SkyseekerInternet weather
Nimbus, the cloud in the corner, reads the news so you don’t have to, and rates it on the Beaufort scale, which sailors have used to describe wind since 1805 and which was never meant for this. He’s moody. Clicking him helps.
One reading a day. When several things happen at once, the worst weather wins: a storm beats a release-day snow, and snow beats sunshine. Release days snow whatever got released.
The scale
| Force | Sailors say | The internet means | On this page |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | Calm | Nothing is on fire. Suspicious. | Sun's out behind him, he beams |
| 1 | Light air | Someone fixed a typo in the docs. | Sun's out |
| 2 | Light breeze | A minor version bump. Nobody panics. | Warm glow, gentle bob |
| 3 | Gentle breeze | A big site is slow and everyone tweets about it. | Wind streaks in the background |
| 4 | Moderate breeze | The cookie banners are breeding. | More wind, he looks unimpressed |
| 5 | Fresh breeze | A patch release breaks everything anyway. | Drizzle in the background |
| 6 | Strong breeze | Eleven lines of code vanish and take the builds with them. | Rain, he goes grey |
| 7 | Near gale | A phishing wave with your bank's logo on it. | Heavier rain |
| 8 | Gale | A botnet made of webcams and toasters. | Distant lightning, Xenia comments |
| 9 | Strong gale | A whole platform falls off the internet. | Lightning, Xenia comments |
| 10 | Storm | A critical hole in a library everyone uses. | Frequent lightning |
| 11 | Violent storm | Someone backdoored the plumbing. | Lightning, constantly |
| 12 | Hurricane force | Half the internet is down, and so is the status page. | He spins, debris swirls in the background |
| ❄ | Snow | Good Nix news, like a new NixOS release. | Nix snowflakes fall (the only time you see them) |
| 🌈 | Rainbow | A real win for open source. | A rainbow behind everything, in the flake colours |
| ~ | Fog | Nobody knows what's going on. It was DNS. | Everything goes a bit hazy |
The almanac
- F1A new website went up today. The weather is fine.
- F12One bad security update blue-screened airports, hospitals and banks.
- F11A compression library nearly shipped a backdoor to half the internet.
- F9Facebook routed itself off the internet and locked its own doors.
- F9A botnet of cameras and DVRs knocked out a big DNS provider.
- F6Eleven lines of JavaScript were unpublished. Builds everywhere fell over.
- rainbowLet's Encrypt opened its doors, and HTTPS certificates became free.
- F10Heartbleed: servers would tell you their secrets if you asked nicely.
