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. The product’s death was priced in years ago (the 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, a 72-hour countdown clock attached in Europe. The breach-incentive entry 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; 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 remains the whole game.