Glitch

The lights kept shining, the gas kept pumping, the taps kept running, and the parties kept rocking as the most hyped New Year's moment in history finally arrived in Ventura County. Staying up to monitor computer systems through the wee hours on Saturday, officials who had prepared for massive Y2K failures stifled massive yawns. No trouble was reported. Crime also took a holiday.

Facebook is fixing a glitch with its social plugins, but contrary to a report going around the Web, Facebook is not "liking" pages for you. The glitch was discovered and shared on Hacker News this week. The site found that if you share a Web page on Facebook that has a "like" or "recommend" button, the page gets credit for two likes. Many commercial and individual sites now use those button to help boost their popularity. But the count, in that case, should go up by only one. News of the glitch led Gizmodo to post an article titled " Facebook Is Reading Your Messages and Liking Things For You. " The article said that private messages sharing URLs for Facebook Pages -- such as the ones used on the social network to promote a movie or a celebrity -- causes Facebook to "like" that page in the name of you and your friend.

Curiosity, recently in hunker-down mode amid a solar storm lashing Mars, is suffering from amnesia. But it's mild. The rover is getting back in the swing of its mission after a significant computer glitch, which was followed by a solar flare that sent radiation barreling toward the Red Planet. “We kept the rover asleep for the solar event,” scientist Ashwin Vasavada told the Los Angeles Times on Thursday, “but now we are resuming operations, which center around diagnosing the original glitch and preparing for science operations on the B-side computer.” The B-side computer is the spare.

Toy buyers caught up in a pricing problem at Amazon.com are reportedly turning to the Federal Trade Commission for help, charging that the online retailer deceived them. Because of a technical glitch two weeks ago, the Seattle-based company displayed some goods for a fraction of the regular retail price. The glitch lasted about 24 hours.

Talk was inexpensive in Kuwait last month. A glitch in a telephone exchange let long-distance calls in parts of June and July go unregistered, the Communications Ministry said. The gulf state's newspapers said Sunday that records for as many as half a million calls may have been lost, with the cost running into hundreds of thousands of dollars.

"High Frequency" (citywide) gets my own special, infrequently awarded prize: The Golden Whatzit, given to a movie of surprising entertainment value, so lightly regarded that no one bothered to screen it for critics. Keep in mind the ground rules. Something is almost always seriously wrong with unpreviewed movies. This one appears to be an Italian co-production, shot in Maine and Washington, D. C. Some actors are clearly dubbed; others have strange accents for New England. It has a preposterous script, full of strained plot twists and logic glitches.

Even Wall Street has doubts about how the stock market is structured, according to a recent financial industry survey. The survey found that 26% of respondents from brokerages, hedge funds, vendors and other firms had "very weak" confidence in Wall Street's market structure, up from 3% in 2010. The survey -- by the TABB Group, a Wall Street research and consulting firm -- was conducted in early August following Knight Capital Group's trading debacle, in which a software glitch sent a flood of errant trades into the stock market and saddled the brokerage with a nearly fatal $440-million loss.

NEW YORK — Knight Capital Group's lifeline may have headed off the Wall Street brokerage's collapse, but it did not allay questions over the firm's future. The Jersey City, N.J., brokerage, whose business processes 10% of all U.S. stock transactions, received $400 million of new capital from a consortium of private equity funds and other major financial players. It will keep Knight in business after suffering massive losses last week when a software glitch sent out a stream of unintended trades.