Articles
April 24, 2013
The Crowd: Reddit and the Boston Manhunt
Reddit's crowdsourced manhunt for the Boston bombers went spectacularly wrong, and the lesson about unchecked online sleuthing is still being learned.
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March 27, 2013
The Flood: Spamhaus and the Largest Attack
The biggest attack in the history of the internet hit an anti-spam group this month, and the flood reached 300 billion bits per second.
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February 6, 2013
The Buyout: Dell Goes Private
Michael Dell took the company he founded private on Tuesday, betting 24.4 billion dollars that he could fix it away from Wall Street's gaze.
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January 14, 2013
The Trial: Aaron Swartz and the CFAA
Aaron Swartz, the activist who built Reddit and fought for the open internet, died on Friday, and the case that prosecutors had built against him has become the symbol of a broken law.
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December 4, 2012
Half the Reward: Bitcoin's First Halving
On Wednesday, Bitcoin crossed a line that had been drawn in its code from the first day. Block 210,000 was mined, and the reward for mining a block dropped from fifty bitcoins to twenty five, the first scheduled reduction in the history of digital money. The halving had been written into the software years earlier, a promise that the supply would shrink on schedule, and the promise had now been kept. The price barely moved, the mining continued, and the drama was in the meaning. This is the December 2012 story, and the story is the lesson: ...
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November 27, 2012
Record Monday: Cyber Monday Tops a Billion
On Monday, the United States spent one point four six five billion dollars online, and the number made history. Cyber Monday had become the heaviest online spending day in American history and the first Cyber Monday ever to pass the billion dollar mark, according to the comScore research firm. The total was up about seventeen percent from the same day a year earlier, and it followed a Black Friday that had already crossed the billion dollar line online. The two days together had made the holiday season a record, and the record was the milestone. This is the November 2012 story, and the story is the lesson: ...
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October 29, 2012
Touch on Every Screen: Windows 8 Ships
There is a launch this week, and the launch is the operating system: Windows 8, on sale worldwide on Friday, the most radical redesign since Windows 95. The launch is the bet, and the bet is the interface: the touch first design with the live tiles, the Start screen that replaced the Start menu. The launch is the answer to the iPad, the belief that touch will come to every screen, the bridge between two worlds. The launch is the week: the Surface, the worried partners, the cautious enterprises, the shrinking PC market. The launch is the October 2012 story, and the story is the lesson: the redesign that bet everything on touch, the lesson that every platform will learn.
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September 28, 2012
We're Sorry: Apple Maps
There is a letter this week, and the letter is the apology: the open letter from Tim Cook on Apple's website, the words the company never speaks. The apology is the admission: the maps that shipped with iOS 6, the missing towns, the misplaced cities, the frustration that filled the web. The admission is the reversal: the company built on perfection, falling short of its own commitment. The reversal is the question: what went wrong with Apple Maps, and what the failure says about the hardest problems. The question is the September 2012 story, and the story is the lesson: the maps built from nothing, the data that defeated the best, the engineering every platform must master.
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August 1, 2012
45 Minutes: Knight Capital's Lost Morning
There is a story this week, and the story is the morning: Wednesday, August 1, when Knight Capital Group, one of the largest market makers in the United States, lost control of its machines. The machines are the market, and the market is the flood: millions of erroneous orders fired into roughly 150 stocks in 45 minutes, buying high and selling low, spiking prices and collapsing them. The firm stopped its trading, the shares fell about a third, and the cause was a software update deployed incorrectly. The lost morning is the August 2012 story, and the story is the lesson: the code that runs the market, the kill switch that was not triggered in time, the machines that no one fully controls.
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July 17, 2012
Product First: Marissa Mayer Takes Yahoo
On Tuesday, Yahoo announced that Marissa Mayer would be its new chief executive, and the news landed like a shock in an industry that had stopped expecting shocks. Mayer was Google's twentieth employee, its first female engineer, and the executive behind the famously clean Google homepage. She was thirty seven, and she was taking over a company that had lost the search war, missed social, and fumbled mobile. The appointment broke every expectation: the board had been expected to pick a media executive or an outsider, and it had picked a product person from the company that had destroyed Yahoo's search business. This is the July 2012 story, and the story is the lesson: ...
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