Timeline: The 2010s

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2010

• Adrian Lamo reports Chelsea Manning to the FBI. → Adrian Lamo: The Homeless Hacker Who Reported Chelsea Manning
• Albert Gonzalez receives 20 years for the TJX and Heartland card thefts. → Albert Gonzalez: The Biggest Card Thief of the 2000s
• Chelsea Manning passes roughly three-quarters of a million classified documents to WikiLeaks. → Chelsea Manning: The Analyst Who Leaked a War
• Demis Hassabis co-founds DeepMind in London. → Demis Hassabis and DeepMind: Games, Proteins, and the Path to AGI
• Fadell founds Nest. → Tony Fadell: From iPod to Nest
• Fei-Fei Li’s ImageNet challenge runs for the first time. → Fei-Fei Li and ImageNet: The Dataset That Fed the Revolution
• Microsoft launches Azure. → The Cloud Wars: AWS, Azure, GCP, and the Infrastructure Battle
• Nokia and Intel merge Maemo and Moblin into MeeGo. → Dead End: Maemo and MeeGo
• Steve Jobs publishes “Thoughts on Flash”. → Dead End: Flash & The Plugin Web
• Oracle completes its $7.4 billion purchase of Sun in January. → Dead End: Sun Microsystems
• Google Buzz launches inside Gmail on 9 February and exposes users’ contacts. → Dead End: Google Buzz
• The Flash Crash of 6 May erases nearly $1 trillion in minutes. → High-Frequency Trading
• Stuxnet is discovered on 17 June, the first cyberweapon to cause physical damage. → The History of Cyberwar: When Code Became a Weapon
• Harry Brignull registers darkpatterns.org to name and shame deceptive interfaces. → Dark Patterns: Deceptive Design and the Consent Dialog

2011

• Alexandra Elbakyan launches Sci-Hub. → Alexandra Elbakyan and Sci-Hub
• Eric Yuan leaves Cisco with about forty WebEx engineers to build Zoom. → Eric Yuan
• Google Brain is founded. → Jeff Dean and Google’s Infrastructure
• JetBrains announces Kotlin. → Kotlin and Modern JVM Development
• Judea Pearl receives the Turing Award. → Judea Pearl and the Causal Revolution
• LulzSec’s fifty days of hacks end with its leader cooperating with the FBI. → Anonymous and LulzSec: Hacktivism and the Mask
• Microsoft buys Skype for $8.5 billion. → Dead End: Skype
• Newell tells a Seattle industry conference that piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem. → Gabe Newell
• Smartphones outsell PCs for the first time. → The Personal Computing Explosion
• Sony sues Hotz over the PlayStation 3 root key. → George Hotz: geohot, the iPhone, and the PlayStation War
• The Arab Spring peaks the “liberation technology” thesis; Morozov’s The Net Delusion argues the opposite. → Online Censorship and Internet Freedom
• The FTC’s Buzz order requires Google to run an audited privacy program. → Dead End: Google Buzz
• Yandex lists on NASDAQ. → Arkady Volozh and Yandex: The Russian Internet
• Stack Exchange opens its code golf site; the first question asks for a JAPH. → Code Golf and Perl Golf
• Kagermann, Lukas and Wahlster publish “Industrie 4.0” in VDI Nachrichten on 1 April; the term becomes German industrial policy. → Wolfgang Wahlster
• Google+ launches in June. → Dead End: Google+
• Nokia announces the MeeGo-based N9, already its only planned MeeGo phone. → Dead End: Maemo and MeeGo
• Tim Cook becomes Apple CEO in August. → Tim Cook and Apple
• Google announces “a fall spring-clean”, closing Desktop, Notebook, Sidewiki and seven other products. → Killed by Google: The Product Graveyard
• Apple introduces Siri on 4 October. → The Voice Assistant Revolution: Speaking to the Machine
• Steve Jobs dies on 5 October. → Steve Jobs and Apple

