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breakdowns

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breakdowns

Yahoo's real leadership problem: David Filo

Everyone's piling on Jerry Yang, saying Yahoo's founder-CEO needs to go. Why? The weak stock that provoked Microsoft's unsolicited bid may have been the result of his absentee ownership over the years. But Yahoo's deeper problem is the rot in its technical prowess. And that has everything to do with the quieter cofounder, David Filo. Filo has stayed behind the scenes, but wields considerable power over Yahoo's infrastructure. Requests for more hardware go through him, for example. When Yahoo executive Jeff Weiner joked in an internal all-hands movie about not going through IT because it was "too much paperwork," the audience surely laughed because they knew exactly what he meant. More »

Feature

5:00 PM on Wed May 7 2008
By Owen Thomas
6,101 views, 33 comments

Latest by X-Y: @BaldDog Bingo. The absolute correct source of "leadership problems" in Engineering, at Filo's expense apparently. more »

the chart

MySpace's technical triumph

The conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley is that MySpace, based in Los Angeles, is a tech nightmare, blaring songs through a user's speakers while crashing all the time. Skilled engineers are in short supply down south, so the website must be falling over all the time, right? Not so. Pingdom, a website-monitoring service, has tracked how often some of the top social networks have gone offline. Twitter, based in Web-savvy San Francisco, has been down for 37 hours from January through April. MySpace has been up 99.96 percent of the time. That's 33 percent less downtime than Yahoo 360, and 60 percent less than Google's Orkut. Score one for the LA crowd. The chart: More »

1:00 PM on Tue May 6 2008
By Owen Thomas
895 views, 8 comments

Latest by BobDope: MySpace is like a DDOS attack on your brain. more »

your privacy is an illusion

Facebook posts advertiser's driver's license for all the world to see

Musicians can promote their work through Facebook's Musician Pages. But before allowing them to upload music files, Facebook requires administrators to submit scans of their driver's licenses, to keep on file in case claims of copyright infringement come up. Last night, one of these administrators, an employee at Ping Pong Music, discovered Facebook had posted his license publicly on EMI artist This World Fair's page. He took a screenshot, which we've included below. More »

10:40 AM on Fri May 2 2008
By Nicholas Carlson
2,469 views, 6 comments

exits

Twitter cans another engineer

When Twitter hired Lee Mighdoll as VP of engineering and operations in January, cofounder Biz Stone called him the "perfect match" for the company. Not anymore. Mighdoll is out after just three months of the job. "The match was not perfect," Stone told SAI in an email. Mighdoll is the second engineer reported to have left Twitter in the last two days; architect Blaine Cook fled the country yesterday. Neither was able to fix Twitter's oft-reported propensity to crash. We hear the final straw to break Biz Stone's back was not the breakdown yesterday that TechCrunch described as a "privacy disaster". Makes sense, because isn't that Twitter's raison d'être?

8:40 AM on Thu Apr 24 2008
By Nicholas Carlson
903 views, 8 comments

Latest by ValleyStiff: @BartKela: clearly you have no clue about engineering management. more »

breakdowns

Ning fires VP of operations two days before major outage

Here's how things usually work: Have a major outage, then fire your operations guy. At Marc Andreessen's Ning, the social-network Web host best known for its porn sites, things run a bit differently. On Monday, CEO Gina Bianchini fired VP of operations Alexei Rodriguez. On Wednesday, the company saw all of Ning's networks go offline. We hear Rodriguez failed to deliver a promised upgrade to Ning's systems that would have avoided the problem; the outage was coincidental but almost inevitable, given Rodriguez's omission. The larger problem for Ning: No one seems to care that it was down. When you offer porn and still no one complains that they can't get to it, you have a problem which goes much deeper than database configurations.

