That's what the snowballs are for.

I've been getting 500 errors on any page load for the past 10 minutes or so. The status page just shows 'webhook' errors, but it looks like it's more widespread than that.

Time to go get caffeine and take a morning break!

This was not at all a failure. They built a 1km experimental road. They gained valuable information about real-world performance and technical challenges. It's not as though they built a 100km long six-lane highway with unproven technology. They built a tiny one-lane trial to test a promising idea.

It was overhyped by politicians, but what isn't? Maybe they even steamrolled over engineering red flags. That doesn't mean it wasn't a valuable experiment.

I don't agree with the author. He pays lip service to security being important, but then proceeds to ignore the threat because he thinks extensions are great. I think people should be more hesitant to install a browser extension than just about any other piece of software.

The threat is absolutely real. Bad actors regularly offer large paydays to lone developers with popular extensions so they can roll out an update that quietly adds a backdoor.

There's at least some publicly documented evidence that Raymond Hill (uBlock Origin) isn't likely to cave to this sort of pressure, but do you really believe that none of the other authors of your fifteen favorite extensions would look the other way for $100k?

Keep in mind that these offers don't look like "Here's some money, please let us roll out an evil update to your extension." They look like "Our company has a product with a similar name. We love your extension and would like to offer to acquire it from you so that we can use the name. We'll even let you keep the rights to your software so that you can re-release it under a different name if you'd like!" They'll make it really easy for the developer to remain in denial about what they're actually facilitating.

I would like to know your opinion on "When to drop the ball when trying to build a business?" You need to persevere, but like playing poker, you invested so much energy that it might be hard to pull the plug. Success might be just around the corner...

If a large brand like Uber wouldn‘t buy (really expensive) keywords like „uber“ some of their rivals like lyft could bid on it. So uber would lose a customer who was really interested in uber to lyft. Exchange company names how you like. Its especially expensive for shops etc.

Google will not change any rules to forbid bidding on brand names because they are making a ton of money of it. Think of something like amazon paying more than $1 for every click just to not loose any potential customer. Adwords is a money burning system.