2012

• A jury awards Apple $1 billion against Samsung. → The Patent Wars
• AlexNet makes CUDA’s value for machine learning undeniable. → The GPU Revolution: From Pixels to Intelligence
• AlexNet wins the ImageNet competition, trained on two gaming GPUs. → Alex Krizhevsky
• AlexNet’s ImageNet win launches the deep learning era. → ImageNet: The Dataset That Proved Deep Learning Worked
• ByteDance is founded in Beijing. → ByteDance and TikTok: The Algorithm That Reorganized Attention
• Goldwasser and Micali share the Turing Award. → Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio Micali: Proving Cryptography Works
• Jaan Tallinn co-founds the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge with Martin Rees and Huw Price. → Jaan Tallinn
• Megaupload is indicted; a helicopter raid hits Kim Dotcom’s New Zealand mansion. → Kim Schmitz (Kim Dotcom)
• Microsoft releases TypeScript. → Anders Hejlsberg: From Turbo Pascal to TypeScript
• Ng co-founds Coursera. → Andrew Ng and AI Education
• Picard’s group shows in Neurology that skin conductance measured at the wrist during a seizure predicts how long the brain stays suppressed afterwards. → Rosalind Picard
• The Raspberry Pi launches. → The Open Hardware Movement: Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and the Democratization of Making
• Tinder reduces dating to a swipe. → The History of Online Dating
• Kodak files for bankruptcy in January. → Digital Photography and the Fall of Kodak
• Virginia Rometty becomes IBM’s first woman chief executive. → Virginia Rometty
• The English Wikipedia blacks itself out for 24 hours on 18 January to protest SOPA and PIPA. → Jimmy Wales and Wikipedia
• Double Fine’s adventure-game Kickstarter passes $1 million in 24 hours and closes above $3.3 million. → Crowdfunding and Kickstarter
• The Pirate Bay stops serving .torrent files and switches to magnet links. → BitTorrent: The Protocol
• Archive Team publishes the Warrior, a virtual machine that lets anyone join its rescue downloads. → Archive Team
• Pebble’s Kickstarter opens on 11 April and raises $10.27 million, a record. → Dead End: Pebble
• Knight Capital loses $440 million in 45 minutes on 1 August. → Famous Software Disasters
• The Oculus Rift Kickstarter raises $2.4 million from 9,522 backers after Carmack’s E3 demo of Luckey’s prototype. → Palmer Luckey
• Massachusetts voters pass the first automotive right-to-repair law with 86 percent. → Right to Repair

2013

• Adobe drops boxed software for the Creative Cloud subscription. → Adobe: The Creative Software Empire
• Geoffrey Hinton joins Google. → Geoffrey Hinton and Deep Learning
• Google buys Waze for about $1 billion. → Israel’s Tech Industry: From Unit 8200 to Startup Nation
• Leslie Lamport receives the Turing Award. → Leslie Lamport and the Science of Distributed Systems
• Nubank is founded in Brazil. → Latin America’s Tech Industry: MercadoLibre, Nubank, and the Fintech Continent
• Patreon launches. → The Creator Economy
• The FBI arrests Ross Ulbricht, operator of the Silk Road, in a San Francisco library. → Ross Ulbricht and the Silk Road
• Aaron Swartz dies on 11 January while facing federal prosecution over JSTOR downloads. → Aaron Swartz: The Internet’s Own Boy
• Vine launches on 24 January. → Dead End: Vine
• Solomon Hykes demonstrates Docker at PyCon on 13 March. → The Container Revolution
• Disney closes LucasArts’ internal game development, laying off about 150 people. → LucasArts and the Point-and-Click Adventure
• The Guardian publishes the first Snowden document on 5 June. → Edward Snowden and the NSA
• Google Reader shuts down on 1 July. → Dead End: Google Reader
• Michael Dell and Silver Lake take Dell private in a $24.4 billion buyout over Carl Icahn’s opposition. → Michael Dell

2014

• Alibaba’s IPO is the largest in history to date. → Jack Ma and Alibaba: China’s Internet Pioneer
• Facebook buys Oculus for $2 billion. → The History of Virtual Reality
• Facebook buys WhatsApp for $19 billion. → Instant Messaging: From ICQ to Signal
• Fernando Pérez spins the language-independent parts of the IPython notebook off as Project Jupyter. → Data Science and the Notebook
• Fowler and Lewis popularize the term “microservices”. → The Microservices Revolution
• Google buys Nest for $3.2 billion. → Tony Fadell: From iPod to Nest
• Google forms Project Zero. → The Vulnerability Disclosure Debate: Full Disclosure, Responsible Disclosure, and the Bug Bounty Economy
• Heartbleed exposes OpenSSL, a library funded by $2,000 a year. → Volunteer-Maintained Infrastructure
• Ian Goodfellow codes the first Generative Adversarial Network in Montreal. → The Generative AI Revolution
• Michael Stonebraker receives the Turing Award. → Michael Stonebraker and Postgres
• Microsoft absorbs Nokia’s phone business. → Nokia: The Mobile Empire That Couldn’t Become a Software Company
• Mt. Gox collapses with about 850,000 bitcoins missing. → Mark Karpelès and the Fall of Mt. Gox
• Rowhammer shows software can flip bits in DRAM. → Spectre, Meltdown, and Hardware Vulnerabilities
• Tallinn co-founds the Future of Life Institute; the 2023 pause letter is one of its products. → Jaan Tallinn
• The battle of B-R5RB destroys 75 titans over 21 hours after a missed sovereignty payment. → EVE Online
• Google publishes a Glass etiquette guide warning against being a “Glasshole”. → Dead End: Google Glass & The First Wearable Wave
• Satya Nadella becomes Microsoft CEO in February. → Satya Nadella and Microsoft’s Transformation
• Facebook buys Oculus VR for $2 billion. → Palmer Luckey
• Apple unveils Swift in June. → Swift and the Post-Objective-C Era
• Google open-sources Kubernetes on 7 June. → The Container Revolution
• Google shuts Orkut down on 30 September. → Dead End: Orkut

