Nature punishes single points of failure because some level of failure is inevitable. Our focus needs to be on containing cascades of failure, and increasing our ability to swiftly recover from those failures. That limits the damage when we’re wrong, and we need to acknowledge the fact that we will sometimes be wrong.

What was missing on these services, for the most part, was original reporting. That was left up to the news media, particularly the few that had reporters in Pakistan and Afghanistan. “Our Kabul reporters spoke to Afghan security chiefs who said it comes too late — there is now a Bin Laden on every street,” Peter Horrocks, the director of BBC Global News, said in an e-mail.

Two weeks ago, several reports indicated Apple had tweaked its App Store algorithm to better promote apps in the Top Free charts based on “ratings and active usage”, rather than download numbers, which could be easily altered by developers using techniques like pay-per-install networks (which Apple doesn’t accept anymore) and promo codes.

New York City may be a lot of things — the city that never sleeps, the Big Apple, home of Ground Zero — but its future is as a data platform, says the city’s newly-appointed chief digital officer, Rachel Sterne.

Sony said it discovered that between 17 and 19 April an “illegal and unauthorised person” got access to people’s names, addresses, email address, birthdates, usernames, passwords, logins, security questions and more. Children with accounts established by their parents also may have had their data exposed, according to Sony, which put the warning on its US PlayStation blog – although the warning about the compromise might not be immediately visible to passing readers. The company is also emailing people who might be affected. The intrusion is potentially one of the biggest ever into a store of credit cards. Sony’s PSN is one of the world’s biggest holders of credit cards, though not as large as Amazon, eBay, PayPal or Apple’s iTunes, which each hold more than 100m accounts. The previous largest hacking attacks were on Heartland Payment Systems in January 2009, when up to 100m US credit and debit card details were stolen, and TK Maxx in March 2007, when up to 46m credit card details were stolen.

It is easy to see how Roadify could be useful. But it is the kind of service that gets better as more people sign up, and it has not reached critical mass. It is not uncommon to click on, say, the E train at Queens Plaza, only to find an update saying the station is crowded — from six hours earlier. There is also some development work to be done: More than 20 bus lines have yet to be entered into the database, meaning that if you live in many parts of Queens, you’re out of luck. And the subway information is arranged by line, not by station. Trying to decide which train to take from Times Square? You have to check each line individually. Roadify is also largely nonfunctional underground, a serious shortcoming for something you want to use on the subway.