As reported on Wired.
BY ROBERT MCMILLAN
The tech world never ceases to amaze. Sometimes, people build amazing things. And sometimes, the people who build amazing things do other stuff that leaves your jaw on the floor. Some of it’s good. Some of it is oh so very bad. And some of it is just plain weird.
Here, we give you our 12 most amazing tech moments of 2012. (Click on the images above.) Yes, you’ll get all kinds. The good. The bad. And the weird. Lots o’ weird.
Above:
John McAfee’s Viral Implosion
Hands down, this is the craziest story of the year. A man is found dead, floating in a pool in Belize, and when authorities try to question his neighbor, Silicon Valley legend John McAfee, he hides overnight beneath a cardboard box and then goes on the run, phoning in dispatches from safe houses and, finally, surfacing in Guatemala where he was the star of a full-fledged international media circus.
McAfee says he’s innocent, but he’s got a serious credibility problem. He says a lot of things, and not all of them add up. McAfee — the guy who basically invented the computer antivirus industry — is a self-admitted master of social engineering, the art of deceiving others to achieve his own ends. On discussion forums, he’s claimed to be an expert on the amphetamine-like drink known as bath salts, and then later said it was all a joke. In Guatemala, he faked a heart attack to delay his extradition.
When last we heard, McAfee had been extradited to Miami and was heading his way west — staying in cheap motels, and switching into different disguises. Or at least that’s what he says.
John McAfee Photo: Brian Finke
Google Computer Equipment Comes From Outer Space
Google is really, really secretive about the stuff that goes on inside its data centers. How secretive? Well, at one point they were turning off the lights at facilities they shared with other companies so nobody could peek in and figure out what they were up to. They consider their custom server designs trade secrets and rarely talk about them.
Which made it all the more remarkable when a top-secret switch built by Google to route traffic between its server racks popped up in somebody’s Iowa distribution center, apparently sent there by accident. It was called the Pluto switch, but it didn’t look like anything you could buy from Juniper or Cisco.
Confused networking admins posted photos of the mystery switch in a networking discussion forum called, well, networking-forum.com. There, members gradually figured out that it was one of Google’s top-secret devices. The guys who found it sent the switch back to Google, which was so grateful, it rewarded them with a couple of free T-shirts.
Google’s Pluto Switch. Photo: Networking-forum.com
Dell Alienates Half the World With Bad Moderator Pick
Dell, Dell, Dell. It’s not enough that the company has been crushed by marketing missteps, service complaints, and fierce competition in the PC market. They have to alienate half of their potential customers by hiring misogynistic “inspirational speaker” Mads Christensen to moderate a Danish customer briefing.
Presumably, this was just an example of a tone-deaf foreign office going rogue with some off-color entertainment, but hiring a guy who tells attendees they should go home and say “shut up bitch” to their wives is so sad, it’s nuts.
Mads Christensen Photo: Rasmus Johnsen/Flickr
Microsoft Raps Itself Into an Apology
You can add this to the “foreign office going rogue” file, but you have to listen to it to appreciate its epic weirdness.
Some Microsoft contractor was casting about for a rhyme for a video to be shown at the company’s Norwegian developer conference. The winning couplet? “I’m a computer gen-i-us / The words micro and soft don’t apply to my penis”
Note to future tech event planners: Microsoft developer conferences are sad nerdy affairs, so you really don’t need to try that hard. We all know this and we expect nothing better. Don’t try to make them edgy and fun. And for god’s sake, don’t tell us all about your penis. We really don’t care.
Microsoft told us it was sorry, anyway.
A screen capture by Wired of Microsoft’s crappy rap performance.
The Diesel Bucket Brigade that Scored a Victory Against Sandy
When Hurricane Sandy struck New York it knocked out power in lower Manhattan for days. That shouldn’t have been a problem from the city’s data centers — they all have backup diesel generators at the ready — but to customers at the 75 Broad Street co-location facility, Sandy delivered a one-two punch. It knocked out power, and it flooded the basement. That’s where the pumps the building uses to move diesel up to its 17th floor where Peer 1 Hosting’s data center is located.
Peer 1 had enough diesel upstairs to keep things running for a while, but when it started warning customers that the power was about to go out, a few of them decided to take matters into their own hands.
Staffers from Peer 1 Hosting, Squarespace, and Fog Creek Software banded together to haul diesel up the 17 flights of stairs to their data center. Using 5-gallon plastic buckets, they managed to haul the 50 gallons of diesel fuel the data center needed each hour to remain online. And they did this for a few days, until power was restored to lower Manhattan.
Diesel barrels in front of 75 Broad Street Photo: Squarespace
Leap-Second Bug Crashes the Internet
We all know that time can get away from us every now and then, but when this kind of thing happens inside the Linux kernel, programs crash.
That’s what happened in late June, when international timekeepers added an extra second to Coordinated Universal Time, something they do every now and then as a kind of existential bookkeeping exercise. The problem was that some programs running on Linux computers just couldn’t compute that extra second, and a lot of them crashed.
