due to unusual activity and that if I had not received services or products I had paid for that I should go to the security center and dispute such items.

I e-mailed Mr. Langdon and advised him as to such and once I informed him what Paypal had said he has went silent and does not respond to e-mail. Thus far him or his other administrators have failed to reply to forum threads on their own forums.

Because of this incident which has left a sour taste in my mouth I strongly suggest all EntreCard users not purchase any EntreCard Credits or purchase Ad Space until Mr. Langdon officially responds in a public area on his site such as his blog as to what is really going on.

Further, I also would like to note that I asked Mr. Langdon to provide information as to what state EntreCard is a registered corporation in and where it maintains its offices and also did not reply to that request either.

EntreCard is the only site claiming to be a corporation that I have experience such lack of professionalism.

Does this sound professional to you? I strongly suggest sticking to BlogCatalog.com when it comes to promotion of your blog.

Please note that at the time of publishing this post EntreCard staff had not replied to e-mail after 48 hours straight.

Google is attempting to fix a technical issue in their server architecture which allowed users of the Google Apps service to submit malicious queries which caused an outage of the Google Apps service.

The outage occurred Tuesday morning and again in the afternoon before Google engineers were able to isolate the problem and bring the system back to normalcy. The Google App Engine enables developers to build applications and run them on Google's infrastructure. The service is available at no charge for applications using up to 500 MB of storage and enough bandwidth and CPU power for 5 million monthly page views according to information provided by Google.

In a developer discussion forum, a Google engineer who went by the name of Pete confirmed that the outage occurred in a data store about 6:30 a.m. Pacific time Tuesday, causing error returns to a "small percentage of requests."

The number of error returns increased "significantly" between 9 a.m. and 11:30 a.m. and again at 12:40 p.m. before Google was able to isolate the problem and bring the system back to normal, the engineer said.

Google was not immediately available for comment Wednesday, and details were scarce. But Pete said the outage was the result of a flaw in Google's data-store servers and was triggered by a particular class of queries.

"We have isolated the bug and we're currently working on a fix," the engineer said. "Going forward, we're also working to further isolate queries so that in the future a bug like this won't affect the stability of the system as a whole."

Google and Amazon are the two first companies to offer so called "Cloud Computing" but thus far businesses are wary of the new technology for valid concerns.

A woman has been found guilty of trying to kill her husband by slipping anti-freeze into his wine and curry which she studied and practiced with the help of popular search engine Google.

A jury at Stafford Crown Court found Kate Knight, 28, guilty of the attempted murder of husband Lee at their home in Stoke-on-Trent in 2005.

Mr Knight, a 37-year-old factory worker, suffered kidney failure and brain damage after being poisoned.

After the hearing, he said his wife's actions had ruined his life. Sentencing was adjourned until a later date.

Mr Knight now has brain damage, is blind, partially deaf and needs 24-hour care.

Over the three-week trial the jury heard how Knight plotted to poison her husband, who worked for JCB, in order to collect a £130,000 pay-out from his employer and clear debts.

Mr Knight, who lives with his parents and the couple's nine-year-old son Jack, said: "Kate has ruined my life."

In a statement, he said: "It has been very stressful. I realized that my wife had left me. I lost my job, my house, everything I worked for and, worst of all, my son.

"I have hardly any independence anymore - I need to have somebody with me all the time. I don't think I'll ever be able to work again."

He added that what his wife had done would have a big effect on their son's future.

During the trial Mr Knight gave evidence, supported in court by two hearing specialists. He wears two hearing aids after regaining some level of hearing following a recent operation.

On the night of the couple's seventh wedding anniversary, Knight cooked her husband a curry and served him red wine - both of which had been laced with ethylene glycol, the chemical name for anti-freeze.

The jury also heard over the course of the trial how Knight, originally from the Wirral, had used Internet search engines to find a method of killing, settling on anti-freeze after ruling out ecstasy or an iron overdose.

Knight's neighbour Sarah Johnson, 28, told the court how the accused had mentioned paying £50,000 to hire a hitman.

Under cross examination, Knight blamed her husband's health problems on drinking too much alcohol.

Outside the court, Det Con Martin Smith, of Staffordshire Police, said: "This highly unusual case posed a number of investigative challenges. Despite the amount of evidence against her, Kate Knight refused to co-operate throughout.

"Her cowardly crime almost caused the death of Lee Knight whose blindness is a life sentence in itself - he will never be able to properly see his young son again.

"Lee, with the support of his family, is piecing his life back together. I hope today's outcome will help them on their road to recovery."

Crown Prosecution Service spokeswoman Katy Halls said the attack on Mr Knight had been "cold and calculated".

Ms Halls said: "Knight had every intention to kill her husband by poisoning him with the toxic substance.

"Evidence was gathered from her computer showing that she had researched the effects of different substances ensuring she used the most lethal."

Googles has refused to provide any comment after repeated inquiries regarding this shocking event.

We have changed our advertisement system and now you can purchase any of our advertising space simply by clicking on any ad space which says "Your Ad Here".

To kick of our new advertising system we are starting our advertising spaces at $1.00 now your ad could stay on our site until your advertisement space is outbid by another advertiser. This model of advertising is called Infinite Auction.

You can feel good about advertising on this blog because 15% of all advertisement revenue is donated directly the American Red Cross on a quarterly basis!

This is the first time ever that we have opened the site up to anyone who wishes to advertise instead of just working with individual companies.

So if you have a website, product, service you want to advertise then this is a great way to get exposure.

In case you have never noticed we do actually have terms of use and a privacy policy as to usage of this blog which is located at the bottom of each page.

Anyways both of these sections have been updated and you should check them out.

Just in case you don't feel up to scrolling to the bottom of our blog you can click either of the links in this post and go directly there.

Terms of Use: Click Here

Privacy Policy: Click Here

In addition to the revision of these two sections I am also doing some minor tweaks to our DNS Load Balancing since we are establishing some files mirroring through Amazon Web Services cloud. The blog should itself be unaffected and all posts, images etc. should load just fine.

In an e-mail to us the owners of Chad Franklin Suzuki in Kansas City, Missouri have blasted KCTalk.com a conservative mid-western forums which serves residents of Kansas City, MO.

The owners assert that Frank Arena and Jeff Hirst have done what amounts to slandering the Chad Franklin Dealership and started a controversy. In a e-mail conversation with the dealerships owners they told us that they have personally done research on Mr. Arena who has himself been involved in some fraudulent activity as a result of his former business attempts.

Most notably Frank Arena's wife divorced him as a result of his peculiar and immature behavior over the years. Mr. Arena has limited visits with his son as a result of the divorce and has became isolated from normal activities.

Mr. Arena owned NodeHosting which was well known in the hosting industry as not only a large bust but a loss for hundreds of customers. Frank Arena owned and ran NodeHosting out of Kansas City, CA where he employed underage youth and felons one of which named Nelson defrauded many of Mr. Arena's customers.

NodeHosting eventually went out of business and disappeared resulting in loss of data and websites of hundreds of customers as a result. Many customers were never reimbursed and Mr. Arena then disappeared until a few years later he formed KCTalk.com

More information on his company NodeHosting can be found by doing a search here.

Just do a search query for "Frank Arena" or "NodeHosting"

I guess Chad Franklin Suzuki owners are scratching their heads wondering how Frank Arena can try to cause a controversy of their business practices when Mr. Arena has a closet full of skeletons when it comes to his own business ethics.

Apple will be releasing their newest version of Max OS X in the very near future and since I am a total Mac Geek I an ecstatic to try it out.

In fact I have a early sneak peak copy which I am running currently in my office.

The new Mac OS X is fantastic and Snow Leopard really is worth the fee for upgrading. I also run some Mac OS X servers and I am looking forward to the future of Apple's OS X Server Architecture. I recently graduated from UC Berkeley and in my spare time I will be blogging here on SyndicatedElitist.com

My name is Zane Fallon and I look forward to providing some interesting posts and in addition I will be helping with the design overhaul of this blog planned for August.

Doug Weaver a Senior Manager at the Kansas City Star via e-mail confirmed today that KCTalk.com which is owned by Frank Arena and Jeff Hirst (Pictured Left) have no agreement whatsoever exclusive or non-exclusive to publish content which is owned by the Kansas City Star.



Mr. Weaver informed Syndicated Elitist that copying and pasting of any content or otherwise using content without following their procedures for getting permission would violate Copyright law.