2015

• A formal verification tool finds a crash bug in Timsort that shipped in Java and Python for over a decade. → The History of Sorting
• A study of 625,000 mammograms finds computer-aided detection improves no measure of screening accuracy. → AI in Clinical Practice
• HP splits into two companies. → Hewlett-Packard
• IBM forms Watson Health. → Dead End: IBM Watson Health
• Microsoft releases Visual Studio Code. → The IDE Wars
• OpenAI is co-founded as a nonprofit. → Sam Altman and OpenAI
• Rob Pike codifies the Go Proverbs. → The Philosophy of Programming Languages
• Rust 1.0 is released. → Rust: The Language That Solved C’s Fifty-Year-Old Problem
• Sundar Pichai becomes CEO of Google. → Sundar Pichai and Google
• The FCC reclassifies broadband under Title II; it is reversed in 2017. → The Net Neutrality Battles
• Google ends the consumer Glass program in January. → Dead End: Google Glass & The First Wearable Wave
• Shenmue III is announced at Sony’s E3 press conference; its Kickstarter closes at $6,333,295, then the most-funded video game on the platform. → Yu Suzuki
• The Librarian of Congress exempts repair of vehicle software, including tractors, from the DMCA’s anti-circumvention rule. → Right to Repair
• SpaceX lands an orbital booster for the first time in December. → Elon Musk and Software-Defined Industry
• Sutskever co-founds OpenAI in December. → Ilya Sutskever and the GPT Series

2016

• Bill Campbell dies. → Bill Campbell: The Trillion Dollar Coach
• BlackBerry’s smartphone share falls below 1%. → Dead End: BlackBerry
• India’s Jio makes mobile data nearly free. → The Digital Divide: Who Gets Computing and Who Doesn’t
• Jepsen founds Openwater to replace the MRI scanner with near-infrared light and holographic imaging. → Mary Lou Jepsen
• The 2016 US election exposes microtargeting and foreign interference. → Tech and Democracy / Elections
• The COMPAS recidivism-prediction controversy puts algorithmic bias on the public agenda. → AI Ethics and Algorithmic Bias
• The Mirai botnet of IoT devices launches record denial-of-service attacks. → The IoT Revolution: When Everything Connects
• The US election makes disinformation a mainstream concern. → Disinformation and Misinformation
• The deletion of left-pad breaks build systems worldwide. → Volunteer-Maintained Infrastructure
• The tidyverse meta-package collects Wickham’s data-science packages under one philosophy. → Hadley Wickham
• Tristan Harris’s “How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds” makes attention design a public issue. → The Attention Economy
• Vulkan 1.0 is released. → Graphics APIs: OpenGL, DirectX, and Vulkan
• AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol 4–1 in Seoul in March. → DeepMind and AlphaGo: The Match That Changed AI
• Microsoft launches the Tay chatbot on Twitter and takes it offline about 16 hours later. → Dead End: Short Cases
• Mayhem wins DARPA’s Cyber Grand Challenge, then finishes last against human teams at DEF CON CTF. → Capture the Flag: Hacking as a Sport
• Dell closes its $67 billion purchase of EMC, the largest technology acquisition to that date. → Michael Dell
• DeepMind publishes WaveNet, a neural network that generates speech one audio sample at a time. → The History of Speech Synthesis
• Twitter announces Vine’s shutdown on 27 October. → Dead End: Vine
• Pebble is insolvent; its assets go to Fitbit in December. → Dead End: Pebble

