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.”
CES is on this week: everything has a screen now, everything connects to WiFi now, and none of it has a security team. The Internet of Things is going to keep this blog in material for a decade.
Bigger personal patch note: I’ve changed jobs. After three and a half years in services, I’ve moved to Chennai to join a product company. Actual product work: data-driven views, CPQ-to-CRM plumbing, code that lives in one codebase longer than a work request. Services taught me discipline; I’m here to learn ownership.
Resolution scoreboard from #048: side project has its first real commit of the year (a feature, not a README edit). React tutorial: started. It keeps re-rendering everything and somehow that’s fine and fast? Suspicious. Continuing.
TIL: what a DDoS actually costs to run, which is depressingly little. Booter services rent attacks for pocket money. Asymmetric warfare: defense costs millions, offense costs a gift card.