Everyone’s heard of how awesome Jane Street is. Fewer people have heard about the times something stupid nearly put it out of business and it was saved by grit and dumb luck.Here's a story about how the NYC datacenter was almost destroyed by a false smoke alarm.— Michael Bacarella (@mbacarella) November 11, 2026
How a false smoke alarm almost drowned Jane Street’s only NYC datacenter
A war story from Jane Street’s systems team: a false smoke alarm, a datacenter with no cooling, and a sprint to pull every power cord before the sprinklers went off
Bleeding edge
New York City, 2001. Fraud investigator Maxine Tarnow starts looking into the finances of a computer-security firm and its billionaire geek CEO and discovers there's no shortage of swindlers looking to grab a piece of what's left of the tech bubble
The Era Of The Business Idiot
Fair warning: this is the longest thing I've written on this newsletter. I do apologize. Soundtrack: EL-P - $4 Vic Listen to my podcast Better Offline. We have merch. Last week, Bloomberg profiled Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, revealing that he's either a liar or a specific kind of
Contra Benn Jordan, data center (and all) sub-audible infrasound issues are fake
One of the most popular videos made about data centers ever is a complete moment-by-moment disaster
What Happened When Marissa Mayer Tried to Be Steve Jobs (Published 2014)
The inside story of how Yahoo’s C.E.O. lost her way.
The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story
In the weird glow of the dying millennium, Michael Lewi…
The Cyber Resilience Act: A Five Alarm Fire
On October 21, 2016, CNN’s website was knocked offline. So was the BBC and Guardian’s. Amazon, Etsy and Shopify too, along with Quora, Reddit, and Twitter – among others. Huge swaths of the internet were taken down by a series of attacks on the DNS provider Dyn. These Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks were
Maloney, Nadler ask NYC mayors what they knew about health hazards at Ground Zero
What did then-New York City Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg really know about the toxic threats posed by the ruins for the World Trade Center, and when did they know it? More than two decades after the catastrophic attacks, and…
More Everything Forever
This "smart and wonderfully readable" (New York Times) exposé shows why Silicon Valley’s heartless, baseless, and foolish obsessions—with escaping death...
Bill C-22’s Groundhog Day: Why the Government’s Dismissal of Signal, Apple and the U.S. Congress Concerns Runs Back the Disastrous Online News Act Playbook - Michael Geist
Secure messaging service Signal yesterday became the latest company to warn that Bill C-22, the lawful access bill, could force it to leave the Canadian market rather than comply with provisions it says would compromise its end-to-end encryption and create new cybersecurity risks. Signal vice-president Udbhav Tiwari told the Globe and Mail that the company “would rather pull out of the country than be compelled to compromise on the privacy promises we have made to our users.” The comments are part of a steady stream of similar warnings from Apple, Meta, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, the Cybersecurity Advisors Network, and the chairs of the U.S. House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs Committees. Despite growing concern, the government’s response has been to launch a misleading social media campaign and repeatedly insist that the experts and companies are mistaken.
Fact-checking an engagement drop on MAGA pages because of the Yandex data center strike | Joohn Choe
Zelenskyy tweet: https://x.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/2109602415397749044?s=20 Res Futura Data House tweet: https://x.com/Polityka_wSieci/status
Is the Left Making a ‘Massive Strategic Blunder’ on Data Centers?
A conversation with Holly Jean Buck, author of a buzzy story about Bernie Sanders’ proposal for a national data center moratorium.
Thoughts on the Bluesky public incident write-up
Back on April 4, the social media site Bluesky suffered a pretty big outage. I was delighted to discover that one of their engineers, Jim Calabro, published a public writeup about it: April 2026 Ou…
⚠️ Big tech's privacy promises are misleading! 🎤 We sat down with Melanie Ensign, CEO of @discernibleinc.bsky.social and former communications lead for Facebook, Uber, AT&T, and DEF CON. In this interview she pulls back the curtain on how these large tech corporations actually approach privacy.
It gets even crazier. After MS NOW reporter @brandyzadrozny.bsky.social published an article debunking the celebrity deepfakes, she herself was woven into the narrative, with fabricated videos emerging that falsely claimed she had retracted her reporting and blamed Democrats for a "false flag."