8:40 AM on Wed Apr 23 2008
By Owen Thomas
1,540 views, 5 comments

Latest by Rockwell: Ning's social networks are primarily useful for creating viral expansion loops in my pants. more »

Web host experiences temporary truth in advertising Media Temple, a Web host which counts several prominent bloggers among its clients, offers an accurate description of its service in a recent downtime announcement: "(mt) Media Temple engineers have brought db servers 13-16 back online and apologize for the temporary convenience." True: It would be convenient if more bloggers were brought offline. [Media Temple]

4 comments

politics

Clinton's campaign accused of hacking Obama blogs

In the clip embedded below, an Obama supporter demonstrates how "someone hacked into Barack Obama's site" and changed a link into Obama's Community Blogs so that it instead directs users to Hillary Clinton's home page. We're shocked. Obama's Web presence is the product of Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes. Anyone familiar with that platform knows it's entirely resilient to human error or internal corruption. The video demonstrating the hack: More »

9:20 AM on Mon Apr 21 2008
By Nicholas Carlson
553 views, 5 comments

your privacy is an illusion

Tumblr security breakdown leaves scenesters exposed for 40 minutes

While editing administrator code today, Tumblr founder David Karp and developer Marco Arment inadvertently published private user data for 40 minutes. Karp reports on his blog that 27 email addresses were exposed. He told us that four accounts — including popular Tumblr blogs by Julia Allison and Pete Nidzgorski — had their passwords changed. Karp told Valleywag he knows who changed the passwords. "He was a registered user, so we were actually able to look up his info," Karp said. The suspected hacker won't lose his Tumblr account. "I don't think we'll be taking this out on him," Karp said.
We have a lot of info on what happened and we were able to recover quickly. We're very comfortable with our infrastructure, and will put some more practices in place to deal with any future human errors. We also feel extremely fortunate that our users have been so forgiving.

4:40 PM on Tue Apr 15 2008
By Nicholas Carlson
494 views, 7 comments

Latest by vulturesquadron: These guys are going to get hammered. They have no idea what they're up against. more »

Oklahoma exposes sex offenders' Social Security numbers A blogger noticed the Oklahoma Department of Corrections was making the Social Security numbers of thousands of registered sex offenders viewable through a security hole on a state website. Even after he notified the department, the problem remained. Only when he showed how to make state employees' personal information visible did the state fix the problem. [The Daily WTF]

1 comment

software

Why Microsoft wants Yahoo -- it's losing at paintball

Can Microsoft's army of programmers write software for the Web? Judging by a spate of recent outages, no. Hotmail, Messenger, and other services targeted at developers and partners have broken down recently. Which is bizarre: Writing an operating system is a vastly more complex affair than coding a website. "Like war versus paintball," says Ted Dziuba, the programmer and former editor of startup-debunker blog Uncov. Therein lies Microsoft's problem. Once you've trained to fight a real war, you can forget about winning at paintball. More »

5:00 PM on Thu Apr 10 2008
By Owen Thomas
1,796 views, 4 comments

Latest by bigdowro: Owen are you completely "damaged" to put a photo of a paintball guy in a IIIrd Reich Wehrmacht uniform on ValleyWag??? Least I can say it is bad taste & totally politically incorrect! I don't question the article but I wonder more »

breakdowns

We've been hacked! No wait, we're just incompetent

Senator Joe Lieberman accused his Democratic challenger Ned Lamont's supporters of a "coordinated attack" on his website during the campaign in 2006. The FBI investigated and found no evidence of foul play. The website had failed as a result of Lieberman campaign technicians' ineptitude. [NYT]

4:20 PM on Thu Apr 10 2008
By Jordan Golson
422 views, 1 comment

breakdowns

Amazon.com's grid-computing service goes offline for 90 minutes, saving its profitless customers money

A number of servers running Amazon.com's Elastic Compute Cloud service, which provides pay-by-the-hour computation, went offline this morning from 2 to 3:30 a.m. EC2 is one of Amazon's developer services, offering low-cost virtual servers mostly to startups. Dozens of users complained in this thread on Amazon's message board, where an Amazon staffer reported the "notworking team" — a Freudian slip for "networking"? — was on the problem. What were they complaining about? That their websites stopped losing money for 90 minutes? More »

10:40 AM on Mon Apr 7 2008
By Jordan Golson
930 views, 1 comment

Latest by sf_tech: nice cloud more »

sex trade

Still a few bugs in OkCupid's system

The Web's most normal pool of singles, OkCupid, is so easy. I thought it a testament to their smart matching software that my ex-boy and I bumped into one another there regularly. That is, until I heard of a match made by an OkCupid bug that tried to hook up a well-behaved lady with a married guy she knows from work. Here's my bug report. More »

