This could happen to me — I can see this now. I make a typo in a database and accidentally write “/” — and suddenly everything goes wrong on my website.

But I’m not Google. They did this around 6:30 am PST today and typed “/” in a database that identifies malware. And around the world, every search for about an hour on Google identified everything as malware, since every address has a / in it.

Twitter buzzed, but wasn’t too helpful. Lots of things were hypothesized. TechCrunch beat all the press to the table out of their Belgian office. Their posts were helpful, not as much from their stories, but from their comments from the whole world pinging in as to the fact that this was happening around the world.

Users were confused in all timezones. Was this my computer? Should I reboot? Should I complain to my ISP?

Google finally ‘fessed up and said no, it wasn’t stopbadware.org’s database. That site was crunched as many users went there for information, so was of no help. No, someone at Google put a “/” in their database. Their quality control folks were able to identify this and fix it in about an hour total. Blog: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/this-site-may-harm-your-computer-on.html.

An hour? In Google Internet time, that’s a big outage for a small glitch.

I had another temporal Google glitch last week. The dates in my Google News search on the left hand side were from the 1800’s — really. When I clicked them, it brought up newspaper articles culled from archives and digitized from the 1800’s. After a few searches, that feature went away. (It was cool, and I’m not sure of why this accident drifted in.)

Glad to hear that Google wasn’t hacked. Disturbed at the ripples. Amused at the temporal impact.

Past Tidbits and Explorations

Augmenting My Mind

How much in technology is augmenting me versus being a digital vampire? How much is one tool or another improving my life vs. taking time and control away? I'm now about 21 months into having short-term memory problems. I had some kind of a memory degradation when I...

From Music in LA to Digital and Music in Austin

We've just ended the second cycle of our Future of Music in LA projects at the Center for Music Innovation at UCLA Alpert.  We helped run a half-day symposium with the City of LA Dept. of Cultural Affairs and the UC Digital...

Playing with Facebook Stories Camera Effects

My Facebook friends must be thinking I'm nuts (again).  I've been tinkering with Facebook Stories and its Camera Effects.  In fact, I've been playing so much I'm also looking into the Camera Effects and AR (augmented reality) developer group. First, here's some of the...

Craft, Process, and Thinking of Becoming

Today I'm working on taxes for our two college students' FAFSAs and watching "Abstract: The Art of Design" on Netflix in the background.  Christoph Niemann is both in his story and telling his story about craft and life.  He is a character and an animated...

HUD: Stories on How We Work and Decide

Gigi enjoyed sharing thoughts over YouTube and the US Housing and Urban Development (HUD) OCIO Learning Series.  This session was recorded in January and ran as a webinar on March 17.  You can find it now...