Do you have an Amazon Fire? I bet you like it. But you may not like it after you read this. A guy named Tyler Hayes discovered that his Amazon Fire TV is using gigs of data on his Internet connection. He found this out when his ISP e-mailed him about his data usage. When he investigated, this is what he found:
When I received the email from Cox Cable, the first thing I assumed was a rogue WiFi guest doing something they shouldn’t be doing. So I immediately changed my router’s administrator password and wireless password and turned off guest access.
I checked my wife’s Windows 8 computer which tracks data usage – nothing there. I installed little snitch on my Mac and didn’t find any rogue data flowing in or out. The next day I checked the data use and the tool actually said usage went up to its peak of ~80GB in one day.
Out of desperation I unplugged the Amazon Fire TV I had been testing and reconnected a Roku streaming media box. Magically, the problem went away.
This seemed weird until I went back through some of the Fire TV’s features and realized ASAP – the feature to predictively cache shows you watch – was the culprit.
Well, Amazon saw his blog posting and had this to say:
We have confirmed this issue was not caused by ASAP. You’ve helped us find an edge case bug related to our screensaver – there is a small possibility if a customer uses the “mosaic” feature (not the default setting) on the screensaver images will not be cached. We’re working on a software update that will fix this bug, and in the meantime you can turn off the mosaic view for the screensaver to avoid the issue.
Well, it’s good that Amazon admits to the bug and plans to fix it. However there may be many users who have no idea that this bug exists and may be completely in the dark about why their Internet usage has skyrocketed. This is why you should constantly monitor your Internet usage so that you can spot anything that might be amiss. Abnormal Internet usage is how I found out about a bug in OS X Mavericks a while back. Your ISP likely has tools to do this easily. But if you are a more technical user, you can set up your own monitoring mechanism. Lifehacker has this post for a suggested method that works regardless of what OS you run.
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This entry was posted on July 6, 2014 at 8:22 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Amazon, Bandwidth, Bug. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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Your Amazon Fire TV May Be Burning Through Gigs Of Data On Your Net Connection
Do you have an Amazon Fire? I bet you like it. But you may not like it after you read this. A guy named Tyler Hayes discovered that his Amazon Fire TV is using gigs of data on his Internet connection. He found this out when his ISP e-mailed him about his data usage. When he investigated, this is what he found:
When I received the email from Cox Cable, the first thing I assumed was a rogue WiFi guest doing something they shouldn’t be doing. So I immediately changed my router’s administrator password and wireless password and turned off guest access.
I checked my wife’s Windows 8 computer which tracks data usage – nothing there. I installed little snitch on my Mac and didn’t find any rogue data flowing in or out. The next day I checked the data use and the tool actually said usage went up to its peak of ~80GB in one day.
Out of desperation I unplugged the Amazon Fire TV I had been testing and reconnected a Roku streaming media box. Magically, the problem went away.
This seemed weird until I went back through some of the Fire TV’s features and realized ASAP – the feature to predictively cache shows you watch – was the culprit.
Well, Amazon saw his blog posting and had this to say:
We have confirmed this issue was not caused by ASAP. You’ve helped us find an edge case bug related to our screensaver – there is a small possibility if a customer uses the “mosaic” feature (not the default setting) on the screensaver images will not be cached. We’re working on a software update that will fix this bug, and in the meantime you can turn off the mosaic view for the screensaver to avoid the issue.
Well, it’s good that Amazon admits to the bug and plans to fix it. However there may be many users who have no idea that this bug exists and may be completely in the dark about why their Internet usage has skyrocketed. This is why you should constantly monitor your Internet usage so that you can spot anything that might be amiss. Abnormal Internet usage is how I found out about a bug in OS X Mavericks a while back. Your ISP likely has tools to do this easily. But if you are a more technical user, you can set up your own monitoring mechanism. Lifehacker has this post for a suggested method that works regardless of what OS you run.
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This entry was posted on July 6, 2014 at 8:22 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Amazon, Bandwidth, Bug. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.