OOPS: How a typo took down S3, the backbone of the internet.

On Tuesday morning, members of the S3 team were debugging the billing system. As part of that, the team needed to take a small number of servers offline. “Unfortunately, one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed than intended,” Amazon said. “The servers that were inadvertently removed supported two other S3 subsystems.”

The subsystems were important. One of them “manages the metadata and location information of all S3 objects in the region,” Amazon said. Without it, services that depend on it couldn’t perform basic data retrieval and storage tasks.

After accidentally taking the servers offline, the various systems had to do “a full restart,” which apparently takes longer than it does on your laptop. While S3 was down, a variety of other Amazon web services stopped functioning, including Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which is also popular with internet companies that need to rapidly expand their storage.

Amazon said S3 was designed to be able to handle losing a few servers. What it had more trouble handling was the massive restart.

Paula Bolyard emailed to tell me that PJM (Instapundit included) experienced a brief slowdown, but that “our tech team was able to create a quick workaround and regular service was restored almost immediately.”

We apologize, of course, if there was any inconvenience.

WHAT GOES ON BEHIND CLOSED DOORS: Hillary Clinton speaks at Wellesley College in a private, closed-to-the-press program.

The event was closed to the media, and a previously scheduled livestream was canceled “to ensure this remains a private Wellesley event,” according to the student newspaper, The Wellesley News.

According to the newspaper’s posts on Twitter, Clinton told the audience that as a woman running for office, “You know you’re going to be subject to unfair and beside-the-point criticism.”

She also answered questions from the audience, the newspaper reported. When a student asked, “What would you change about your campaign?” Clinton replied, “I’d win.”

Slow learner.

TRUMP WAS RIGHT: Large Amounts of Actionable Intelligence Found in Yemen Raid.

BILL WHITTLE: Dreams Of Madam President.

Bill has found a collection of 2016 presidential “art” which will haunt your dreams and your waking hours.

HMM: Conflicting French Polls Show Macron In Either First Or Second Place.

With the Fillon campaign in shambles following a raid of his home by corruption investigators and the subsequent resignation of both his spokesman and campaign manager, and with the republican party now reportedly preparing to replace Fillon with former PM Alain Juppe, the big winner from the ongoing chaos, at least according to one poll, is the centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron. The former Rothschild banker reportedly consolidated his status as favorite for the French presidency after an opinion poll published by Odoxa showed Macron coming first in the first round, pushing far-right leader Marine le Pen into second place for the first time since the line-up of candidates became clear.

Odoxa put Macron on 27 percent in the first round on April 23 with Le Pen behind him on 25.5 percent and Fillon on 19. In a scenario where Juppe was to stand in Fillon’s place, Odoxa put Juppe in front on 26.5, with Macron on 25 and Le Pen out of the contest on 24 percent. Odoxa did not present a second-round scenario, but daily polls have consistently shown any candidate beating Le Pen in the May 7 second round.

What actually happens is anybody’s guess.

NOT FAKE NEWS: Sorry Liberals, Ellison and DWS Remained Seated During Roughy Two-Minute Standing Ovation Honoring Fallen Navy SEAL’s Widow.

DOG THE BOUNTY HUNTER COUPLE: Fix ‘Tragic’ Bail Reform, End All Catch-and-Release.

IT’S DIFFERENT WHEN THEY DO IT:

HMM: European Parliament lifts Marine Le Pen’s immunity for tweeting gruesome images of violence.

As Le Pen, the leader of France’s far-right National Front party, rises in the polls ahead of France’s presidential election next month, authorities will now be able to pursue a case against her. Speaking on French television Thursday morning, she was quick to condemn her European colleagues for what she called “a political inquiry.”

In December 2015, Le Pen tweeted a picture of James Foley, the American journalist executed by the Islamic State in August 2014. “Daesh is THIS!” she wrote as a caption, using another name for the Islamic State.

After a day of immediate and widespread outrage on social media — including from Foley’s family — Le Pen ultimately took down the tweet. “I did not know it was a picture of James Foley,” she said at the time. “It’s accessible on Google. I learned this morning that his family is asking me to withdraw it. Obviously, I immediately withdrew it.”

Because French law considers the dissemination of violent images a potential incitement of terrorist activity, prosecutors were keen to pursue a case against Le Pen. But they could not, as Le Pen was a member of the European Parliament, an institution that guarantees immunity to its deputies to protect their freedom of speech.

That immunity, however, applies specifically to the work deputies do in the European Parliament itself and can be revoked at the request of a respective country.

This looks like a preemptive strike by the French/EU establishment.

THE GRAVY TRAIN STOPS HERE: GOP wants to eliminate shadowy DOJ slush fund bankrolling leftist groups.

“It’s clear partisan politics played a role in the illicit actions that were made,” Rep. John Ratcliffe, R-Texas, told Fox News. “The DOJ is the last place this should have occurred.”