2017

• “Attention Is All You Need” introduces the Transformer. → The Transformer: “Attention Is All You Need”
• “Attention Is All You Need”, co-authored by Jakob Uszkoreit, introduces the Transformer. → Hans Uszkoreit and German Language Technology
• AMD ships the Zen architecture under CEO Lisa Su, beginning its turnaround. → AMD and the x86 Underdog
• CSS Grid gives the web a real layout system. → The History of Web Design
• Google makes Kotlin an official Android language. → Kotlin and Modern JVM Development
• Hennessy and Patterson share the Turing Award for RISC. → Hennessy and Patterson: The Quantitative Approach
• President Obama commutes Manning’s 35-year sentence. → Chelsea Manning: The Analyst Who Leaked a War
• The Transformer ends decades of dispute in NLP and opens the LLM era. → The Natural Language Processing Revolution
• The first DEF CON Voting Village, co-founded by Blaze; an AVS WinVote falls over Wi-Fi in about ten minutes. → Matt Blaze
• Verizon buys Yahoo!’s core business for $4.48 billion. → Dead End: Yahoo!
• WebAssembly ships in major browsers. → WebAssembly
• The FCC incentive auction, run with the SATFC repacking solver, closes at $19.8 billion. → Spectrum Auctions
• Luckey leaves Facebook in March and incorporates Anduril Industries in April. → Palmer Luckey
• Marcus Hutchins stops WannaCry on 12 May by registering a $10 domain. → Marcus Hutchins: The Accidental Hero of WannaCry
• Impression Products v. Lexmark is decided on 30 May. → The History of Printing
• Zadeh, who died in Berkeley on 6 September, is buried in Baku’s First Alley of Honor with state honors. → Lotfi Zadeh
• Ruja Ignatova, the OneCoin “Cryptoqueen”, vanishes on a flight to Athens in October. → Ruja Ignatova: The Missing Cryptoqueen

2018

• Bengio, Hinton, and LeCun share the Turing Award. → Yoshua Bengio and the Montreal School
• CeBIT holds its last edition; the computer trade fair era ends. → CeBIT and the Age of the Computer Trade Fair
• Joy Buolamwini’s Gender Shades study measures facial-recognition error rates by skin tone and gender. → AI Ethics and Algorithmic Bias
• The Cambridge Analytica scandal breaks. → Tech and Democracy / Elections
• The Cambridge Analytica scandal breaks. → Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook: The Social Network That Rewired Society
• The FDA clears Empatica’s Embrace, co-founded by Picard, as the first wristwatch for seizure alerting in neurology. → Rosalind Picard
• The GDPR takes effect. → The Privacy War: Surveillance, Data, and the Architecture of Attention
• The Google Walkout: 20,000 employees protest sexual-harassment payouts. → Tech Labor Movements
• Spectre and Meltdown are disclosed on 3 January. → Spectre, Meltdown, and Hardware Vulnerabilities
• Trump blocks Broadcom’s $117 billion bid for Qualcomm on 12 March. → Qualcomm: The Invisible Tax on Every Phone
• The FDA authorizes IDx-DR, the first autonomous AI diagnostic system. → AI in Clinical Practice
• The European Commission fines Google €4.34 billion over Android licensing restrictions. → Android: The Dominant Mobile OS
• Cody Ogden starts Killed by Google, a public graveyard of discontinued Google products. → Killed by Google: The Product Graveyard
• IBM under Rometty announces the $34 billion purchase of Red Hat, its largest acquisition. → Virginia Rometty
• Epic Games opens a PC store charging 12 percent, the first major break with 30. → The Platform Tax

2019

• A review of over a thousand studies finds the basic-emotions premise behind face-reading unsupported. → Affective Computing: Machines That Read Feelings
• A study re-executes 863,878 Jupyter notebooks from GitHub; 4 percent reproduce their stored results. → Data Science and the Notebook
• California’s AB5 tries to reclassify gig workers as employees. → The Gig Economy and Technology
• Catmull and Hanrahan share the Turing Award. → Ed Catmull
• Jibo’s servers are switched off in March; each robot delivers its own farewell and does a last dance. → Cynthia Breazeal
• Jony Ive leaves Apple. → Jony Ive and Apple Design
• Shoshana Zuboff publishes The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. → Surveillance Capitalism: The Business Model That Monetized Human Behavior
• Apple and Qualcomm settle their royalty war in April. → Qualcomm: The Invisible Tax on Every Phone
• Google shuts consumer Google+ in April. → Dead End: Google+
• The Oculus Quest ships on 21 May, a VR headset that needs no PC, phone or cable. → The History of Virtual Reality
• Joi Ito resigns as Media Lab director over hidden donations from Jeffrey Epstein. → The MIT Media Lab
• Google launches Stadia on 19 November. → Dead End: Google Stadia
• Coolest Cooler shuts down, leaving more than 20,000 of its 62,642 Kickstarter backers without a cooler. → Crowdfunding and Kickstarter

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