The leap-second crash took out Reddit and Gawker Media and a part of Mozilla too, but it didn’t take out everyone. In fact, a patch for the problem had been written months earlier, but unaware of their impending doom, not everyone had updated.
Photo: foxgrrl/Flickr
Google Clones Apple’s Patented ‘Leave Phone in Bar’ Move
Apple says that Google has copied its biggest ideas with the Android mobile phone. Well, now Google has copied another page from the Apple playbook: the one where you accidentally leave a prototype of your next-generation smartphone in a bar.
Jamin Barton, a bartender known as “Sudsy” at the 500 Club in San Francisco, found a prototype of Google’s Nexus 4, just weeks before its launch. After a bit of back and forth with Google’s security team, he eventually returned the phone — but not before snapping a few photographs.
Sound familiar? Two years ago an Apple engineer named Gray Powell forgot his iPhone prototype at a Redwood City, California, restaurant called the Gourmet Haus Stadt.
500 Club bartender Jamin Barton Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired
Romney’s Get-Out-the-Vote System Gets Out the Bugs.
Bad PINs. Blank, seemingly broken webpages. Bum information: Presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s Project Orca was supposed to be a high-tech superweapon — a computer system that would organize the complex flow of information on election night to help Republicans get out the vote and keep on top of election problems.
But Orca, it turned out, was a bit of a fail whale. And when it didn’t work as planned, it ended up being a glitchy coda on Romney’s ill-fated 2012 campaign.
A Romney Campaigner. Photo: Flickr/WEBN-TV
Patent Excess Gets a Rockstar
You could think of 2012 as the year that the lawyers made manifest their plans to take over the technology industry. Patent lawsuits were everywhere.
Apple and Google duked it out, as did Microsoft and Google. And Oracle and Google too. But for the first time, companies that don’t actually make anything — patent trolls — filed more lawsuits than firms that actually sell products. Santa Clara University professor Colleen Chien says that more than 60 percent of this year’s patent lawsuits were filed by trolls. Five years ago, the number was 23 percent.
The company that most perfectly captured this movement is Rockstar, a company made up of former Nortel engineers and lawyers who once developed networking gear. Now they spend their days ripping apart other people’s products, looking for signs of infringement. To some, it may look like a completely unproductive waste of engineering talent, but maybe it’s a taste of things to come.
Rockstar’s Ottawa reverse-engineering lab. Photo: Rockstar
Larry Ellison Torpedoed HP From a Slip-and-Fall Jury Box
When Oracle ditched plans to support HP’s Itanium servers, it was an abrupt decision. We knew that, because months before HP and Oracle had been assuring customers that Oracle fully planned to keep porting its software to Itanium, a server chip that had had been an overhyped dud in the marketplace.
What we didn’t know was that when Oracle CEO Larry Ellison finally made the call that would terminate — at least for a time — support for the most popular software on HP’s servers, he did it while on a break from jury duty. He was serving as foreman in a slip-and-fall lawsuit.
That came out in court records, after HP sued Oracle, saying that an earlier agreement forced Oracle to keep delivering new versions of its software for the Itanium platform.
“I … had nothing to do for 15 minutes, so I drafted a press release,” Ellison said in a February 2012 deposition.
Now, nearly two years after Ellison drafted his press release, HP has won an initial ruling in the dispute, and so Oracle must again port its software updates to Itanium. But the damage from that jury-box e-mail is mostly done. Confused customers have moved on, and to most of the corporate world, Itanium has long been a goner.
Larry Ellison patiently awaits jury selection in March 2011. Photo: Photo: Davis W. Frank
Senate Tries to Kill Open Source in Government
Does the U.S. Government really get open source software? Well, if you were to ask U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park, he’d probably say “yes.” But check in with the Senate’s Armed Services committee and you might get a completely different answer.
They’re the folks who, earlier this year, tried to pull the plug on the National Security Agency’s Accumulo database, an open source project used by the government’s surveillance agency. The committee questioned whether Accumulo violated a government policy that prohibited its agencies from building their own software when they could buy something ready-made.
If the Senate committee was right, that could have had a major chilling effect on any government-backed open source projects. Luckily, though, the committee seems to have been forced into a comedown by the house. Just last week, they dumped the anti-Accumulo language from their 2013 appropriations bill.
Open source Apocalypse averted.
The Senate Armed Service Committee Photo: jim.greenhill/Flickr
Apple’s Crappy iOS Update Clobbers ‘This American Life’
For a company that’s supposed to stress the little things in a quest for perfection, Apple sure blew it with its recent update to its iPhone and iPad operating system. At first, users were mad because the update foisted a buggy Apple Maps on them. Apple maps wasn’t just buggy and wrong; it was dubbed potentially life-threatening by Australian police.
We called it the biggest tech fail of 2012, and Apple booted two of its top iOS execs because of it.
But that wasn’t the weird part. No, the weird part was the bug that Apple silently patched in its iOS 6.0.1 update without telling anybody about it. That bug messed up the way podcast users downloaded media onto their iPhones, dramatically bumping up the bandwidth they consumed. This meant data plan overages for consumers, and big internet bills for podcasts like This American Life, which apparently saw a massive spike in its internet usage.