CSCL2002

Tweet, Twee, Tw, T…

June 17, 2010 by · Leave a Comment 

Twitter-holics are suffering endlessly as Twitter went MIA on Monday. For once, this is not a story of hackers and DOS attacks and such. Instead, this is about a botched upgrade job.
The upgrade was in itself a move to address problems the service was experiencing for several days. The website and its platform crashed several times in a one week period which led the company to do some serious hunting. They eventually blamed the errors on the planning, configuring and monitoring of their internal network. It was based on this finding that an initiative was taken to sharpen the monitoring process and to improve the load balancing by doubling the internal network’s capacity.
Unfortunately, by Monday, “Fail Whale” and its new companion “Something is technically wrong” made repeated appearances to users. In addition to this, Tweets went missing or got duplicated and the web page also malfunctioned at sporadic intervals. This is perhaps the worst development that Twitter has suffered in terms of outages.
Although the service was plagued by similar sort of outages early in its life, Twitter has come a long way in those four years. The outages then didn’t matter as much as they do now. The reliance that users have on it, especially the companies that use it, are very high. Companies are known to use it for customer communications among other things and in this regard, it is a serious disruption of services.
The company stated that their engineers are working flat out to solve the issue, but so far nothing solid has emerged to alleviate the problem.
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The Hurt is About to Get Worse

June 4, 2010 by · Leave a Comment 

With the news that Lime Wire is about to go down in flames, others have found courage to hope. The movie industry has also been battling piracy just as much as the RIAA and the newest and most ambitious entrant in to this foray is Voltage Pictures.

Voltage is the independent production company that responsible for the Oscar winning “Hurt Locker”. The company is going after no less than five thousand John Doe’s in a lawsuit. The names of the persons are not known yet as the company has only been able to collect the IP addresses of the pirates. They want all those who downloaded the movie to delete it from whatever storage mediums they have it on and also pay up actual or statutory damages to cover the expenses of the lawsuits.

The plan seems ambitious and does reek a little of bitterness and money grubbing. It is ambitious because even a massive organization like the RIAA has not been able to succeed in this area. The fact that the movie didn’t make more than 16 million dollars at the home box office also could be due to the movie being downloaded and distributed. The lawsuit could be a way of recovering some of the lost revenue, although it makes Voltage look a little desperate.

The company’s co-founder, Nicolas Chartier, is not bothered by the bad press that may be generated because of this lawsuit. In fact he seems to be quite happy to meet it and will probably find a way to use it to his own benefit.

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