r/technology • u/chrisdh79 • Feb 03 '23

Netflix says strict new password sharing rules were posted in error Business

https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/02/03/netflix-says-strict-new-password-sharing-rules-were-posted-in-error
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u/Practical_Law_7002 Feb 03 '23

Ah yes...a help page typed in English on a ".com" was supposed to be for Spanish speaking countries that use ".cl" for Chile, ".cr" for Costa Rica or ".pe" for Peru.

They think you're morons folks.

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u/SeaweedSorcerer Feb 03 '23

That is actually super easy to do since these kinds of content database sites are run from the same engineering systems and content database, and the content usually starts in English written by a single publishing team to be translated into N global languages based on the target region(s).

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u/Practical_Law_7002 Feb 03 '23

Didn't know that, thanks for the info!

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u/bdone2012 Feb 03 '23

Yeah I mean I could see someone making this mistake fairly easily. People are often incompetent. And there’s always weird scenarios.

I for instance used to be in charge of making 15 different sites across the world in various languages. They’d get sent out to millions of people so likely more than the amount of people looking at a Netflix help site.

I did Spanish, and Italian for example. Both of which I speak enough of that I felt fairly comfortable with it. Even for languages like German I didn’t feel too bad about it because the alphabet is the same so I was less likely to make a mistake. But the Japanese site for example always really concerned me since the alphabet is different. If I put copy in the wrong place it was hard to notice.

I wasn’t doing the translations just placing the copy. So if the Japanese translator sent me a translation but at the top in Japanese wrote “this isn’t the final copy, please don’t post” I would have put that on the website and it would have gone live. People in Japan would then see that and wonder how we were so stupid. I did complain about it and would ask for a Japanese speaker to read it but they often wouldn’t get around to it.

So in all I think it’s somewhat possible that Netflix didn’t mean for it to go live yesterday. But they’ve absolutely been planning this for a long time. And just because it’s possible they didn’t mean to post it yesterday my gut is that they probably did. The fact that it was posted in English as opposed to the other direction makes me assume they meant to.