On Tuesday at 3.30am GMT, thesecondAmazon EC2 outage in as many days saw its customers once again asking questions of Amazon’s cloud platform. Fortunately for the many products that rely on the service, the incident was quickly resolved. Amazon’s US-EAST-1 region experienced connectivity issues according to its status page and big name startups including Rapportive, Reddit, Foursquare, Hootsuite and Heroku were temporarily unavailable. This wasn’t the first time an EC2 outage has left some of the web’s most popular startups grinding to a halt....

Researchers have developed glasses that read faces during conversation and tell you how the person you’re talking to are really reacting to what you’re saying,NewScientist reports. Are you boring your conversation partner? Aggravating them? Entertaining them? The glasses provide that information through a headphone, allowing you to correct course and become a better conversationalist. Humans are surprisingly bad at reading the facial expressions of those we’re conversing with. NewScientist writer Sally Adee reported thinking that she was holding an interesting conversation with one of the scientists behind the glasses, Rosalind Picard, until she put them on and found otherwise....

On 4th October 2021, millions of unsuspecting online users were surprised when asudden internet blackoutshut Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Whatsapp down. The six-hour outage left many people without access to these platforms, which have cemented their place as the everyday cornerstones of modern communication. The significant outage lost Facebook billions on the stock market and made businesses that run on their platforms vulnerable to losses. Facebook’s data center issue shook the world, and a smaller Instagram outage a few days later highlighted how vulnerable we are to any disruption in our connectivity....

Streaming music serviceSpotifyhas grabbed the rights to premier the new album by veteran rock band REM. From today, the company’s premium subscribers in the UK, Sweden, Spain, Norway, Netherlands and Finland will get one week’sexclusive accessto the album ‘Collapse Into Now’ a week ahead of its European release. Spotify is also running a competition offering users the chance to win prizes including guitars, signed merchandise and Sonos music systems. This isn’t the first time Spotify has run an exclusive preview of a well-known artist’s new album but it is probably its second biggest deal since itofferedU2’s 2009 album exclusively for a week prior to its full release....

The iPod changed the way we enjoyed our favorite tunes on the go when it launched in 2001. And while there were loads of other MP3 players on the market then, none came close to matching Apple’s incredibly intuitive wheel interface. If you missed your chance to try it, orsimply miss your beloved iPod,fire this one up in your mobile browser. Frontend developer Tanner Villarete’s clever creation resembles the 6th generation iPod Classic from 2007 (incidentally,the same one I had and loved), and works just like the real thing — except, it works with your Spotify and Apple Music libraries!...