Paul Allen died Monday — 65, lymphoma, the OTHER Microsoft founder, the one who named it, who talked Gates into the BASIC bet that started everything, then spent his post-Microsoft decades funding brain science, rock museums, sports franchises, and rocket planes. The industry’s origin generation is becoming its memorial generation, and the eulogies this week were a reminder that “co-founder” histories get flattened by the survivor’s spotlight. Read the footnotes; the footnotes built half of everything.
Google, meanwhile, announced Google+’s shutdown — triggered by disclosure of an API bug exposing ~500k users’ profile data that (per reporting) the company found in MARCH and sat on, partly fearing regulatory attention in Cambridge-Analytica season (#127). The product’s death was priced in years ago (#083’s chat-app graveyard has a plus-shaped plot reserved); the DISCLOSURE CALCULUS is the story — “we found it, fixed it, and said nothing” is now a strategy with a name and, post-GDPR (#131), a 72-hour countdown clock attached in Europe. The breach-incentive entry (#116) keeps gaining citations.
Also swirling: Bloomberg’s explosive “Big Hack” story — alleging Chinese spy chips the size of rice grains implanted on Supermicro server motherboards — is being denied with unprecedented flatness by Apple, Amazon, AND the named agencies, while Bloomberg stands firm. Someone is catastrophically wrong in public, and the security community’s inability to find a single affected board is becoming its own evidence. Extraordinary claims, extraordinary signatures (#082); logging as UNRESOLVED, with skepticism trending.
TIL: supply-chain attestation — how you’d even VERIFY a motherboard (X-ray diffing, golden samples, firmware measurement). The Big Hack’s truth value almost matters less than the drill it forced: nobody could rule it out from inventory alone. The inventory (#031, #107, eternally) remains the whole game.