The International Earth Destruction Advisory Board (IEDAB), an independent scientific institution which monitors the current status of the Earth, regrets to inform you that the Earth has been destroyed. 
I’ve been subjected to a fair bit of hysteria about the heartbleed vulnerability in OpenSSL. While it’s admittedly a severe problem, I can’t see much use in all the frothing Y2K-esque fearmongering (although it’s funny when Randall does it).
But honestly, I’ve been looking forward to Theo’s take on this, and he did not disappoint. You never doubt where Theo stands!
OpenSSL has exploit mitigation countermeasures to make sure it’s exploitable. — Ted Unangst
As the various cert vendors I deal with have been telling me all morning (can you stop emailing me now, guys, please?) it’s time to patch the vulnerable webservers, get new certs and move on.
IF YOU DID NOT UNDERSTAND ANY OF THE ABOVE, here’s what you do: Test each site you use (like, for example, mail.google.com or www.yahoo.com) using Filippo Valsorda’s tester. Once ALL the sites you use are patched, change ALL your passwords on ALL websites you use. Don’t change your password on a site that’s not patched – don’t even log in on a site that’s not patched! That will just increase the chances you will be hacked. Don’t assume that because your site is OK now, that you don’t need to change your password – the big boys (Yahoo comes to mind) were vulnerable for quite a while before they patched, but they test out fine now.
Facebook has followed up their 2011 release of their PHP Virtual Machine (HHVM, aka HipHop) by releasing Hack, an HHVM-compatible statically typing version of PHP.
I like PHP (mostly because it’s an extremely rapid development language for the web, and also because academic Java snobs hate it so passionately) but static typing should be a fantastic improvement.
Cal Lee’s discussion of the rise and fall of Gopher, and his refutation of simplistic explanations for the dominance of HTTP, is a good read. But it’s more than a paragraph long and hasn’t any pictures, so it won’t appeal to the average web denizen.
This paper does not provide any one definitive answer to why history played itself out as it did. Instead, I have attempted to refute the very notion that such a unitary answer is either desirable or possible. I have found the concept of mind share to be a useful way of presenting the influences involved without the need to commit to a specific causal chain of events. My hope is that the result can contribute positively to the ongoing historical dialog on why the Internet that so many of us use developed in the way it did.