Security News
Google has blamed a bug in its global authentication system for last week's outage that affected Gmail, Calendar, YouTube, Meet and multiple other Google services. The 47-minute outage last Monday, which severely affected operations at workplaces and schools globally, was caused by a bug in an automated quota management system that powers the Google User ID Service.
As a direct result, users weren't able to access Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive, Google Maps, Google Calendar, and several other Google services for almost an hour on Monday, December 14th. During the outage, users could not send emails via Gmail mobile apps or receive email via POP3 for desktop clients, while YouTube visitors were seeing error messages stating that "There was a problem with the server - Tap to retry." "The majority of authenticated services experienced similar control plane impact: elevated error rates across all Google Cloud Platform and Google Workspace APIs and Consoles."
Google users are currently experiencing issues around the world, with users unable to access Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive, Google Maps, Google Calendar, and other Google services. According to DownDetector and user reports, Google services are currently experiencing an outage in the U.S, Europe, and other parts of the world.
Today, GitHub shared more info regarding why YouTube-dl was kicked off the platform and about why GitHub handled this situation the way it did. "Our actions were driven by processes required to comply with laws like the DMCA that put platforms like GitHub and developers in a difficult spot," GitHub's Director of Platform Policy Abby Vollmer said.
GitHub has issued a warning that accounts could be banned if they continue to upload content that was removed due to DMCA takedown notices. On October 23rd, 2020, GitHub removed the source code repositories for the popular video download tool called YouTube-dl after the Recording Industry Association of America, Inc. filed a DMCA infringement notice.
Users of the extremely popular YouTube-dl YouTube media downloader have flooded GitHub with new repositories containing the tool's source code after GitHub took down the project's repositories on Friday. On October 23, 2020, GitHub took down YouTube-dl's repositories due to a DMCA infringement notice filed by Recording Industry Association of America, an organization that represents the recording industry in the U.S. Before being removed, YouTube-dl's repo was in the top 40 most starred GitHub repositories with more than 72,000 stars, between Node.js and Kubernetes.
The Recording Industry Association of America, Inc. has taken down YouTube-dl's GitHub repositories using a DMCA takedown notice. Today, the RIAA took down the YouTube-dl GitHub repositories by filing a DMCA infringement notice with GitHub.
A campaign group is suing Google for up to £2.5bn over claims that YouTube breaks EU data protection laws by harvesting information about children under 13 - and is hoping to turn it into a UK class-action-style case. In a particulars of claim filed at London's High Court and seen by The Register, McCann said Google "Failed to obtain valid parental consent for the processing of personal data of children under 13 years of age, as required by law".
Crypto scammers hijacked three YouTube channels to impersonate Elon Musk's SpaceX channel, offering bogus BTC giveaways that earned them nearly USD $150,000 over the course of two days. According to Bleeping Computer and the reports filed in the BitcoinAbuse database, the scammers took over legitimate YouTube accounts and changed the branding to look like that of Elon Musk's rocket company.
On Monday, a video of former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates could be found playing on multiple YouTube channels that were broadcasting a well-known cryptocurrency Ponzi scam, ZDNet reported. In November 2019, cryptocoin news site Coin Rivet reported that scammers were hopping on YouTube live streams to bilk people by posing as the official foundations and development teams of popular cryptocurrencies.