Not many people realize that Drew Curtis of Fark.com lives in low-cost-of-living Kentucky. Fark is headquartered there, and the servers are physically located in Lexington. As such, his might be the website most affected by the "proposal" to ban anonymous Internet comments. Curtis is ticked. Reached for comment at his home on Huevos Rancheros Blvd. in Lexington, Curtis weighed in on state representative Tim Couch, the guy behind the bill. "He is a retard," says Curtis. "He is also a douchebag. And he sucked in the NFL." Nothing anonymous there.

Freakishly boyish FCC chairman Kevin Martin isn't exactly denying our earlier report that his commission was considering a "do-over" hearing on net neutrality. The first hearing, held at Harvard, dealt with regulations on what Internet service providers can do to privilege some kinds of Net traffic over others. It was marred by a seat-packing scandal: Comcast paid people to hold spots in line for Comcast employees who never showed up. A FCC representative gave News.com this unhelpful quote on the subject of a new hearing, which we've heard could be held at Stanford:

In our "Googler's vent: working here sucks too" post, commenter tengallonhero does some venting of his own:

Yesterday morning, Microsoft's Hotmail and many other Windows Live services were knocked offline, but came back after a few hours. Tonight, I tried to go to hotmail.com and got the above error message after more than a dozen redirects.

Pakistan has lifted its ban on YouTube. The ban was put in place because "blasphemous" videos were available on the site. Some users are skeptical about the government's official explanation for the ban, and believe YouTube was banned instead because it hosted videos that proved election fraud occurred in recent parliamentary elections in Pakistan. A nasty side effect of the ban: YouTube was knocked offline, worldwide, for two hours on Sunday. Pakistan Telecom, the Internet service provider which rendered YouTube unavailable, says that was an accident. [AFP]

Last week, conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh begged Apple CEO Steve Jobs for bug fixes on problems he'd been having for months. Finally, an Apple muckety-muck reached out to El-Rushbo:

In November of last year, one of Rackspace's data centers went offline for several hours. One of the companies affected was Chicago-based 37Signals, makers of fancy collaboration software used mostly by Valley companies (including this publication). This morning, 37Signals went offline again — we made a joke about Rackspace in our post, but it seems we were more prescient than we realized. 37Signals is blaming the outage on Rackspace.

"Warning: The Content in this Article May be Inaccurate." So reads the creatively capitalized disclaimer now placed on the Digg discussion page for "Digg's secret editors," in which I revealed that Digg's so-called moderators use their own judgment to override Digg's supposedly all-powerful algorithm. The consequences are stunning: Digg is not a democracy of news, and the way headlines make their way to Digg's homepage are neither fair nor transparent. Digg cofounder Kevin Rose weighed in with an oddly worded nondenial.

Yesterday we noted the lack of high-definition football in the press room at CES 2008, the biggest electronics show in the world. Today though, things are much more civilized. We're watching the Giants/Buccaneers game in glorious high definition on some LG set. We're surprised there isn't a massive Panasonic plasma with booth babes serving beef Wellington to the bored hard-working masses of reporters. This should be prime sponsorship real estate.

Jakob Lodwick has burst our balloon: the fameballer has taken time from his vacation in Mexico to deny any involvement with norbum.org and its tasteless homeless fashion contest (although he does reserve the right to make fun of the homeless in the future). Lodwick did create the "norbum" name and has purchased several domain names related to his new startup. It's no surprise that the site was attributed to the Web exhibitionist. But Lodwick says his new startup — a music-production venture, we hear — will not be ready for publicity for another couple months. But when it is, will whatever stunt he engineers surpass the attention he could have garnered by mocking the poor? (Photo by Zach Klein)

David Karp, the creator of Tumblr, may be working on a new project with the attention-seeking Jakob Lodwick, but he doesn't want anything to do with Lodwick's attention-seeking means. Karp called Silicon Alley Insider while on vacation in Puerto Rico to deny any involvement with the Norbum project:

Perez Hilton is done — DONE! — with those dirty monopolists at YouTube. He's posted one video on his own site, and another on Revver. Given the amount of traffic that Hilton can push, we expect the various video hosting sites will be falling over themselves to give him free bandwidth.

More details on Perez Hilton's YouTube woes: Apparently it was his posting of this video of Liza Minelli collapsing on stage that caused his account to be banned. Normally YouTube removes a video when it receives a DMCA message and that's the end of it. This time though, says our tipster, Idolator editor Maura Johnston, it "was a 'repeat offender' thing". No surprise there. Hilton has built his entire site on images of questionable legality. Our timeline after the jump.

A commenter on our previous coverage of Rackspace's Texas datacenter outage last month had some pretty harsh words about Rackspace's recovery effort. I called Rackspace for comment and got slightly less alarming spin on the situation. Our tip, and the company's story, after the jump.

I was duped on a scoop. Word had reached me, from multiple sources, that Mark Zuckerberg had sold $40 million worth of shares in Facebook's $300 million financing round. Not so, we hear: All of the $300 million Facebook raised from Microsoft and Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-Shing is in the company's bank account, not Zuckerberg's. So why the rumor?

A week after launching, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal remain the bestsellers for Amazon.com's e-reader, Kindle, but Time magazine has dramatically fallen to 12th place and continues to fall. Why? The display technology, eInk, is better than traditional displays at approximating the experience of text on a page, but the high-contrast, monochromatic screen is lousy at displaying images. The Kindle version of Time omits the images because of this, and Time magazine's appeal is as much in pictures as in words.

Turns out today's bomb scare which caused the evacuation of 200 people from an eBay campus was in response to a suspicious, but harmless, device sent to eBay's mailroom. eBay spokeswoman Shannon Stubo sent in this update, after the jump:

After Rackspace experienced two power issues Sunday and Monday, a truck collided with a power transformer on the side of its Dallas-area data center in Grapevine, Texas. As a result, power was lost again. Two of the chillers that keep the servers cool failed to restart and a number of servers were taken offline to prevent heat damage. As far as we know, all servers are back up and functioning and Rackspace is very apologetic. Now, everyone is asking "how did this happen?" The short answer: Low blood sugar. Find out more sweet details after the jump.

An accident near Rackspace's Dallas datacenter sparked a late-night Web crisis, downing Internet service providers from Texas to California and bringing down 37signals' Web-based software suite, on which many startups depend for coordinating their work. But Rackspace worked fast to fix the cause of the outage — balky chillers which failed to start when switched to backup power, causing the datacenter to overheat — and by midnight, most of Rackspace's hosted websites were back online. Here's the apology note from Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier, forwarded to us by a customer.

The most recent email to customers from Rackspace, the Texas Web host whose datacenter outage in Dallas downed some of the Web's most useful websites: