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500 Internal error at YouTube

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Re: 500 Internal error at YouTube

#21

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

Looks base64 encoded to me, but running it through a decoder isn't giving me anything intelligible. Here's a OCR of the text in the image, maybe you can figure it out: Edit: Full text is in sibling comment.

I'd guess it's gpg encrypted with the ASCII-armor enabled (which I believe is just base64 encoding).

https://www.gnupg.org/gph/en/manual/r1290.html

Re: 500 Internal error at YouTube

#23
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.

Re: 500 Internal error at YouTube

#24
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.

Re: 500 Internal error at YouTube

#25
post #23

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.

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

Re: 500 Internal error at YouTube

#28
post #26

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

Back up for me now.

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.”

Re: 500 Internal error at YouTube

#29
post #8

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.

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

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.

Re: 500 Internal error at YouTube

#30
post #8

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.

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

I could see it being useful as an affordance for internal testers.

It would be useful when things break so hard you don't even get a log.

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