So it's April Fools' Day, and for once I actually fell for something before 9am, which almost never happens to me anymore because I've gotten cynical about the whole tradition. Google put a little Pac-Man icon in the bottom left corner of Google Maps last night and by this morning half the internet was driving a yellow circle around eating dots on their own street. I did it too. Obviously. I spent about twenty minutes this morning "playing" Pac-Man on the three-block stretch between my apartment and the coffee place I like, and it is somehow both completely pointless and extremely satisfying, in the way only a good dumb joke can be. The ghosts turn into little Google Street View pins when Pac-Man eats a power pellet. Someone on the Google Maps team clearly had way too much fun building this, and I respect that a lot more than I respect most of the "clever" fake product announcements that show up in my feed today.
I don't really do April Fools jokes on this blog anymore. Did one back in like 2012 about a fake Facebook redesign and got three separate emails from people who were mad about a feature that didn't exist, so lesson learned. But I like when a company does something genuinely fun and low-stakes instead of a fake product page designed to get clicks. The Pac-Man thing costs Google basically nothing, doesn't pretend to be a real feature, and it's just a nice little bit of goofiness dropped into a tool that thirty million people already had open on their phones. That's the right size for a joke like this. It's not trying to be a whole marketing campaign.
Anyway I bring this up partly because I needed something light to write about, because the actual thing on my mind tech-wise this week has been way less fun: GitHub has been getting hammered on and off for something like five or six days now by a distributed denial of service attack, and it is not subtle about it. Two specific pages have been the targets: a project connected to GreatFire.org, which mirrors sites blocked in China, and a Chinese-language New York Times page, but the traffic flood has been big enough that it's been dragging down GitHub generally, not just those two repos. I have a small side project repo I push to most nights after work, nothing important, just some scripts I use to scrape and archive a couple of RSS feeds I like, and twice this week I sat down to push a commit and just got a spinning wheel for a solid minute before it timed out. Which, fine, it's not a big deal in the scheme of things, my scraper script can wait. But it's a weird feeling watching a piece of infrastructure that a huge chunk of the software world depends on getting visibly strained by what looks like a state-level attack aimed at getting a censorship circumvention tool taken down. GitHub's status updates have been pretty candid about what's happening, which I appreciate, but "we are aware of the issue and mitigating" is cold comfort when you're just trying to git push at 11pm.
It's a strange contrast, honestly. One tab open with a cartoon ghost chasing a yellow circle down my actual street, another tab open with a status page telling me a piece of core internet infrastructure is under sustained attack because some specific pages annoyed the wrong government. Both things are true about the internet on the same Wednesday morning. I don't have some grand point to make about it, I just think it's worth sitting with for a second — how much of what we build our jokes and our tools on top of is way more fragile and way more politically loaded than it looks from the outside on an ordinary day.
Also, unrelated complaint I'm sneaking in here because I don't feel like writing a whole separate post about it: my building switched trash pickup days without telling anyone and I've now missed it two weeks running. Not tech related. Just needed to say it somewhere.
Going to go finish my coffee and eat a few more dots on Elm Street before this feature disappears tomorrow, because apparently it's only up for the day.