Entry fifty. Two years and change of fortnightly homework. My streak is my favorite side project. SpaceX tried to land a rocket on a floating barge this month. It found the barge, then hit it at an angle and exploded, and Elon posted the crash footage himself, captioned like a bug report: “full RUD (rapid unscheduled disassembly).” A company live-tweeting its own failed test with telemetry and humor is postmortem culture at 300 feet per second. They’ll stick one this year, I’d bet the streak on it. ...

Happy 2015. The gaming world spent Christmas offline because the Lizard Squad DDoS threats turned out to be real. PSN and Xbox Live both went down on Christmas Day, right as a few million kids plugged in new consoles. Days of outage for PlayStation. A DDoS aimed at the exact hour of maximum emotional load: cruel, effective, and a reminder that attackers read calendars too. Every capacity plan should have a column called “worst possible timing.” ...

Forty-eight entries, two full years, zero missed fortnights. Retro time. World patch notes: the internet’s foundations caught fire twice (Heartbleed, Shellshock) and got funded once. Facebook bought a face computer and a messaging app for a combined $21B. Apple shipped a language, a payment system, and a bendable phone. Amazon bought Twitch and invented servers you don’t think about. Germany dropped a 7-1 that will outlive us all. A comet got landed on. A movie studio got erased over a comedy. (The Interview saga is still unfolding as I write, pulled from theaters, then un-pulled for streaming. 2014 refuses to end quietly. There are even hackers threatening the PlayStation and Xbox networks for Christmas, because gamers getting consoles need villains too apparently.) ...

Sony Pictures got hacked and it’s unlike anything I’ve followed before. Not stolen credit cards, but everything: unreleased films, executives’ emails, salary spreadsheets, employees’ SSNs, entire server images, dumped publicly by a group calling itself “Guardians of Peace.” Machines were wiped. The company reportedly fell back to fax machines and paper checks. The rumored motive is geopolitical, their upcoming movie about North Korea, which would make this a nation-state attacking a movie studio over a comedy. ...

We landed a robot on a comet. The ESA’s Philae probe, after a ten-year journey, touched down on a comet moving 84,000 mph, then its harpoons didn’t fire, it bounced twice across the comet in micro-gravity, and settled in a shadow where its solar panels can barely charge. It still sent back science before sleeping. Ten years of planning, one anchoring failure, heroic degraded-mode operation. It’s the most engineering story ever told and I’ve read every detail. ...

Hamilton won the US Grand Prix to make it five wins in a row, but the F1 title is going down to the wire in Abu Dhabi because of the weird double-points rule. Hamilton’s driving was a masterclass in controlled aggression, holding off Rosberg under extreme pressure. I’m completely hooked on this teammate rivalry. Mercedes’ dominance is real and their telemetry is the proof. The tech moment that mattered most this fortnight: Tim Cook came out as gay, in an essay, as CEO of the most valuable company on Earth. First openly gay CEO in the Fortune 500. Several coworkers had a visibly emotional day, the good kind. Representation at that altitude changes the math for a lot of people quietly doing that math. ...

Apple Pay went live Monday, in the US only, so I experienced it by proxy: a teammate on rotation at the client’s Ohio office paid for groceries with his thumb and messaged us the play-by-play. He and the cashier reportedly shared a moment of genuine wonder; the man behind them sighed, because the future is unevenly distributed and also in his way. Some pharmacy chains are actively blocking it to push their own janky QR thing (CurrentC), which is a masterclass in putting corporate strategy ahead of user experience. Prediction logged: the janky consortium app dies, the thing-that-just-works wins. ...

Five months after Heartbleed, we got the sequel: Shellshock. A bug in bash, the shell, the thing under literally everything, that’s been sitting there for twenty-five years. Environment variables could carry executable functions and bash would just run them. Any CGI script, any DHCP client, boom. The Heartbleed drill kicked in like muscle memory: patch everything, then hunt for the forgotten. This time we had the inventory list (April’s homework paid off), and what took three panicked days in spring took one calm afternoon. I cannot overstate how good that felt. Incident response is a skill you build in peacetime. ...

Alibaba IPO’d Friday at $25 billion, the biggest IPO in history, and most of the world outside Asia met Jack Ma for the first time via a stock ticker. A former English teacher built China’s Amazon-eBay-PayPal combo and the US markets treated it like a moon landing. My mental map of “tech” is embarrassingly one-country and this fortnight fixed some of that. The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus launched, lines around blocks, 10 million sold opening weekend, and within days the internet discovered the big one can bend in your pocket. “Bendgate” is trending; Apple says nine customers complained. Somewhere a materials engineer is having the healthcare.gov experience. Structural rigidity: also a capacity dimension. ...

Confirmed: Amazon bought Twitch for about $970 million. Called it. (I called it after the rumors told me to call it. This counts.) The ugly story of the fortnight: hundreds of celebrities’ private photos leaked from iCloud accounts. Early panic said “iCloud was hacked,” but the emerging picture is more mundane and scarier: targeted phishing and password guessing, plus a find-my-phone endpoint that reportedly didn’t rate-limit login attempts. No zero-day, just the oldest tricks against the weakest links. At work we turned on mandatory 2FA for everything the same week. Should’ve been years ago. It always should’ve been years ago. ...