"My personal information, my finances, my family connections, my ideas--all are now in the hands of those to whom I have submitted." (Can we please centralize and scale Paul Ford?)
Dang, we ended up with a top-down Internet anyway. "Today, Google and a handful of other major Internet corporations like Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon fulfill much the same role that Otlet envisioned for the Mundaneum—channeling the world’s intellectual output." [via RF]
Paul Ford explains how Greg Knauss prepared for massive Web traffic. It's a great look at how Web scaling works. "Can you turn our tour bus into an airplane for a week or two?" Simple!
Fascinating look at the domain name system and the complex DNS master key ritual. (Seems like an event that stopped international travel would keep the key locked away.)
Rafe zeroed in on the real problem in the recent Kindlegate: "If a business is going to use an algorithm-based approach to fraud problems like this, there’s got to be an understanding of the limitations of such a system. When you ignore that fact, you run into public relations disasters like the one Amazon encountered today."
Mat Honan is experiencing a nightmare cascade failure of interconnected services. This is a good reminder to back things up and make sure your passwords are unique for each service.