Click to enlarge this screenshot of Frank Arena putting his foot in his mouth
claiming he has an agreement with the KC Star:

And now click to enlarge this e-mail from the KC Star:

And finally Frank Arena has put his foot in his mouth some many times in fact he went as far as to state on KCTalk.com that Viacom no longer exists.....

When I showed him that he was a total idiot he then stated he had filed a police report but funny thing is according to Captain Mark Folsom of the Kansas City Police Department no report has been filed by Frank Arena in his jurisdiction or that of Jackson County, Missouri.

Perhaps you should go check if your content is being stolen by KCTalk.com? If so why not e-mail the fearless leader Frank Arena his e-mail address is frank@kctalk.com or farena@gmail.com

Guantanamo Bay Detainees have something to look forward to now that the Supreme Court has ruled that they are in fact entitled to access to Federal Courts.

What exactly are they to look forward to? Likely Freedom and that is exactly what the Bush Administration has been trying to prevent for years now.

Now detainees will be able to bypass military hearings and challenge their detentions in the Federal Courts. Although it is likely that the U.S. Military will make attempts to block this new liberty through direction of the Bush Administration.

But with a new president soon to be elected it is likely Guantanamo Bay itself will be shuttered in the near future.

Supreme Court Justice Kennedy wrote in the decision that the framers of the Constitution saw the need "to guard against the abuse of monarchical power" and, therefore, gave individuals the right to contest their detentions, even during "extraordinary" times.

Detainees can still be tried by U.S. Military Tribunals but at the same time they can now challenge their detention elsewhere... the question is will the military silence the detainees requests for federal hearings?

With talks of rice shortages and rationing its not likely you will hear of many people giving out Free Rice but in this case that is exactly what is happening at FreeRice.com.

I am encourage all visitors of my blog and other bloggers to spread the word about this site which will donate rice to the United Nations World Food Program just for your visit to the site and a few seconds of your time to play a simple word game which helps improve literacy.

This is no sham at all and has been featured on a number of news sites but I want to keep this site in peoples memory and encourage those who have not heard of it to go give it a try.

Do your good deed for a day!

Google and Yahoo jointly announced an agreement between both companies which will cause Yahoo to begin using Google Adsense on its Internet properties in the United States and Canada.

In addition Google and Yahoo will be working to make Gtalk and Yahoo IM work just like AOL Instant Messenger did a few years back. I personally look forward to being able to message Yahoo users from Gmail.




This is likely a move by Yahoo and Google to avoid any further attempt of takeover by Microsoft and perhaps to avoid Carl Icahn's rogue takeover attempt.

What Carl Icahn fails to understand is that he will only weaken Yahoo as a Internet property by trying to merge it with Microsoft.

And a link to Google's Blog Post regarding the agreement here.

Although the business I know of has yet to be criminally or civilly pursued by any government agency, it is foreseeable that in the near future the owners of a store in Willits, CA will face federal criminal and civil penalties.

The owners of a certain market in Willits, CA are selling Alcohol, Tobacco (Cigarettes) and Hot Food to anyone who walks in with a California EBT Card which is a benefit card that holds Food Stamp Benefits.

Not only does this violate California State Laws it also surely violates a dozen Federal Laws and could end the owners of this market in Federal Prison. I personally have not reported the market in question because honestly its not a big secret.... people who do not even live in this state are aware that this is the place you go to buy tobacco and liquor with Food Stamps.

I think it is the duty of local law enforcement and federal authorities to make good effort to locate and take what action is necessary to end this fraud and abuse of a welfare program.

I do not at all approve of the actions of this market and its owners and I strongly consider this a case of fraud and theft of the government by the market's owners and waste, fraud and theft by every consumer who participates in this abusive practice.

Just from the information I am privy to I would estimate that in excess of $10,000 in federal food stamps are illegally used in this fashion at this store.... every year!

Google's Gmail Team has introduced Gmail Labs which allows you to essentially build widgets and features into Gmail.

This move will probably attract more users to Gmail since Gmail will become more feature rich thanks to Google Developers and Regular Gmail Users who create new widgets and features.

Google is facing an uphill battle against Privacy Advocates around the globe who are upset that Google is not in compliance with California State Law when it comes to Privacy Policies.

