This week’s post is about email. As you probably know, email started - and we can have a lively debate about this - at the same time as the Internet was born. As the Internet gained popularity, so did email, soon becoming the preferred method of communication.

How can you design system which you know won’t be hackable in the future?

The tech writers were clamouring to write article after article comparing ever-more-impressive speed and size and capabilities of computer technology. A lot of that excitement has faded over time… but a sliver of it is coming back, thanks to quantum computers.

Recently, I got an email: Gartner Insights for IT Executives. Yes, the Gartner you know with the tagline: “We help clients make smarter and faster decisions.” They're also famously the authors of the Magic Quadrant research methodology.

What followed was a very weird experience.

You can’t always get what you want - and maybe we can’t even get what we need. There are no cars because there are no chips. Christmas shopping is in danger because containers are not getting from port A to port B fast enough. There are not enough container ships. Manufacturers can't get raw materials fast enough to fulfill the demand).

The supply chain would have trouble supplying a chain these days. The last two years have brought to a forefront how much the world is interconnected. We see how events in one country or even in one company can have far-reaching consequences.

I had no intention of writing about Facebook again so soon after last week. The back-and-forth between the company and politicians were on full display. Then the whistleblower story blew - and online opinion-makers did their thing. I’m not even getting into any of that here. I said what I was going to say.

What was the other thing that happened to Facebook this week? The outage - and what happened next. That’s what I want to talk about.

Another day, more bad news for Facebook. Facebook's own research team identified that Instagram followers of the biggest celebrities such as Kim Kardashian and Justin Bieber experience more negative feelings.

Here is a story about an infamous “digital transformation” project that went horribly sideways. Unlike its namesake, the Phoenix project is not going to rise from the ashes. However, the government seems intent on repeating this failed process from square one.

Alexa is fighting to get to your living room so you can spend more time together.

Amazon has unveiled its latest device - the Amazon TV set. It’s called the Fire TV Omni Series.

Does Amazon make the TV? Of course not. That's beside the point. It is a TV with Alexa built directly into it. 

In her Conclusion, Judge Leonie Brinkena of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia denied the motion by Dr. Stephen Thaler of the Artificial Inventor Project that AI can be listed as an inventor on a U.S. patent application.