Opening with the somber: the Las Vegas shooting is days old and processing hasn’t finished; the tech-adjacent note, again (#084), 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, #087) 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, #115, 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 #076, 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 (#076’s 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 2 MILLION 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 (#093, 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.