Hasta La Gadget!

JERUSALEM — In a major concession to Gaza’s Hamas leaders Monday, Israel dropped its five-year ban on construction materials crossing into the territory and raised hopes there that rebuilding could begin following a damaging eight-day Israeli air campaign.

The easing of restrictions is an outgrowth of the cease-fire that ended the airstrikes and months of daily rocket fire from Gaza at Israel. Contacts mediated by Egypt to follow up the truce produced the concession, and Israel promised to keep easing the lives of Gaza’s 1.6 million residents, as long as Israelis were no longer targeted by rocket fire by Gaza militants.

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Still wondering what the heck happened with Netflix on Christmas Eve? Cloud architect Adrian Cockroft has returned to fill in the details with an official blog post. As we already knew, Amazon Web Services was to blame for the issue — the company issued an apology earlier today — with the Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) service causing the outage. The interruption began at 3:30PM ET on December 24th, though some users had normal service until later that evening, at which point many TV-connected devices in the US, Canada and Latin America were affected. Notably, customers in the UK, Ireland and Nordic countries did not experience issues.

Netflix uses hundreds of ELBs, but only “a handful” failed — devices using these specific ELBs, including game consoles, were unable to access the server. While the Elastic Load Balancers serving Mac and PC streaming were unaffected, those users experienced latency issues, and may have needed to reload a stream. Cockroft explains that at 1:30AM ET on Christmas Day, the ELBs were restored by AWS, and most users were reportedly up and running at that point, though some still experienced downtime throughout the morning. Ultimately, Netflix plans to improve redundancy, which will be costly and could take some time to accomplish. For now, let’s hope that AWS manages to avoid future failures. You’ll find Netflix’s full explanation at the source link below.

Filed under: Home Entertainment, Internet

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Source: The Netflix Tech Blog, Amazon Web Services

There are a number of web browser options out there available for your computer, but if you’re a PC user who doesn’t know much about the big, scary world of web browsers, then you’re probably an Internet Explorer user. And if you’re an Internet Explorer user, then Microsoft is urging you to update your browser immediately as they have found a new security hole over the weekend you’re not going to want to take a chance on.

The alert from Microsoft is directed at Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8 users specifically as a new “zero day” security hole was discovered that could potentially allow hackers to control your system after visiting an infected website.

“An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could gain the same user rights as the current user. … an attacker could host a website that contains a webpage that is used to exploit this vulnerability. In addition, compromised websites and websites that accept or host user-provided content or advertisements could contain specially crafted content that could exploit this vulnerability.”

A patch is currently available to fix the security hole, which should now be available for your downloading pleasure. This is just another reminder that whatever web browser you choose to use, please always be sure it’s always the latest version as the older your version, the more likely you’ll run into some security issues.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Instagram Launches New Year’s Eve Site Showcasing Users’ Celebration Photos, Foursquare Changes Privacy Policy To Publicly Display Users’ Full Names In 2013,

The year 2012 brought major changes for the Latino community. As Hispanics expanded to 10 percent of the voting population, helping to usher Obama in to a second term as president in November, few could deny that politicians finally have to take Latinos seriously.

At the same time, the Latino community faced tragic events. Mexican-American singer Jenni Rivera passed away in a tragic plane crash this month, and the shooting that took boxing legend Hector “Macho” Camacho’s life highlighted the rising violence in Puerto Rico that has sparked a social movement demanding peace.

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BY JOSH LEDERMAN & MATTHEW LEE, ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON (AP) — Doctors treating Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton for a blood clot say the clot formed in her head but they stress that they are confident she will make a full recovery.

In an update Monday on Clinton’s condition, her doctors say the blood clot did not result in a stroke, or neurological damage. The clot is located in the vein in the space between the brain and the skull behind the right ear.

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