By: Cynthia Herbert :: 8:09 PM
Trying to log on to Reddit tonight, but having difficulty? Don’t worry, you’re not alone – the site has had issues most of the afternoon, and was recently taken offline for maintenance within the past hour.
Many users reported seeing messages about the site “taking too long” to make a page for them, and after several hours of these issues, and cycling up and down, the site switched to the message seen above, “Reddit is down for emergency maintenance.”
No estimated fix time has been communicated yet.
By Paul Thomson :: 1:16 AM
Update:Â As of 2:45 AM, it appears that Amazon’s cloud services are coming online again.
With the northeast in the grips of a deep freeze and blizzard, many people are stuck indoors tonight, hunkered down in front of the glowing screens of laptops and televisions. What they’re likely not doing, is watching Netflix and surfing on some parts of the social web, however.
Around 12:30 AM, an outage occurred with Amazon’s cloud storage service, throwing many databases and applications offline. Some of the affected sites include Netflix, Amazon streaming media, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Steam, Tumblr, and various blogs and websites that depend on Amazon’s services to host and deliver their data.
The outage appears to be centered in one of Amazon’s East Coast data centers, according to Tweets from various sources trying to pinpoint the problem, but no official status update has been given from Amazon yet.
By Cynthia Herbert :: 1:02 PM
The British drama series Downton Abbey has many fans here in the United States, and one of them created the Lego masterpiece seen above as a Christmas present for his girlfriend.
23-year-old Eric Stevens, from Rochester, NY, created the building in the fictional series, as well as eleven Lego cast members to go along with it.
Stevens employed a digital design program to model the abbey, using photos and aerial shots of Highclere Castle where the series is filmed. He also relied on floor plans of the building that he found online.
All told, it took Stevens about 15 hours to recreate the TV setting in plastic bricks, and about $250 in supplies.
And his girlfriend’s reaction? She Tweeted: “My boyfriend made me Downton Abbey out of LEGO for Xmas. Is he a keeper?”
More photos of the Lego set, as well as the accompanying cast members as Lego figurines, available on Stevens’ Flickr account.
By Paul Thomson :: 5:04 PM
Social picture sharing service SnapChat was compromised last month, with hackers making off with a database filled with SnapChat usernames and mobile phone numbers.
The hackers have now posted this information online – data for over 4 million SnapChat users.
In an explanation provided to industry blog Tech Crunch, the hackers claimed that they stole and posted the information as a way to encourage SnapChat to increase its security efforts.
Our motivation behind the release was to raise the public awareness around the issue, and also put public pressure on SnapChat to get this exploit fixed. It is understandable that tech startups have limited resources but security and privacy should not be a secondary goal. Security matters as much as user experience does.
As a sort of courtesy to users who had their data stolen, the hackers have only made partial mobile phone numbers available in the dataset posted online. However, they have not ruled out releasing the full phone numbers, should SnapChat not tighten its security procedures.
Though SnapChat has patched some of its systems to prevent a similar exploit, there are still ways for hackers to obtain confidential user data, according to Gibson Security group – a firm that conducts routine hack attempts into companies and databases to inform them of security issues.
Gibson has provided a website for SnapChat users to check if their data was stolen in the attack.
By Leslie Spellman :: 3:23 PM
James Avery, the actor who played Uncle Phil on the 1990s television sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air has died of complications from open-heart surgery.
His death occurred on Tuesday afternoon, and was confirmed by both his manager, as well as actor Alfonso Ribeiro, who played the part of Phil’s son Carleton on the series.
In addition to his most well known as the patriarch of the Banks family on Fresh Prince, Avery also appeared on CSI,  That ’70s Show, The Closer, and L.A. Law.
His most recent work was in a film by Zach Braff titled Wish I Was Here, set to debut at the Sundance Film Festival later this month.
Avery leaves behind his wife of 26 years, Barbara, his mother, Florence, and a stepson, Kevin Waters.
Below: Video of Avery as Uncle Phil on Fresh Prince, doing a gangster impression with son Carleton and nephew Will Smith.