Last week, a coalition of groups that have questioned Google's practices in the past sent a four-paragraph letter to CEO Eric Schmidt, charging that "Google's reluctance to post a link to its privacy policy on its home page is alarming."

The signatories include the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, Center for Digital Democracy, and World Privacy Forum.

Google has provided the following public response:

"We share the view that privacy information should be easy to find, and we believe our privacy policy is readily accessible to our users. Just as importantly, privacy information should be easy to understand. That's why, in addition to offering a Privacy Center with our privacy policy and other important information, we also created a YouTube privacy channel with videos explaining our practices and products, ran an ad campaign to draw consumers to our privacy information, posted several blogs that explain our privacy practices in detail and posted detailed frequently asked questions to help consumers understand the complex aspects of privacy. Privacy policies can be complex and not consumer friendly. To truly help consumers understand privacy, our goal is to provide accessible and useful information."

Google argued that having a link to a privacy policy may not be the best method to convey privacy information to consumers.

"Privacy policies can be complex and not consumer friendly," stated Google. "To truly help consumers understand privacy, our goal is to provide accessible and useful information."

"California law requires the operator of a commercial Web site to 'conspicuously post its privacy policy on its Web site,'" the letter says. "The straightforward reading of that law is that Google must place the word 'privacy' on the Google.com Web page linked to its privacy policy. Moreover, just about every major company that operates a Web site places a link to its privacy policy on its homepage."


From InformationWeek:

Aesthetic treason though it may be to clutter the nearly pristine Google.com with an additional seven letters, Google really ought to comply, even if doing so results in a slight statistical diminution of "user happiness" -- Google's measure of how pages perform. (Believe it or not, Google pays a lot of attention to tiny details that affect page load times and user response. Tenths of seconds matter to Google.)

Clearly, Google is not keen to set a precedent that anyone with a grievance is entitled to redress on its home page. But the company has to make sure its public statements about privacy remain consistent with its actions. And it just looks bad for Google to insist that it reads the law differently than everyone else. It makes Google look like it's trying to pull one over on its users.

Google's stance is particularly perplexing given that in 2005 and 2006 the company publicly resisted the U.S. Department of Justice's demand for user search data to protect user privacy. Google associate general counsel Nicole Wong said at the time in a blog post that Google worried that "if the government was permitted to require Google to hand over search queries, that could have undermined confidence that our users have in our ability to keep their information private."

What could boost user confidence in Google's ability to keep user information private more than a prominent privacy policy? (Aside from deciding not to store any user data for any purpose.)

At Google's recent developer conference, VP of search products Marissa Mayer said that the "©2008 Google" notice on the Google home page exists as punctuation, to alert users that the page has loaded completely. Why not replace it with a "Privacy" link, since the copyright notice isn't legally necessary?

It is our opinion that Google is not adhering to it's own "Don't be evil" motto by not complying with this important law. Perhaps some visitors to Google.com would cease using the site if they had a visible link to the Google Privacy Policy and actually read over the whole policy.

Is Google opening itself up to unnecessary litigation by refusing to comply with this simple law which was established to protect consumers?

Syndicated Elitist will be moving to Amazon Web Services in the very near future as part of our plan to provide ongoing continuity of our content.

Syndicated Elitist is currently hosted on the Google Blogger Cloud, Google Apps Cloud and we also have hosting with Geek Storage and RackSpace.

We will continue to host some content with Google Apps and with Geek Storage but will more formally rely on AWS for direct hosting of our blog in load balanced multi-location environment.

The primary reason for this change is we are expanding this blog into a full fledged network of blogs with individual writers and content and will also be doing commercial advertising in mass transit systems of our blog and anticipate a increased amount of traffic.

Our newest member to our team is Zane (pictured to the right) who will providing original articles and content which will cover business and technology.

Zane is a recent graduate of UC Berkeley where he studied Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences.

We are proud to have him join our staff and look forward to some excellent content for our readers.

Well today me and my associate editor will be going to the new Zohan movie which features Adam Sandler. We will be providing a review of the movie which just came to theaters today.

I am a big fan when it comes to Adam Sandler movies so I couldn't miss out on this new movie.

Stay tuned for a review or just go see it yourself!

I just have to post about Woopra which is by far the most feature rich website statistics and analytical service I have used. Not only can you view perhaps the most in-depth and rich stats online you can also view them in a desktop client.

