The Great Netflix Christmas Outage Is Thankfully Over

The great Netflix outage of Christmas 2012 is thankfully over, according to a tweet from the company. The service went down last night, during arguably one of the worst possible times ever, when many people stuck at home with their families would hope to seek a little refuge in some streaming movies.
Special thanks to our awesome members for being patient. We're back to normal streaming levels. We hope everyone has a great holiday.
— Netflix US (@netflix) December 25, 2012
Netflix blamed the outage on the Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud, which frequently takes out parts of the Internet when its servers go down. AWS reported "Elastic Load Balancing Service" issues on its status page last night and this morning. Curiously, this time, the outage only affected Netflix's video service and not Amazon's own video service, as GigaOm's Barb Darrow pointed out. Heroku, a cloud application platform, was also down. Perhaps its not such a good idea for Netflix to use its competition to host its site? As for the rest of you, you can now go back to spending quality, no-talking allowed, movie-time with the fam.

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Netflix streaming service back online after outage

Those hoping to spend the holiday watching streaming video from Netflix can now get back in front of their TVs, tablets and PCs after a Christmas Eve outage.
A Netflix Inc. spokesman said by email Tuesday morning that the service has been fully restored.
The outage affected customers in the Americas starting around 12:30 p.m. PST on Monday. The company, which is based in Los Gatos, Calif., blames problems with Amazon Web Services, and says it is investigating further.
Amazon Web Services provides companies with online storage and computing. It is separate from Seattle-based Amazon.com Inc.'s better-known shopping website.

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Netflix suffers Christmas Eve outage, points to Amazon

 An outage at one of Amazon's web service centers hit users of Netflix Inc.'s streaming video service on Christmas Eve and was not fully resolved until Christmas day, a spokesman for the movie rental company said on Tuesday.
The outage impacted Netflix subscribers across Canada, Latin America and the United States, and affected various devices that enable users to stream movies and television shows from home, Netflix spokesman Joris Evers said. Such devices range from gaming consoles such as Nintendo Wii and PlayStation 3 to Blu-ray players.
Evers said that the issue was the result of an outage at an Amazon Web Services' cloud computing center in Virginia, and started at about 12:30 p.m. PST (2030 GMT) on Monday and was fully restored Tuesday morning, although streaming was available for most users late on Monday.
"We are investigating exactly what happened and how it could have been prevented," Evers said.
"We are happy that people opening gifts of Netflix or Netflix capable devices can watch TV shows and movies and apologize for any inconvenience caused last night," he added.
An outage at Amazon Web Services, or AWS, knocked out such sites as Reddit and Foursquare in April of last year.
Amazon Web Services was not immediately available for comment. Evers, the Netflix spokesman, declined to comment on the company's contracts with Amazon.

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Samsung Elec seeks U.S. sales ban on some Ericsson products

Samsung Electronics said on Wednesday it had filed a complaint against Ericsson with the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC), requesting a U.S. import ban and sales ban on some of the Swedish telecoms equipment maker's products.
The action taken on Friday by the world's top smartphone maker, which accused Ericsson of breaching seven of its patents, came after Ericsson requested an ITC U.S. import ban on Samsung products and sued the South Korean firm for patent infringement.
"We have sought to negotiate with Ericsson in good faith. However, Ericsson has proven unwilling to continue such negotiations by making unreasonable claims, which it is now trying to enforce in court," Samsung Electronics said in a statement.
"The accused Ericsson products include telecommunications networking equipment, such as base stations," Samsung said.
With Ericsson suffering a big drop in sales at its network unit, down 17 percent in the third quarter, it is turning to the courts to maintain its patent income, part of a wider trend where big technology names are fiercely protecting intellectual property as global sales of tablets and smartphones boom.
Ericsson is facing a growing challenge from Samsung Electronics, a smaller player in the network equipment market.
"I'm sure that at this point, no one in the industry would underestimate Samsung's ability to become a significant player, if not the leader, in a new segment of the overall market for telecommunications hardware," Florian Mueller, a patent expert, said in a blog posting on Monday.
"This certainly adds a more strategic dimension to the Ericsson-Samsung dispute."
Samsung Electronics and its arch smartphone rival Apple Inc have been also locked in patent disputes in at least 10 countries as they vie to dominate the mobile market and win over customers with their latest gadgets.
The European Commission on Friday charged Samsung Electronics with abusing its dominant position in seeking to bar rival Apple from using a patent deemed essential to mobile phone use.
Samsung Electronics shares were trading up 1.3 percent, outperforming the wider market's 0.7 percent gain as of 0037 GMT.