12:00 PM on Fri Apr 4 2008
By Melissa Gira Grant
2,948 views, 8 comments

If you're trying to get Arrington to write about your startup, you're doing it wrong Head TechCruncher Michael Arrington says his site is slow "due to some sort of DOS [denial of service] attack." What, did Arrington give the wrong startup a bad review? [Twitter]

4 comments

breakdowns

Digg: We'll be back shortly -- in the meantime, here's some porn

Digg went down this morning and, while repairs were under way, a placeholder for Digg.com redirected users to some of the staff's favorite sites. Mostly the boring usuals. Kevin Rose recommended "Purple & Brown." PaidContent and TechCrunch were on the list. But then, some guy named Micah recommended SuicideGirls, the "alternative" porn site which features girls with piercings, colored hair and tattoos. The link might upset the sensitive users who made nice guy Jay Adelson yank our Gene Simmons sex tape post from Digg. For us, SuicideGirls beats screen-cleaning puppies any day. Only thing. What will advertisers think? We heard Digg hates porn because it likes money. The screenshot of Digg's porn-loving placeholder is below. More »

1:20 PM on Wed Mar 26 2008
By Nicholas Carlson
3,059 views, 3 comments

Latest by Figaro: Micah is a woman's name... which makes it even more fun! more »

breakdowns

Digg goes down! EVERYBODY PANIC

I got the strangest feeling of deja vu this morning. When I clicked over to Digg to see if Kevin Rose had sold out yet, I was greeted by an "Out of Service" message — in the middle of the day. The site is back up, but it reminded me of a similar outage in January: Digg went offline in the middle of the day while "making some changes." During the last outage, we thought the site was unintentionally taken offline. Generally downtimes are scheduled for out of the way hours like 3 A.M. on a Sunday — not 9 A.M. in the middle of the week. After Digg came back online in January, there were significant changes made to the algorithm that decides which stories make it to the front page, angering a few of Digg's higher profile users. What's the deal this time? Our theories and a poll after the jump. More »

9:40 AM on Wed Mar 26 2008
By Jordan Golson
1,357 views, 13 comments

Latest by Jordan Golson: @matto: Yeah, but I wouldn't notice those outages. You see, I actually visit Digg. more »

breakdowns

Can't you tell how clever John Mayer is from his bug report to Apple?

John Mayer sat there waiting — waiting — on his iTunes to load. It never did. And like the rest of us, he had to force quit. But instead of doing so and moving on, Mayer felt compelled to write a cheery missive to the folks at Apple. "Hi guys. John Mayer here. Nothing's worse than running to stale music on your iPod, am I right?" He goes on in such a manner. We know this because Mayer posted the below screenshot of his report to his blog, fully indicating his cleverness to those paying attention. At the end of his post, Mayer wonders how Apple engineers will react to his letter. Anyone care to inform us how it was greeted at One Infinite Loop? More »

9:00 AM on Wed Mar 26 2008
By Nicholas Carlson
2,155 views, 13 comments

Latest by flyover: that help request is awesome more »

breakdowns

Valleywag brought down by outage -- editor blames sci-fi fans

Coincidentally, the Valleywag crew was chatting in Campfire about how much we loved a new site we'd discovered, Downforeveryoneorjustme.com, right before we had to use it on our own site. Some theories we came up with: Nick Denton, Gawker Media's owner and publisher of Valleywag, likes to bring down his sites occasionally just to watch how his editors deal with the unbearable pressure of not being able to write. As part of Jason Calacanis's new Valleywag charm campaign, Mahalo guides posted so many links to us that it brought the site down. Or, most plausibly, outraged Arthur C. Clarke fans launched a denial-of-service campaign against the unremarkable observation that the deceased sci-fi writer was an admitted pedophile.

11:42 AM on Thu Mar 20 2008
By Owen Thomas
589 views, 13 comments

Latest by rsbear: Like anybody noticed... more »