I guarantee that no other statistics or analytical has half the features that Woopra offers.

I encourage all website owners to try Woopra out today as I stand by this product which I just started using today and will continue to use from here on out.

Here are the features as listed at Woopra.com:

Live Tracking and Web Statistics

Woopra’s revolutionary server architecture, combined with its intuitively designed client software, enables seamless tracking of visitors. Webmasters can track over 40 different statistical events and analytics. Never before has so much information been instantaneously available to Webmasters.

Most analytical and site statistics are updated once a day at the least, or several times during the day. With Woopra, you get live track of visitors coming and going and moving through your site. You get the stats now.

Rich User Interface

Woopra’s interface was designed to display information clearly and efficiently, without upsetting the balance between design and function. Links to data and various pageviews are easily recognized and accessed. As the program runs on your computer, there is no delays in the response time as comes with web-based programs.

Woopra’s interface is designed to be flexible, with plans for future development of various color schemes and themes. The information is at your finger tips to access a wealth of statistics and data about your site and visitors.

Real-time Analytics

Woopra redefines Web Analytics by enabling instantaneous information transfer combined with the ability to immediately act on each action. Woopra changes website management discussions from “how should we change things in the future” to “what should we do right now?

Webmasters can respond faster to sudden influxes in traffic and help monitor trends in search and traffic patterns. Woopra helps web owners generate content based upon customer needs and trends now, not after the fact.

Manage Multiple Blogs and Websites

Woopra creates a one-stop service for monitoring all your blogs and websites. Through the quick site tabs at the top of the Woopra panel, you have one-click access to your registered sites.

Deep Analytic and Search Capabilities

Woopra breaks the Web statistics mold by allowing lightning quick search functionality along any data point in the system. What information do you need to help you manage and develop your site? Specific user names, IP addresses, geographic locations, user browsing data, visitor history, visitor paths, arrival and departure points - what do you want to know?

The data is searchable. Using the Search panel, you can reach into the data to find specific information about your site’s visitors, learning more about your site’s demographics and loyal readers. Woopra simply digs deeper.

Click-to-Chat

Woopra enables websites with both “proactive” and “reactive” chat functionality. Webmasters can remotely initiate sessions with visitors, or embed “Click-to-Chat” buttons within a site to accept inbound requests. This breaks the virtual wall between visitor and webmaster. Customer service sites could offer personal service directly through the Woopra interface, with no installation of software by the visitor. Woopra breaks down the barriers of the static web.

Visitor and Member Tagging

In addition to the most comprehensive suite of Web statistics available, Woopra’s proprietary plugin technology appends real “known” user data from existing communities. Once a visitor leaves a comment or registers with the site, their on-site activities can be tracked, helping you learn more about how your loyal readers use your site. Event notifications can be created to notify the webmaster when a specific user or user type is visiting the site.

WordPress, vBulletin, MediaWiki and other community site plugins allow simple tracking of registered users.

eal Time Notifications

Streaming real-time Web statistics are useless without the ability to filter and act on specific variables. For this reason Woopra offers “on-demand” Custom Notifications with visual and auditory cues when pre-defined actions take place.

Notifications can alert webmasters to specific users, IP addresses, search terms, languages, countries, browsers, specific pages, and more. Specific client visits, special events (sales or ad clicks), and other important actions become instantly actionable.

Easy Installation and Update Notification

Installing Woopra is easy. There is a simple Woopra Installation Guide to assist the new user. Once installed, Woopra will alert the user of updates, feature improvements and changes, new plugins and tools, and Woopra news and resources through the Woopra panels.

Woopra can be installed on any recent version of Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Plugins to activate Woopra from within various blog, CMS, and website platforms currently include WordPress and vBulletin. Plugins for other platforms will soon be available.

Developer Tools

More than merely a Web statistics and analytics service, Woopra is a robust platform with an API for advanced integration. Plugin and skinning capabilities ensure that ultimately Woopra will conform to user preferences instead of forcing users to adopt a standard.

Woopra is developed for expandability and easy customization. Woopra is designed for the future of web analytics and site interaction.

