While I work in technology fields and am surrounded by and use devices all day long, I was recently stumped by a seemingly simple problem: how to change users in Netflix? A relative had come over and changed our login to his account, and I wanted to change it back. We get Netflix to our TV through a PS3 system and its wireless connection to the internet.
This turned out to be a surprisingly hard problem. I may be slow, but I couldn’t find anywhere on the Netflix user interface for logging out.
Solution? My friend Google led to this very short video. The video runs a whopping 36 seconds, but the useful content only takes about half that time. And for some strange reason, the audio tends to play faster than the video on some systems and browsers: I checked on PC and Mac, Firefox and Chrome, and it had the audio running fast. But on my tablet it played normally. (So the useful audio may be over in 12 seconds if that’s playing fast.)
Anyway, the technique for getting to the logout screen, shown in the video, was odd enough that I thought the video might be a joke. But I tried it and it really works. Just scroll through the movie icons in this pattern: up – up – down – down – left – right – left – right – up – up – up – up. Would a sane person expect this to work? (This probably became public as part of the wikileaks revelations, and beware that a bell probably rings at NSA headquarters whenever anyone successfully completes the pattern.)
Minor usage note: On a PS3, this is more reliable if you use the ‘arrow’ keys rather than the joystick — the joystick can work but doesn’t always, perhaps because it senses some slight ‘angles’ which the interface uses as a straight scroll, but the pattern-recognizer rejects those to protect the super secret logout access.
Go ahead and invest / waste 36 seconds of your life on the video, and another minute going off and discovering that it actually works. Here’s how it looks for those who like numbered instructions. For some reason.
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