Franz's blag

Don’t worry, it’s not just you. The internet on the East Coast is unbearable right now, and you can blame Amazon. On Thursday afternoon, you probably noticed images and video were slow to load on some popular websites. The culprit is AWS S3, or Amazon Web Services, a massive cloud storage service run by the online retail giant, which became unreachable sometime early Tuesday afternoon.

East Coast internet outage: Why is the internet down? What’s causing internet issues today?

The internet isn’t technically down, but Amazon S3 services are down in the Northeast region of the U.S. — which is affected any website or company that use it to host files.

What is AWS S3?

AWS S3 hosts images, pictures and videos for other companies and websites (the S3 stands for simple storage service). So when it has issues, it means that you may still be able to visit websites, but any large files they use that are hosted by AWS won’t show appear or may look broken. According to the Independent, some of the websites affected by Tuesday’s issues include Imgur, Medium and SoundCloud.

How do Amazon Web Services work?

AWS charges users for the service of storing their data. So other sites use it to host their files, including images, videos and audio, and then link out to them. That way, the smaller websites can rely on AWS to host larger files.

Is there an AWS status page I can check?

Yes — Amazon has a status page that users can check for news about outages. But Amazon is notoriously bad about reporting its own issues, and, on Tuesday afternoon, the AWS status page indicated that most service was operating normally and featured a small alert at the top warning users of “Increased Error Rates.” The note also said “We’re continuing to work to remediate the availability issues for Amazon S3 in US-EAST-1.”

Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s DLC “Expansion Pass” ⊟

For $20, you get access to two DLC packs coming later this year: 

The first content pack is scheduled to launch this summer, and will include the addition of a Cave of Trials challenge, a new hard mode and a new feature for the in-game map. The second content pack will launch in Holiday 2017, and adds new challenges that will let players enjoy a new dungeon and a new original story.

Immediately upon buying the Expansion Pass, however, you’ll get three treasure chests: one with a Switch logo shirt for Link to wear, and two more with unspecified “useful items.”

The Wii U and Switch versions have the same items, so… you get a Switch shirt on Wii U too. Sure, why not.

Hackers just helped NASA save a treasure trove of climate data from an uncertain future

Roughly 200 programmers congregated Saturday in the Doe Library at the University of California, Berkeley, to take part in a hackathon focusing on NASA’s earth sciences programs and the Department of Energy.

Wired reported the group of coders had the common goal of saving data that could be deleted or otherwise tucked away under Trump.

Using web-crawler scripts and patching together data sets, the hackers were able to successfully preserve 8,404 web pages onto the Internet Archive — a digital library with a plethora of screenshots from websites — and download 25GB of data from 101 public datasets. Read more (2/14/17 3:06 PM)