Findings spearheaded by the House Judiciary Committee point to a process shrouded in secrecy whereby monies were distributed to a labyrinth of nonprofit organizations involved with grass-roots activism.

“Advocates for big government and progressive power are using the Justice Department to extort money from corporations,” Judicial Watch’s Tom Fitton told Fox News. “It’s a shakedown. It’s corrupt, pure and simple.”

There is a recent effort by Republicans to eliminate the practice, which many believe was widely abused during the Obama administration.

When big banks are sued by the government for discrimination or mortgage abuse, they can settle the cases by donating to third-party non-victims. The settlements do not specify how these third-party groups could use the windfall.

So far, investigators have accounted for $3 billion paid to “non-victim entities.”

Three billion dollars is a lot of money, even in Washington.

NOW HE’S GONE TOO FAR: Florida Man Arrested For Allegedly Impersonating Nickelback Drummer.

AFTER PROMETHEUS I MIGHT NEED MORE THAN FIVE: 5 Reasons the New ‘Alien: Covenant’ Trailer Gives Us Hope.

REPORT: Congressional Black Caucus PAC Spends Big on Luxury Resorts, Restaurants.

The CBC PAC, which is the fundraising arm of the Congressional Black Caucus, puts far more money towards administrative and fundraising purposes than it donates to candidates, the intended purpose of the political action committee.

The CBC PAC claims its mission is to increase “the number of African Americans in the U.S. Congress” and to “support non-Black candidates that champion our interests, and promote African American participation in the political process-with an emphasis on young voters,” according to its website.

The PAC spent hundreds of thousands throughout the 2016 election cycle on administrative expenses that included bills for lavish trips that were paid by the committee.

A $5,000 payment was made in January 2016 from the PAC to the Buccaneer Hotel located in St. Croix, Virgin Islands, one of the “world’s top 50 tropical resorts.”

Later, on March 21, 2016, the PAC made another payment to a resort in the Virgin Islands. This time, the money went towards a stay at the “one-of-a-kind” Renaissance St. Croix Carambola Beach Resort and Spa also located in St. Croix. The Renaissance is situated “among the foothills of a lush tropical rainforest and only steps away from the pristine sands of Estate Davis Bay.”

The PAC spent $820 on taxicabs while in the Virgin Islands. More than $2,000 was spent at Sweeny’s St. Croix Tours in the town of Christiansted, considered “the most beautiful town in the West Indies.” Sweeny’s provides an open-air bus for its guests as they embark on safari tours of the island. More than $4,500 was also spent by the PAC on catering at Un Amore, an Italian restaurant.

To be fair, it doesn’t matter what color a congresscritter is — this is exactly what many (most?) of them get themselves elected to do.

Allen West has more, including details on how he ran his PAC when he was in Congress.

WE MAY NEVER KNOW: FBI Still Baffled Over Motive in Minnesota Mall Stabbing Attack Claimed by ISIS.

CYBERSECURITY: Old Windows malware may have tampered with 132 Android apps.

Google has already removed the apps from its Play store. But what’s interesting is the developers behind the apps probably aren’t to blame for including the malicious code, Palo Alto Networks said in a Wednesday blog post.

Instead, the platforms the developers used to build these apps were probably infected with malware that looks for HTML pages and then injects the malicious coding, the company said.

Many of these tainted apps offered design ideas for things like cheesecakes, landscaping a garden, or laying out a patio. The most popular had more than 10,000 downloads.

When installed, the apps would display seemingly benign webpages. However, in reality, the pages shown contain a tiny hidden iframe that links to two suspicious domains.

The malware is so old that the suspect domains went defunct several years ago, so this is more a case of sloppy development work than an actual security risk.

ABOUT TIME: McDonald’s vows to win back patrons with better burgers.

I noticed a couple years ago that the higher-quality buns and veggies on the company’s new specialty burgers didn’t do much more than highlight how low-quality the meat was. Better veggies and better beef, and pretty soon you’re talking quality fast food.

Now if they’d just put the beef tallow back in the fries.

DON’T GET YOUR NEWS FROM FACEBOOK AND PROBLEM SOLVED: Did You Fall for This ‘Fake News’ Bogus Baby Wipe Recall?

NOBODY TELL NOTORIOUS ROBOPHOBE MATTHEW YGLESIAS: Get ready for robots made with human flesh. “The 600 series had rubber skin. We spotted them easy, but these are new. They look human… sweat, bad breath, everything. Very hard to spot. I had to wait till he moved on you before I could zero him.”

Skynet smiles.

IT’S THE NEW “DOG WHISTLE” AND ONLY SALON CAN HEAR IT: Trump advocated white nationalism with an “indoor voice,” and pundits loved it.

Never change, Salon.

QUESTION ASKED: Why Is Twitter a For-Profit Platform, Anyway?

The root of Twitter’s troubles — up to and including all the Social Justice Warring — stems from one fatal conceit. Microblogging is a low cost/low margin business, which Twitter’s management has spent the last several years trying to over-monetize and overstimulate into a multibillion-dollar Facebook competitor.

