Bluesky is once again having a wobble. The platform said some of its systems are down and that it’s “investigating an incident with service in one of our reginos” (that’s Bluesky’s typo, not mine). The issue appears to have started at 1:42AM ET and was still persisting as of 11AM when this story was originally published. Since then, the site has been experiencing intermitent interuptions, including at times to its status page where users should be able to monitor outages. At 7:47PM ET, the platform explained that it’s been attempting to mitigate “a sophisticated Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack, which intensified throughout the day.” It said the attack had caused interruptions to users’ feeds, notifications, threads and search, all of which the Engadget team experienced first-hand at various points through the day. While DDoS attacks are frequently used as virtual smokescreens for hacks, Bluesky says it has “not seen any evidence of unauthorized access to private user data.” The social media service had another brief outage earlier this month. The outage is ongoing, but due to its intermittent nature it’s more of a rolling blackout than a power outage. Bluesky says it will provide another update on the situation by 1PM ET on April 17. Update, April 16, 8PM ET: This story was updated after publish with an of the outage from Bluesky. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/bluesky-blames-ddos-attack-for-server-outages-150515882.html?src=rss
Blackmagic Camera is one of the more powerful third-party smartphone camera apps available and it's now even more useful for solo creators. Blackmagic Design just announced that the latest iOS version 3.3 now supports Apple Watch, letting you control the app and monitor video remotely from your wrist. It also includes ATEM camera control so you can use your iPhone as a live studio camera. With the new Camera Apple Watch companion app, you can remotely control and monitor your iPhone from anywhere within Wi-Fi range. It lets you start and stop recording, control zoom and adjust settings like frame rate, shutter speed (angle), white balance and ISO with a tap. You can also see a view of your video for framing control, though a Watch screen is probably a bit too small to accurately check focus. The Watch app will benefit solo creators who want to mount their iPhone on a tripod to record standup or vlogging activities. To set it up, you install the Watch app through your iPhone and it will automatically connect and sync to your device. Use your iPhone as a broadcast camera? Sure, why not Blackmagic Design The other key feature is iPhone control from Blackmagic's ATEM Mini switcher used by streamers and broadcasters. To use it, you need the $420 Blackmagic Camera ProDock that gives your iPhone 17 Pro or iPhone 17 Pro Max an HDMI output, timecode, USB-C and other ports. Blackmagic Camera now lets you connect a single HDMI cable from the ProDock to an ATEM Mini switcher, then adjust settings, trigger recording, focus and zoom. It also offers a DaVinci primary color corrector so you can match and create digital film looks during live production. Finally, Camera now supports Blackmagic's " Focus and Zoom Demand " controls (a knob and handle) designed for broadcast cameras. When those controls and an iPhone 17 Pro/Pro Max are connected via USB-C to a ProDock as shown above, you can zoom and focus Camera app video without taking your hands off the tripod handles. Together with the ATEM feature, it lets you use an iPhone as a full broadcast camera, which looks slightly weird but is pretty cool. On top of those features, Blackmagic Design also added ProRes RAW stabilization and general bug fixes and improvements. Blackmagic Camera for iOS 3.3 is available now as a free download from the Apple App Store. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apps/blackmagic-camera-for-ios-now-has-a-companion-watch-app-194529980.html?src=rss
YouTube is making some changes that might affect how you share videos from the mobile app. From the app, you can finally share videos from a specific timestamp, which will make it easier to point someone to a part of a video you might want them to see while you're on your phone. However, this […]