Hasta La Gadget!

GoDaddy is one of the larger web hosts out there today and hosts hoards of websites in the US and abroad. The company has reportedly censored a Mexican website that … Continue reading

Yesterday the case of Naoki Hiroshima and the hack that resulted in his @N twitter account being extorted out of his control by a hacker came to light. Hiroshima outlines … Continue reading

A twitter user was recently extorted into giving up his twitter user name. It would be bad enough giving up your established twitter user name, but this one was worth … Continue reading

For some people, the Super Bowl isn’t about the game, but about the commercials. We saw a lot of them during this year’s game, and there was no shortage of advertisements relating to technology, cars, and movies. We decided to round up all of the Super Bowl commercials that we thought SlashGear readers would enjoy most, including ones from Samsung, Best Buy, GoDaddy, and even BlackBerry. We’ve embedded some of our personal favorites right in this post, with links to all the other ads that are relevant.

Samsung ended up going all out this year for their Super Bowl ad, taking up a full two minutes of airtime, costing them around $16 million after it was all said and done. Actors Seth Rogen and Paul Rudd, as well as NBA all-star LeBron James made appearances in the commercial, and discussed some ideas on what Samsung’s “next big thing” could be. BlackBerry (formerly known as RIM) aired their first-ever Super Bowl ad, spending a few million dollars on an ad showing off the new BlackBerry Z10, which according to the ad, will light you on fire, so be careful.

Best Buy ended up airing their own Super Bowl ad as well, and it features SNL alum and Parks & Recreation star Amy Poehler, who is pretty much the most adorable and funniest woman in show business right now, so we have to give it up for Best Buy for pulling off such a cute and witty ad.

We knew GoDaddy would make an appearance at the Super Bowl, as they do every year, but this time they aired two ads, one featuring the typical sexy theme that you know and love, and then there was an ad that actually wasn’t that bad. The company advertised their .co domain names, and the ad rings true of anyone with an original idea these days.

As far as the automotive commercials, it was a hit or miss mostly. Audi’s “Prom” ad was probably our favorite one out of the bunch, with Dodge’s “Paul Harvey” commercial at a close second. Other car ads included VW’s semi-racist Jamaican ad, Hyundai’s adorable “Team” ad featuring kids with super powers, Kia’s “Hotbots” ad, Mercedes-Benz with their celebrity-filled commercial (as well as one featuring Kate Upton), Lincoln’s Jimmy Fallon ad and “Phoenix” teaser, and an awkward Toyota ad featuring Big Bang Theory star Kaley Cuoco.

Movie trailers were also hot stuff during Super Bowl commercial breaks. The Iron Man 3 trailer caught our eye the most, with Star Trek: Into Darkness also showing off a quick teaser for us. World War Z also made a quick appearance, and we also saw an extended teaser for Johnny Depp’s upcoming movie, The Lone Ranger.

Now we want to hear what you think. We know not every ad this year was amazing, and some were iffy at best. What was your favorite commercial from the Super Bowl? Which tech company blew it out of the park? Which one could’ve been better? What suggestions would you make to the creators of the ads? Sound off in the comments below!

SlashGear’s Super Bowl XLVII ad spot roundup is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Yesterday it became apparent late in the day that GoDaddy was having issues with keeping a collection of webpages up as they were reported as under attack by hackers – today it seems that this is entirely untrue. Though GoDaddy and collection of webpages they work with did indeed go down for a period yesterday, they’ve today sent out a statement that notes that no external forces had to do with the incident. Instead of it being Anonymous or some other nameless hacker dropping a DDoS attack or any number of other malicious actions, it was simply an internal network issue.

GoDaddy’s interim CEO Scott Wagner has sent a message out to a set of webpages affected by the drop, including TechCrunch, which noted that, “once the issues were identified, we took corrective actions for our customers and GoDaddy.com.” In addition, a site outage investigation report was released today with a bit more info:

“Yesterday, GoDaddy.com and many of our customers experienced intermittent service outages starting shortly after 10 a.m. PDT. Service was fully restored by 4 p.m. PDT.

The service outage was not caused by external influences. It was not a “hack” and it was not a denial of service attack (DDoS). We have determined the service outage was due to a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables. Once the issues were identified, we took corrective actions to restore services for our customers and GoDaddy.com. We have implemented measures to prevent this from occurring again.

At no time was any customer data at risk or were any of our systems compromised.

Throughout our history, we have provided 99.999% uptime in our DNS infrastructure. This is the level our customers expect from us and the level we expect of ourselves. We have let our customers down and we know it.

We take our business and our customers’ businesses very seriously. We apologize to our customers for these events and thank them for their patience.”

– Wagner

This type of attack – or issue – is enough to make some of the more gigantic hosted webpages think about their future with the business. Because of a downtime like this, massive amounts of otherwise earned cash will have been lost. A company whose main task is to keep webpages hosted successfully on the web at all hours of the day has this one key element that will act as bad PR for them – what GoDaddy must hope now is that this incident fades away quickly.

GoDaddy denies all external influence in Crash is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.