Hasta La Gadget!

GigaOm has some shots of Netflix’s new personalized profiles, which break down preferences and watching habits by person, on the same account. So a dad won’t be inundated with Twilight movies, and so on. It looks more or less like you’d expect, with the profile pictures being fairly generic cartoon faces. Check out the rest of the images over at GigaOm. [GigaOm] More »

This sleek, simple HP pebble is more powerful than it looks. The Pocket Playlist is a portable storage device which can store and record media from a host of sources, then stream it to five devices over Wi-Fi, no internet connection required. More »

Amazon has publicly apologized for the outage that stopped Netflix users from spending Christmas Eve slumped in front of How It’s Made re-runs while slurping egg nog, blaming human error for the server downtime. According to Amazon, a developer inadvertently deleted part of the “ELB state data” which handles load balancing – which servers deliver content to each user across different locations – and it took several hours of testing and troubleshooting to figure out what had gone wrong.

“The service disruption began at 12:24 PM PST on December 24th when a portion of the ELB state data was logically deleted. This data is used and maintained by the ELB control plane to manage the configuration of the ELB load balancers in the region (for example tracking all the backend hosts to which traffic should be routed by each load balancer). The data was deleted by a maintenance process that was inadvertently run against the production ELB state data. This process was run by one of a very small number of developers who have access to this production environment. Unfortunately, the developer did not realize the mistake at the time. After this data was deleted, the ELB control plane began experiencing high latency and error rates for API calls to manage ELB load balancers” Amazon

Unfortunately, the initial efforts to take a snapshot of the system configurations prior to the accidental deletion – a process which took several hours – did not work. A second method was cooked up, which was more successful; however, installing it and bringing all of the systems back online was not so straightforward as simply overwriting the patchy section of data.

Instead, Amazon’s AWS team had to merge the new ELB state data with the old – a process which took almost three hours alone – and then spent a further five hours gradually re-enabling all of the service workflows and APIs in a way which did not affect any correctly running process. Amazon says the system was operating normally by 12:05PM PST.

“Last, but certainly not least, we want to apologize. We know how critical our services are to our customers’ businesses, and we know this disruption came at an inopportune time for some of our customers. We will do everything we can to learn from this event and use it to drive further improvement in the ELB service” Amazon

As well as the apology, Amazon says it has implemented new policies to make sure the same problem doesn’t happen again. The ELB state data is now harder to delete without specific approval, rather than under blanket permissions for the small number of developers with access, and Amazon has updated its data recovery policies with the new skills it was forced to learn. “We are confident that we could recover ELB state data in a similar event significantly faster (if necessary) for any future operational event” the company’s data team says.

In fact, Amazon plans to make some lemonade from the Christmas Eve lemons, building new server systems that can automatically recover data rather than wait for human intervention. “We believe that we can reprogram our ELB control plane workflows to more thoughtfully reconcile the central service data with the current load balancer state” the AWS team suggests. “This would allow the service to recover automatically from logical data loss or corruption without needing manual data restoration.”

[via Bloomberg]

Amazon: Sorry for Netflix downtime, here’s what we got wrong is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Where were you during the great Netflix outage of Christmas 2012? If you were home attempting to enjoy your holiday break by attempting to access Netflix, then you know it was impossible to access its Instant Streaming service as it was completely crippled due to Amazon’s issues with their ELBs. It looks as though people who are on holiday break between today and tomorrow to celebrate the coming new year will have to go without their Netflix fix as the service has been experiencing extended outages for the majority of the day.

The reports of Netflix’s downtime have come in through a number of sources including Sitedown.co and DownRightNow, with the most vocal reports coming directly from Twitter users who were hoping to cuddle up with a good movie on their day off from work.

As of now, Netflix has yet to officially announce the downtime through their official channels, but we’ll keep an eye out for any changes throughout the day. For now, it looks like you Netflix users will have to find your entertainment elsewhere until Netflix gets over this current outage. Might we recommend YouTube?

[Update: Netflix has released this official statement in regards to today’s service disruption:

“We are experiencing some technical difficulty with the Netflix DVD Web site, which as a result may not be available for all members. Our engineers are working to address this issue. Netflix streaming is not impacted.”]

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Elephant Eats Chinese Tourist’s iPhone In Thailand Park, Fun’s ‘We Are Young’ Covered By Old Computer Parts,

We talked about Netflix and the company’s efforts to allow users to share the movies they are watching with friends on social networks such as Facebook. The reason Netflix can’t allow users to automatically share what they’re watching with Facebook friends now has to do with a law that’s been on the books in the United States for years concerning privacy. That act is called the Video Privacy Protection Act.

Last month the Senate Judiciary Committee approved an amendment that would be attached to the Video Privacy Protection Act Amendments Act that would also address accessing other computer information. Specifically the amendment attached to the Netflix bill would’ve required federal law enforcement agencies to get a court order before being able to monitor e-mail or other data stored remotely on the cloud.

The Senate was reportedly ready to approve the video privacy bill including the amendment to require law enforcement officers to get a court order to monitor e-mails. However, for an unknown reason the senators decided to drop the amendment requiring a court order.

Currently the law in the US allows federal agencies to collect e-mail and other data stored on the cloud without needing a warrant if the information has been stored on a third-party server for over 180 days. Rather than obtaining a court order the federal agents only need to show that they have “reasonable grounds to believe “that information located in e-mails or on cloud servers would be useful in a criminal investigation.

[via AllGov]

Amendment to Netflix bill requiring a warrant to monitor e-mail is cut at the last minute is written by Shane McGlaun & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.