Opening with the somber: the Las Vegas shooting is days old and processing hasn’t finished; the tech-adjacent note, again, is safety-check systems and blood-bank logistics doing quiet essential work. Take care of your people. Onward, because onward is the format.
Yahoo (now buried inside Verizon) revised its breach disclosure this week: not 1 billion accounts. All of them. Three billion, every Yahoo account that existed in 2013, the largest breach in history, upgraded via footnote four years later. Breach numbers only ever revise upward; initial disclosure is a floor, never a ceiling (Equifax’s count has already crept too). Assume the ceiling on day one.
The joyful counterweight: the Nobel Prize in Physics went to LIGO’s founders for gravitational waves, the chirp from last year, now with medals. From “Einstein doubted it was measurable” to Stockholm in 19 months of public knowledge and 40 years of instrument-building. Blind-injection testing (chaos-engineering-for-physics) gets a share of every prize molecule, I’ll argue forever.
Gaming note for the record: PUBG, the janky, brilliant battle-royale that eats our office game nights, passed a million and a half concurrent players on Steam, breaking records with server tick rates held together by hope. And a free clone-ish mode called “Fortnite Battle Royale” launched two weeks ago, which the group chat dismisses as a cartoon knockoff. Logging the dismissal for posterity, because our track record on dismissals (see the Switch) is instructive.
TIL: breach-disclosure incentives. Every force (legal, stock, PR) pushes counts low and late. Regulation is the only counterpressure. GDPR’s 72-hour clock arrives in May. The industry is not ready, which is the point.