Although we had aimed to interview a Senior Manager of ThePlanet that was not the case but we do have an official response to a number of questions we asked ThePlanet's NOC Staff. We still have a request for a senior manager from corporate to provide an interview but that probably will not occur for a few more days due to the high level of existing inquiries the company is responding to from its customers.

Here are answers provided by ThePlanet to some questions we asked and some submitted by our readers:


Question #1 (Asked by Syndicated Elitist's Associate Editor): What kind of time frame are customers looking towards when it comes to the H1 Datacenter being fully stable in all areas including connectivity and power?

Answer (Provided by Dallas DC Manager): We are unable to provide with any certainty an exact date as to when things will be stable and permanent. We anticipate that our customers can expect things to return to some level or normalcy within the next two weeks as we have a number of outside contractors working around the clock to repair damaged infrastructure.

Question #2 (Asked by Syndicated Elitist's Readers): Will all customers who experienced downtime be receiving credit to their accounts?

Answer (Provided by Corporate Sales): As we have stated on our forums and elsewhere we have every attention of applying credits to customers accounts who experience downtime during this tragedy. Customers should see these credits applied within the next few days and otherwise can submit a ticket for direct assistance.

Question #3 (Asked by Syndicated Elitist's Readers): What action is being taken to prevent a repeat of this situation?


Answer (Provided by Corporate Support): Our management team will be doing planning and research to provide solutions to ensure this type of event is less likely to occur in the future. We do everything within our power to prevent an outage such as this.


Question #4 (Asked by Syndicated Elitist's Readers): Why did local fire department officials prevent backup generators from being started?

Answer (Provided by Corporate Support):

To protect the safety of our on site staff during an event like this they are trained to exit the facility and allow fire department responders to extinguish any fire and inspect for damage and advise when it is safe to return to the facility.

Since our staff were evacuated the initial amount of damage was not known and fire department staff felt that it would pose a hazard to start up backup generators due to severe damage to the infrastructure in our facility.

-End of Transcript -

We are making repeated inquiries with ThePlanet management in an attempt to have more extensive dialogue as to the details that have yet to be disclosed in regards to what happened. We intend to provide a podcast of the interview with management once it becomes available.

We have been able to gather the following information from a number of sources including directly from ThePlanet (TP) Staff. In addition to this update we will be providing more valuable answers to a number of questions customers are probably wondering.

As things stand as of 11:09pm some customers are online on the second floor of the H1 Facility of ThePlanet but the amount of servers that are back online are extremely limited (Less than 10). Some servers are believed to have some loss of data and or corruption due to the power issues that resulted instantly during the fire explosion. Although some corruption and or data loss may have occurred ThePlanet is supposedly going to offer data recovery services to customers affected by any data loss or corruption.

Most second floor servers are expected to be back online around noon on Monday and more teams of support staff and technicians have been brought in to resolve individual issues affecting specific servers.

The bad news at this point is that all cabling that provides power and connectivity to the first floor is destroyed and will require replacement. There is no estimated time frame for restoration of customers on the first floor at this time as the amount of damage is far more severe than initially believed and as such a large amount of work will be required to restore power and connectivity and to repair other infrastructure. In addition to this the ability to provide power and connectivity to Phase 2 (Floor Two) there is also a problem with this situation which is that it is just a workaround and is not a permanent solution.

It is possible that 1st Floor power and connectivity can be temporarily restored also to the first floor but this will take additional time and the earliest anticipated temporary restoration for this section would be Monday evening sometime.

This outage is estimated to be affecting over 700,000 websites and several million Internet users visit these websites on a daily basis. Dozens of high profile websites including EntreCard and B3ta are offline as a result of this outage in addition entire hosting companies and other service providers are without service. Many businesses have lost thousands of customers as a result of this outage.

Syndicated Elitist has spoken with a number of staff who work in various departments of ThePlanet from the support and sales teams to NOC staff. We do have a interview planned for Monday morning which we will be asking a number of questions which we feel will address a number of customer concerns.

If you have any questions you would like us to consider asking ThePlanet management then we suggest using our contact us form and submitting the question for consideration. In addition to this informative update there are some photos below provided by a third party of activity outside of the datacenter. If you want to go to the official status update page click here and please feel free to refer your customers, visitors or other interested parties to visit this post for information on the outage. This blog has already received a little over 14,000 visitors since yesterday afternoon alone just seeking information on the outage and we will continue to provide any new information we become privy to.