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Netflix blames Amazon for Christmas Eve outage

 An outage at one of Amazon's web service centers hit users of Netflix Inc's streaming video service on Christmas Eve and was not fully resolved until Christmas Day, a spokesman for the movie rental company said on Tuesday.
The outage impacted Netflix subscribers across Canada, Latin America and the United States, and affected various devices that enable users to stream movies and television shows from home, Netflix spokesman Joris Evers said. Such devices range from gaming consoles like the Nintendo Wii and PlayStation 3 to Blu-ray DVD players.
Netflix, which is based in Los Gatos, California, has 30 million streaming subscribers worldwide, of which more than 27 million are in the Americas region that was exposed to the outage and could have potentially been affected, Evers said.
Evers said the issue was the result of an outage at an Amazon Web Services' cloud computing center in Virginia and started at about 12:30 p.m. PST (2030 GMT) on Monday and was fully restored before 8:00 a.m. PST Tuesday morning, although streaming was available for most users by 11:00 p.m. PST on Monday.
The event marks the latest in a series of outages from Amazon Web Services, with one occurring in April of last year that knocked out such sites as Reddit and Foursquare.
"We are investigating exactly what happened and how it could have been prevented," Evers of Netflix said.
"We are happy that people opening gifts of Netflix or Netflix capable devices can watch TV shows and movies and apologize for any inconvenience caused last night," he added.
Officials at Amazon Web Services were not available for comment. Evers, the Netflix spokesman, declined to comment on the company's contracts with Amazon.

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Cold water for Google Fiber fans: Covering the whole country could cost $140 billion

Bad news for those of us who would love to see Google (GOOG) expand its fiber network out to the entire country: Doing so may be prohibitively expensive. Business Insider points us to a new research note from Goldman Sachs estimating that it would cost Google an estimated $140 billion or more to make Google Fiber available to the rest of the United States. Since Google has “only” $45 billion on hand and since its annual CAPEX budget is $4.5 billion, it’s highly unlikely that Google Fiber will be rolling into most peoples’ neighborhoods in the near future. And that’s not the worst part — according to Goldman, “even a 50 million household build out, which would represent less than half of all US homes, could cost as much as $70 billion,” meaning Google would likely have to take out a major loan just to get Fiber to most major markets.

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Sprint reportedly looking to team up with Dish on its proposed national wireless network

The intrigue surrounding the Dish Network’s (DISH) plans to build out its own nationwide mobile data network just got even more interesting. Unnamed sources have told Bloomberg that Sprint (S) has been trying to hash out a deal with Dish that would let the satellite television provider “offer mobile-phone service over the carrier’s network” in exchange for giving Sprint “access to Dish’s mobile airwaves, which aren’t currently being used.” From there, the companies would either “share revenue from customers who sign up for a Dish wireless service, or Dish may pay Sprint a fee to use the network.” Dish, which wants to use a 40MHz chunk of satellite spectrum on the 2GHz band for terrestrial LTE-Advanced services, has also reportedly held talks with Google (GOOG) to jointly operate a nationwide LTE network that would officially set up the companies as direct competitors with wireless giants Verizon (VZ) and AT&T (T).

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NASA: Apocalypse, No!