Last year I asked a sysop friend who runs data centers for a living what it would cost to run something like Twitter, but streamed down. His ballpark guess was that he could do it for two million dollars annually. That would be an easy sum to cover with banner ads, data mining etc, with enough left over for a modest profit — provided the investors didn’t expect that by some miracle the service could ever be anything more than that.

I suspect Twitter spends more than two million each year just on corporate extravagances.

‘TIS A PITY THEY CAN’T BOTH LOSE: Syrian army re-enters town of Palmyra as IS defenses crumble.

The SANA news agency reported earlier that government troops had entered the town’s archaeological site, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, around mid-day, then the town itself, as IS defenses crumbled and militants fled the area.

It said army units were engaged in “precise tactical operations” and chasing remnants of IS fighters holed up inside the ancient town.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based opposition monitoring group, said IS militants pulled out completely from Palmyra, adding that troops were conducting mopping-up operations.

The Syrian government’s push has relied on ground support from Lebanon’s militant Hezbollah group and Russian air cover, according to Hezbollah’s media outlets.

Once this is over these hardened Hezbollah vets are going to become Israel’s next big headache.

TO ASK THE QUESTION IS TO ANSWER IT: Ex-Muslim Woman to Toronto Imam ‘Can I Criticize Islam Without Fearing for My Life?’

According to a strict interpretation of Islam apostasy is punishable by death — which is something those Muslim-for-a-day protestors should perhaps have looked into before they took to the streets last week.

FASTER, PLEASE: NASA’s longshot bet on a revolutionary rocket may be about to pay off.

The rocket engine starts with a neutral gas as a feedstock for plasma, in this case argon. The first stage of the rocket ionizes the argon and turns it into a relatively “cold” plasma. The engine then injects the plasma into the second stage, the “booster,” where it is subjected to a physics phenomenon known as ion cyclotron resonance heating. Essentially, the booster uses a radio frequency that excites the ions, swinging them back and forth.

As the ions resonate and gain more energy, they are spun up into a stream of superheated plasma. This stream then passes through a corkscrew-shaped nozzle and is accelerated out of the back of the rocket, producing a thrust.

Such an engine design offers a couple of key benefits over most existing propulsion technology. Perhaps most notably, unlike chemical rockets, the plasma rocket operates on electricity. As it flies through space, therefore, it does not need massive fuel tanks or a huge reservoir of liquid hydrogen and oxygen fuel. Instead, the rocket just needs some solar panels.

The Sun powers both the production of plasma and the booster exciting the plasma, and the extent to which it does either can be shifted. When a spacecraft needs more thrust, more power can be put into making plasma. This process uses more propellant, but it provides the thrust needed to move out of a gravity well, such as Earth orbit. Later, when the vehicle is moving quickly, more power can be shifted to the booster, providing a higher specific impulse and greater fuel economy.

“It’s like shifting gears in a car,” Chang-Díaz explained. “The engine doesn’t change. But if you want to climb a hill, you put more of your engine power into torque and less into rpm, so you climb the hill, slowly, but you’re able to climb. And when you’re going on a freeway, flat and straight, you upshift. You’re not going to go to Mars in first gear. That’s the problem. It’s why we run out of gas going to Mars with a chemical engine.”

Not needing a huge propellent tank means more cargo space for supplies, equipment, habitat, or people.

IT’S DIFFERENT WHEN THEY DO IT:

TAMMY BRUCE: Why the liberal establishment is collapsing.

Democrats and liberals have been driving drunk while texting for eight years. Swerving into the wrong lane, they crashed into oncoming traffic and sit, dazed and confused, wondering what happened. The few survivors crawl out of the clown car screaming at the innocent people they’ve harmed. After all, it’s never their fault, you see, it’s everyone else’s for daring to get in their way.

Oscar host Jimmy Kimmel led the way, as Entertainment Weekly noted, “The first salvo against Donald Trump was fired only a few minutes into the Oscars — and then they just kept on coming. In what might be an unprecedented number of jokes, allusions, and sincere articulations inspired by a single person during an awards telecast, Hollywood’s most luminous tackled Trump and his policies. …”

The target may have been President Trump, but the derision was meant for the people who elected him. Nothing says “oops” like ridiculing your audience.

I apparently was one of the millions who didn’t tune in, causing the ABC network program to be the least-watched in nine years. The Los Angeles Times spent thousands of words trying to explain why the awards show had its third year of ratings decline. It was late, they explained, small budget films and, they mused pensively, maybe, just maybe, “[t]he promise of strong criticism of President Trump from the Oscars participants may also have put off some viewers.”

Ya think? But it’s not about criticism of any particularly president, it’s Hollywood’s constant sanctimonious lecturing of the unwashed hoi polloi.

People generally don’t sit down in front of the TV or make a trip down to the multiplex in order to enjoy a sanctimonious lecture — a simple reality reflected in declining ratings and fewer ticket sales.