A 16-year old student of a Japanese private school hung herself on Thursday in a province of japan after writing a suicide note indicating insults left on her personal blog resulted in her hanging herself.

The city's fire department received an emergency call around 7 a.m. Thursday from her family, and the first-year student's death was confirmed later at a hospital in the city.

Children's advocates in Japan are encouraging parents to pay closer attention to their children who use the Internet for blogging and social networking sites.

We had previously reported here that Feeva which originally worked with Google to provide free WiFi in Union Square in San Francisco, CA had some problems with connectivity and signal. Through our direct contact with Feeva and as a result of our article Feeva made good effort to send out a engineer to resolve the issues and now the Hotspot is working perfectly.

We believe our article and contact with Feeva benefited a number of citizens who regularly used this Hotspot and we thank Feeva for working with us to resolve this issue. On a side note we think it is funny that Google proposes to offer "Free WiFi throughout the City of San Francisco" and then backs out on its partnership to provide a small Hotspot with Feeva.

The Office of the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California is considering formally filing criminal charges against key employees at MediaDefender who were involved in launching a Denial of Service attack against a BitTorrent tracker maintained and ran by Revision3, the San Francisco-based site that produces and distributes the popular DiggNation show and others via the BitTorrent protocol.

MediaDefender, of Santa Monica, Calif., holds some 2,000 servers with a 9GBps dedicated connection and it regularly uses special tactics to fight piracy. The company describes itself as a provider of anti-piracy solutions.

According to federal law the launching of a denial of service attack is a felony punishable by a term in federal prison and to include fines and restitution. Why the music and motion picture industry would hire another company to carryout overt illegal Internet attacks like this is unknown.

Syndicated Elitist's Editor will interview a member of ThePlanet's Senior Management tomorrow morning around 9:00am Central. We will post transcripts and summary of the interview after the interview.

As of currently SyndicatedElitist.com is getting the second largest amount of traffic/visitors looking for information in regards to "ThePlanet H1 Outage".

We will continue to keep you updated as this situation changes and as more information becomes available.

EntreCard.com, one of the largest blogging promotional services on the web is offline due to the outage at ThePlanet which was caused by fire and explosions. ThePlanet had initially intended for some restoration by noon today although no such restoration has occurred at this time. For more details on the related outage click here.

EntreCard is not the only high profile site offline due to the ThePlanet outage in fact many hundred of thousands of websites are offline as a result.

ThePlanet.com’s H1 Datacenter in Texas experienced a fire and explosion caused by an electrical short on Saturday at approximately 5:45pm. An Initial report by the Datacenter staff suggests that no damage has been caused directly by the fire or explosion but there is the possibility of damage being caused to some customers by the power outage itself causing instability in data stored on customers servers.

According to Amy R. who works for ThePlanet an estimated 9,000 customers are affected currently and perhaps over 700,000 websites if not more are currently down as a result of this incident. Instead of going directly to backup power for some reason the Datacenter’s automated switchover did not initiate during the fire and explosion and when the local fire officials arrived they instructed ThePlanet H1 staff not to manually switch to backup power.

ThePlanet has informed it’s customers that it will be issuing credits automatically and this outage is estimated currently to cost ThePlanet upwards of $891,000 just to restore customers and by issuing credits. In addition ThePlanet will be forced to repair infrastructure and pay overtime for it’s staff which would also result in hundreds of thousands dollars being spent.

But ThePlanet’s customers are likely to see damages with a much higher price tag due to downtime of their individual sites and their inability to sell products and services during this outage. Some customers without any doubt make thousands of dollars a month via websites and various web services hosted on servers located at ThePlanet’s H1 facility and this outage will cause a large impact on those profits.

One concern ThePlanet will have to deal with is the loss of customers moving their data, websites and services to other providers. This kind of an accident is very rare and unlikely in the industry since some many standards are in place to prevent this kind of an occurrence and as a result it will effect the integrity of ThePlanet’s services some customers will end their relationship with ThePlanet and even parties who were considering starting a business relationship with ThePlanet will be cautious due to this incident. ThePlanet has greatly effected it’s own ability to continue to claim some of it’s hosting capabilities on it’s company website.


Customers have been directed to visit a status update thread located here due to limited availability of ThePlanet support staff.