With the Mayan apocalypse fast approaching (two weeks!), a NASA senior scientist has reassured the world that the space agency isn't hiding any intel on the order of the universe and its impending implosion December 21. "There’s no cosmic catastrophe coming," David Morrison said definitively to Current TV's Cenk Uygur. (Watch the full video below.) RELATED: There's No Excuse for Missing Tomorrow's Total Lunar Eclipse See, one of the prevailing theories for how the world will come to an end this month is that the planets will all align in some way to trigger hugegantic natural disasters and other chaos on that day. Actually, a lot of the theories about the world ending involve space, a frontier the Mayans probably knew little about. There's the one about Nibiru, the sun's dark star counterpart that is coming our way as we speak. Or, the idea that the sun has reached a solar maximum that will lead to our death and destruction. To all of that, NASA just says no — just as it has insisted for months now, official agency explainers and all. RELATED: Forget Mars: There's Water on Mercury! But why should we believe this man now? Couldn't his statement be a part of some NASA cover-up conspiracy to keep humanity calm before the big death-storm? Sure. But he is the agency's senior scientist for the search for life elsewhere, and NASA has a pretty good track record for predicting when objects will come into earth's orbit. And if there were a giant projectile headed our way, we'd have seen it by now, as Space's Stephanie Pappas points out.

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‘Six strikes’ ISP policy could be a disaster in the making

ISPs have delayed implementing their “six strikes” anti-piracy program so many times now that we’re beginning to wonder if the whole thing isn’t just a giant bluff. All the same, TIME’s Matt Peckham has written an interesting piece about how the long-threatened policy could be a nightmare for apartment building owners and small businesses that rely upon shared connections. Basically, Peckham says that the new policy could amount to a form of collective punishment for users on such connections, who may have to implement measures such as deploying tracking software to discover where copyright violations are happening. “Who’s responsible for each infraction?” he asks rhetorically. “Who should be punished? The entire complex, by throttling or at some point terminating our Internet service? Each unit in the complex pays for shared Internet equally as part of our monthly association fees. We’re not a business — there’s no CEO. The few of us who manage the Internet on behalf of the rest can’t act unilaterally to preempt potential infractions by blocking aspects of the service by introducing content filters the way a private company might.” Ars Technica earlier this month reported some details on exactly how the oft-delayed six strikes policy will work in practice. Basically, there are three “stages” ISPs will go through before taking action: a “notice” phase that “involves letting users know they’ve been tracked on copyright-infringing sites”; an “acknowledgement” phase in which “the customer will have to actually acknowledge having received those notices”; and finally, the “mitigation” phase where “users who have traded copyrighted files are actually punished” through either having their speeds throttled or having access to certain sites blocked. Peckham admits that he doesn’t know for sure how this policy will impact shared connections such as the one in his apartment complex, but he’s worried because ISPs haven’t yet outlined any of the specifics yet and is worried that this could be one of the major reasons why they keep delaying implementing it: Because they have no idea how to make it work practically. “I’d like to see the CCI and participating ISPs lay all the details about ‘six strikes’ on the table, proactively, instead of letting them trickle out in leaked documents and casual interviews,” he writes. “Don’t just backdoor the policy and expect users, especially where Internet’s shared, to somehow reverse-engineer what they’re responsible for, what happens if they fail to meet some new policy threshold and so forth. Be upfront with customers.”

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How Apple may have turned Samsung into its very own ‘Frankenstein’s monster’

