Month: February 2017

Enlarge (credit: K W Reinsch)

On Tuesday, AOL (yes, it’s still around) suddenly announced to users of AOL Instant Messenger (including yours truly) that it would be disabling access to its network through at least one third-party messaging app (Adium) as of March 28. Third-party chat apps like Adium, Trillian, or Pidgin use the company's OSCAR chat protocol to handle AIM messages.

The service will continue to live on through AOL’s proprietary standalone chat app, which exists for MacOS, Windows, iOS, and Android.

Just got this AIM message. Anyone else still using AIM out there? pic.twitter.com/2WpR1lTwmH

— Cyrus Farivar (@cfarivar) February 28, 2017

One Ars editor reported no such message when using the Trillian app, while another editor reported that her AIM account would not connect via Adium at all.

Enlarge (credit: Amazon)

When the Amazon infrastructure-as-a-service cloud goes down, Internet users are going to notice.

Amazon Web Services, which powers a whole bunch of websites and online services, has been struggling today, and numerous sites that rely on Amazon infrastructure have gone offline as a result. Appropriately enough, "Is It Down Right Now?," a site that tells you whether other sites are down, has been struggling to stay online. Other apparent victims include The AV Club, Trello, Quora, IFTTT, Open Whisper Systems, and websites created with Wix.

Oh the irony! https://t.co/UlVux2PETS is down now too. #aws #s3

— Gillian Owen (@gilliancowen) February 28, 2017

Amazon itself was initially having trouble providing updates to its service health site. But the company posted this note at 2:35pm ET: "We have now repaired the ability to update the service health dashboard... We continue to experience high error rates with S3 in US-EAST-1, which is impacting various AWS services. We are working hard at repairing S3, believe we understand root cause, and are working on implementing what we believe will remediate the issue."

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Today at an event in Los Angeles, YouTube announced a huge new feature that could change what you watch on the online video platform. The company debuted YouTube TV, a television streaming service that combines live content from broadcast and cable networks with content from the online creators that have made YouTube so successful. This comes as YouTube also revealed the passing of a huge milestone: as of last year, users globally watch one billion hours of content on the site every day.

YouTube TV will launch in the coming months and will start off with over 40 networks available for streaming. Subscribers will be able to stream live content from these networks, and record shows for later viewing with no storage limits. A YouTube TV subscription will cost $35 per month, and that gives you six separate accounts to share with friends and family.

At the event, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki introduced the new subscription service by diving into three big changes in how people consume content over the years. The rise of cable was the first, which expanded the universe of channele selection to including news, music, sports, and scripted shows. The second was the rise online video, which continued to expand the types of content available and made way for personality-driven content like that of many YouTube creators. The final was the rise of the smartphone, which changed the way people consumed content by moving it out of the home and into people's hands, wherever they may be in the world. Wojcicki claims YouTube TV is a product of all those changes, and it puts YouTube TV directly in competition with other streaming services including Sling TV and Playstation Vue.