The Great Geek Manual

2004
Symantec Corporation, the largest single developer of security software for computers, completes its acquisition of @stake (ATstake, Inc.), a computer security professional service. The @stake start-up includes L0pht Heavy Industries, the corporate face of the formerly notorious hacker collective L0pht, which testified before Congress in 1998 that they could shut down the entire internet within thirty minutes. @stake merged with L0pht Heavy Industries in January 2000, lending the group legitimacy. The Symantec acquisition was initially announced on September 16. In March 2006, Symantec will discontinue the sale of the L0phtCrack password auditing and recovery application. Visit the official Symantec website. Visit the official L0pht website.

2006
Google officially announces that it will acquire the video host YouTube for US$1.65 billion in stock. The agreement comes just hours after YouTube announces three separate agreements with major media outlets in response to threats of copyright-infringement lawsuits. YouTube was launched by former PayPal employees Chad Hurley and Steve Chen in February 2005 and quickly grew to become one of the most visited sites on the internet.

Version 4.4 of the Scientific Linux operating system, “Beryllium,” is released. Visit the system’s official website.

2007
Google acquires Jaiku, a micro-blogging similar to Twitter. Visit the official Jaiku website.

Sony announces that it will reduce the price of its PlayStation 3 video game console in Japan to ¥44,980 for the 20GB model and ¥54,980 for the 60GB.

2008
Version 2.6.27 of the Linux operating system is released. Visit the official Linux website.

2009
Gary McKinnon, age 43, is denied an appeal to the Supreme Court, Britain’s highest judicial body, in his legal battle to avoid being extradited to the United States. McKinnon is accused of crashing the U.S. Army’s network for twenty-four hours in what is being characterized as “the biggest military hack of all time” using only a 56K dial-up connection. McKinnon argues that his actions were not malicious, while his lawyers have argued that extradition would be a cruel and excessive punishment, given his Asperger Syndrome. Read more at Reuters.

Google announces that the number of books scanned into its Google Book Search service has exceeded ten million. Less than a year prior, on October 28, 2008, Google had scanned seven million books. Visit the Google Books website.

In an attempt to determine the extent of the water-ice discovered on the Moon, the NASA Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) robotic spacecraft impacts the Cabeus crater on the south pole of the Moon in two stages. The Centaur rocket stage of the probe crashes into the lunar surface at 7:31am, creating a hole into which the second stage of the probe, equipped with camera to photograph the results of the first crash, impacts at 7:37am, taking photographs in an effort to capture photographs of water-ice. The mission is dedicated to the late American broadcaster Walter Cronkite.

Three years to the day after Google’s acquisition of YouTube, the company’s chief executive and co-founder Chad Hurley announces on the video sharing site’s blog that YouTube has been serving well over a billion views a day. “Today, I’m proud to say that we have been serving well over a billion views a day on YouTube. This is great moment in our short history and we owe it all to you.” He goes on to explain that “As bandwidth has increased, so has our video quality. As we’ve started to see demand for longer, full-length content, we’ve brought more shows and movies to the site. There are now more ways than ever to make and consume content, and more of you are looking to turn your hobby into a real business.” Read the original announcement.