Were Nietzsche alive today and covering the tech industry, he might say something along the lines of, “And what you outsource to the abyss, the abyss outsources also onto you.” Over at Asymco’s blog, James Allworth has written a very interesting piece arguing that Apple (AAPL) really has itself to blame for the rise of smartphone rival Samsung (005930). In fact, Allworth contends that Apple’s reliance on Samsung as a component supplier may have taught the South Korean manufacturer everything it needed to know about effective smartphone design and supply chain management. Allworth’s argument can be summarized thusly: Apple spent a good part of the last decade thumping its competition because it had gone through “a long gestation period” where it perfected both its products and its business practices in ways that couldn’t have been easily copied by competitors unless they were privy to Apple’s trade secrets. To replicate Apple’s success in this area, it would likely take competitors years of going through similar gestation periods just to catch up. But Allworth then throws something else into the mix: What if the biggest threat to Apple didn’t come from well-known electronics manufacturers such as Nokia (NOK) and RIM (RIMM), but from the companies it had long relied upon to supply it with components? “When Apple went through this transformative process, where the design whittled down the broad range of offerings to just a few, and they generated the scale on the business side that accompanied that — they weren’t actually the only one to go through that process,” Allworth contends. “Apple’s partners — their suppliers — went through it with them. And they’ve got very big, and very good at what they do. Samsung, obviously, is among those partners.” The irony, of course, is that Apple’s mastery of its supply chain and its approach to outsourcing have been two of the reasons why the company has turned into one of the most profitable the world has ever seen. And if Allworth’s theory is correct, then it’s no wonder that Apple is in such a rush to ditch Samsung as a component supplier, because otherwise any further refinement of its design and management practices would only stand to benefit the company that has become its fiercest rival.

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T-Mobile to Offer Cheapest iPhone 5 in 2013

T-Mobile, the smallest of the "big four" wireless carries in the United States, already offers the country's cheapest iPhone service -- if you have an unlocked iPhone. And according to Engadget's Brad Molen, more than a million unlocked iPhones are on T-Mobile's network already. Now, T-Mobile has announced that it will "add Apple products to its portfolio in the coming year," according to parent company Deutsche Telekom AG. And while that could mean anything from the new iPad Mini to an as-yet-unreleased Apple product of some kind, many expect T-Mobile to finally get the iPhone, making it the last major carrier in the United States to get it. If T-Mobile does, and it continues to offer its $30 "Unlimited Web & Text with 100 Minutes" plan, that may make T-Mobile's iPhone the cheapest one out there -- even if it costs hundreds of dollars more up front than on AT&T. Subsidies aren't just for big corporations Most of the big-name wireless carriers in the United States offer what are called "subsidized" smartphones, meaning you don't pay their whole cost up front. Instead, you pay a discounted price (which can be as little as $0.01), but are locked into a wireless contract for up to 2 years. Wireless customers who switch before their contract is up have to pay an "early termination fee," which can go over and above the actual cost of the smartphone. Buy now, save later With prepaid smartphone plans, on the other hand, you pay the whole cost of the phone up front and afterward it's yours to keep (whether its SIM card is locked into one network or not). And with the announcement that T-Mobile is going prepaid-only starting next year, that means any iPhone the company carries will be of the unsubsidized variety. Apple currently sells the 16 GB iPhone 5 for $649, contract-free, on its website. It also sells the 16 GB iPhone 4S for $549, however, while contract-free carrier Virgin Mobile sells the same phone unsubsidized for $449 with a $35 per month data plan -- not too much more expensive than T-Mobile's. Lessons of the past​ It's hard to say how much T-Mobile would offer an iPhone 5 for if the device landed on its network. Virgin Mobile started out charging more up front and offering a $30 plan, while Cricket currently sells the contract-free iPhone 5 for $499 but its service starts at $55. Assuming T-Mobile continues to offer its current "web exclusive" $30 unlimited plan for a hypothetical iPhone 5 on its network, it's not likely to be discounted much if at all from Apple's asking price. Just paying for 5 GBs of data per month from AT&T would cost $1,200 over 2 years, however, plus the $199 cost of a subsidized iPhone (and you have to pay for voice minutes and texting on top of that). Meanwhile, it's possible right now to buy an unlocked iPhone 5 from Apple and get 2 years of T-Mobile's $30 service for $1,369. That includes 5 GBs of data before connection speed throttling, plus unlimited texting and 100 voice minutes per month. ​Looking to the future T-Mobile offers the cheapest iPhone 5 service right now. And if the "Apple products" T-Mobile is getting next year include the iPhone 5, T-Mobile customers may see even better offerings coming their way in the near future. Jared Spurbeck is an open-source software enthusiast, who uses an Android phone and an Ubuntu laptop PC. He has been writing about technology and electronics since 2008.

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