
500 Internal error at YouTube - solarengineer
http://imgur.com/6WIgh9J
======
avinoth
Well, you can get a 500 error from facebook via this URL.

[http://facebook.com/logout](http://facebook.com/logout)

~~~
alch-
They're working on getting this fixed as soon as they can, though ;-)

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gbraad
My kid got soooooo upset: "Daddy, fix it. I wanna see the Beetle monster
truck". Imagine me trying to explain that 'monkeys will fix the problem for
him' :-P. He was eager to wait... hoping to see the monkeys... but none came
while refreshing the page. As soon as the Beetle baja buggie video loaded, all
about he monkeys was forgotten.

~~~
friendly_chap
At first I was kinda surprised at your comment (not even sure why, maybe
because it lacked snark...), but then I realised it is a prime example of how
our (techies) work actually affects lives, experiences etc, something we often
forget.

Thanks for reminding

~~~
gbraad
It made me actually realize how simple and effective it actually was. Without
graphics he understood something was wrong... Out of the ordinary, but the
text eased him.

BTW, he is 3 years old.

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drdoom
We have been doing this in all of our web applications for over a decade now.
Essentially, whenever there is an error, we don't just display the error
message as-is. All the technical or trace info it contains seems to scare
users. So, we simply encrypt it and display a base64-encoded version of it. It
also gets saved into a log file.

Users are more comfortable with this way: they simply copy/paste the text to
us and we have all the info we need.

~~~
grogenaut
What happens if there's an error in the crypto handling system? Edit: Not a
troll, I'm seriously interested in "minimum required functional systems" in
the case.

~~~
drdoom
There is no other dependency in the encoder/decoder functions so there is no
point of failure there. Those functions were developed a long time ago and
have not changed. They work with any stream of data and automatically chop off
the input after the first few hundred characters. This contains more than
enough info for the developers to see exactly what caused the error.

In any case, even if, as you say, if the crypto handling system failed, and it
returned nothing, there was no critical information that was lost. Only
information on an error message, which you will hear from the user anyway.

~~~
grogenaut
Aah, I was thinking you might be encoding stack traces or equivalents which
you'd want to protect a lot more than the head of user submitted data which
the user chooses to re-submit through a seperate channel that is about as
secure (esp for the purposes (email)) as the original channel. A hard coded
key would be fine for this imho as you don't have to protect the user from the
user's own data.

Cool idea btw.

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TimGremalm
"If you see them, send them this information as text (screenshots frighten
them)" Love this!

~~~
mpnordland
Seems we've scared the Google monkeys away from HN again. Now we'll never get
an AMA.

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FoxInBoxers
Anyone know what's in that debug information the 500 error page spits out?

~~~
ge0
[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21681084/decoding-
youtube...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21681084/decoding-youtubes-
error-500-page)

~~~
j_s
Dang, did you type that all in manually from the image? Ouch!

~~~
hundchenkatze
Nah, I don't think so. The SO post contains a link to this HN post
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7210750](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7210750)
and it contains a link to what looks like a paste bin of sorts.
[http://paste.pm/raw/dme](http://paste.pm/raw/dme) but paste.pm is apparently
down.

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leni536
I got a similar 500 Internal error trying to watch a video (not search, not
front page). First 6 characters appear to be the same for the error:
[http://pastebin.com/ibxLurkr](http://pastebin.com/ibxLurkr)

I wonder if someone could make sense of the error or if it's actually
encrypted.

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thomasreggi
code monkey jonathan coulton:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYodWEKCuGg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYodWEKCuGg)

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conradfr
I got it on this one :
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6U16XShROI8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6U16XShROI8)

~~~
conradfr
Not anymore.

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talles
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7210750](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7210750)

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Fuxy
Hm... wonder if there's a library that could do something similar.

It's an interesting idea encrypting your error that I haven't seen in many
places.

~~~
forgotpwtomain
What could the purpose of an encrypted error be? If it's a server side error
it's already in their logs.

~~~
sowbug
Think of it as a zero-capability web cookie. Burden of storage is on the
client, so it scales nicely.

If it's symmetric-encrypted, then it's unforgeable, and it's safe to include
private information, like IP address or recent video-viewing history, just in
case someone posts a screenshot of it on HN.

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StavrosK
..so?

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jbg_
Spotify is down too. Didn’t they move to Google Cloud recently?

~~~
ayyn0n0n0
Back up for me now.

~~~
jbg_
Still not up for us here in Amsterdam, and support.spotify.com says: “Spotify
is currently not available. We are working on a fix and will continue to
provide updates.”

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jswny
I don't get it. Have people not seen this before?

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owobeid
Yeah, just got that as well :(

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smegel
Back again.

