Myspace DNS Problems, Offline
Check out what I get when I ask where Myspace is:
nslookup myspace.com
Name: myspace.com
Addresses: 216.178.32.49, 216.178.32.50, 216.178.32.51, 127.0.0.1, 216.178.32.48
That’s right–the loopback address, essentially me, resolves to Myspace. They’ve clearly misconfigured their DNS, and are now dropping 1/5 of their global traffic. Smart one, News Corp. It’s not a great idea when you buy a company to make a public, stupid mistake. For more, see the opendns blog.
Steam Support Sucks
If you’ve ever played any Steam-powered game, you know that their distribution model requires a user-account which is licensed for whatever games you’ve bought from them. Their top games, according to rating, are Half-Life 2 (HL2), Half-Life (HL), Counter-Strike (CS), Counter-Strike: Source (CS:Source), Half-Life 2: Episode One, Darwinia, Day of Defeat: Source, SiN Episodes, and X2: The Threat. Apparently, though, account authorizations aren’t working properly, and their support page is dead in the water. When I signed in today to kill half an hour on CS:Source, I got the following error message:
“Disconnect: This Steam account does not own this game. Please login to the correct Steam account.”
Naturally I’d like to visit their Steam support page, but I get a timeout when I try to load the page:
In other words, Steam is telling me that I don’t own the rights to play the game I bought from them, and refusing to listen to me when I want to complain and let them know that I do. Sorry Steam, Valve, et al, you’re wrong. I really did buy that game:
Dear Elliott Back (Steam account name: exxxx),
Thank you for your recent purchase. Counter-Strike: Source is now available in your Steam “Games” window. To play, just double-click on the name of a game in this list.
Your credit card has been charged as detailed below. This email serves as your receipt.
Product Cost
———————————————–
Counter-Strike: Source $ 19.95
In their purchase email, they include steamsupport@support.steampowered.com as a support email address, so I’ll definitely be dropping a note. I’m not optimistic, though, since many other Steam or CS players are experiencing the same issues. Valve / Steam must have rolled out a new patch without thinking about how it would hammer their servers.
WP-Plugins.org Dies A Silent Death
Guess what happens if I try to visit my subversion repository for wp-plugins.org right now:
That’s right, the domain registration has expired. It seems like they’re in the process of recovering the domain, because I can’t buy it, but right now it’s just an ugly, spammy landing page. It’s also the last time that I upload a new version of my plugin there–all plugins of mine will now be hosted in .zip files onsite. I really can’t trust wp-plugins.org to just do its job.