So, I blogged here a while ago about the order in which to watch the various installments of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It was a simpler time. The Infinity Saga was maybe only half formed. But still, there was enough to take a good chunk of time to catch up on. Now, with Disney+ recently launched, this might be the best time to revisit this list. Now, the sheer size of the MCU is even more intimidating. And that is a statement that will seem naive in a couple years. Anyway, without further delay here is my updated suggested order:
Captain America: The First Avenger
Agent Carter Seasons 1 & 2
Iron Man
The Incredible Hulk
Iron Man 2
Marvel One Shot: A Funny Thing Happened On The Way to Thor’s Hammer (on Captain America: The First Avenger BluRay/DVD)
Thor
Marvel One Shot: The Consultant (on Thor BluRay/DVD)
The Avengers
Marvel One Shot: Item 47 (on The Avengers BluRay/DVD)
Iron Man 3
Marvel One Shot: Agent Carter (on Iron Man 3 BluRay/DVD)
Agents of SHIELD Season 1 Episodes 1-7
Thor: The Dark World
Marvel One Shot: All Hail The King (on Thor:The Dark World BluRay/DVD)
Agents of SHIELD Season 1 Episodes 8-16
Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Agents of SHIELD Season 1 Episodes 17-22
Guardians of the Galaxy
Agents of SHIELD Season 2 Episodes 1-19
The Avengers: Age of Ultron
Agents of SHIELD Season 2 Episodes 20-22
Ant-Man
Captain America: Civil War
Spider-Man: Homecoming
Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol 2
Doctor Strange
Thor: Ragnarok
Black Panther
Avengers: Infinity War
Ant-man and the Wasp
Captain Marvel
Avengers: Endgame
Spider-Man: Far From Home
The Netflix Shows operate pretty separately, and don’t tie in closely to the MCU films. They all take place after Avengers, with the later series (Jessica Jones Season 2, Defenders, etc) taking place after Avengers Age of Ultron. However, apart from that they can basically be watched in their order of release.
Daredevil Season 1
Daredevil Season 2
Jessica Jones Season 1
Luke Cage Season 1
Iron Fist Season 2
Defenders
The Punisher Season 1
Jessica Jones Season 2
Luke Cage Season 2
Iron Fist Season 2
Daredevil Season 3
Jessica Jones Season 3
The Punisher Season 2
Similarly later seasons of Agents of SHIELD stop tying in quite so closely to the MCU and can be watched in whatever order relative to the rest of the MCU. The same can be said for marvel’s Runaways and the Cloak & Dagger series. Both are quite good, but don’t tie closely in to the MCU happenings. Though, they are intended to be in the same world. Inhumans should be skipped altogether.
So the census website gave us all something to laugh or cringe or rage at in some measure over the last 24 hours. If you are seeing this, you probably saw I had some things to say about it. Some in jest. Some less so. But what happened?
There are stories out this morning that the site was hacked. First of all, if I could ask the ABS to never be so stupid as to use that phrase again, that would be great. When people already have privacy concerns with the data being gathered using a generic chronically misunderstood term like “hacked” just makes you look terrible and the data insecure. Of course people have always had privacy concerns about the census, but when you are now asking for identifying information they are all the more valid.
A little more reading indicates the “hacking” was really a series of Denial of Service (DOS or Distributed Denial of Service – DDOS) attacks. At least as far as the information I am seeing. When you say “hacked” a lot of people envisage some teenage techie savant, or foreign government spy breaking into the system and copying everything to an elaborate USB stick (in fact, that is the definition). But that is not what a Denial of Service attack is. A DOS is simply an attempt to make a system so busy or overloaded it can’t be used by anyone. Just like the first 2 minutes after Ticketmaster puts Beyonce tickets on sale. Or a thousand extra people turning up to catch your train. Suddenly there is no room for you. It just gets too busy. The distinct difference is that any data stored by the website previously is generally no less secure after or during a DOS attack than it was otherwise. This is why just saying “hacked” is a terrible idea.
So, what did happen?
Well, I wasn’t there in the room, so I don’t know. What I do know is that they claim the site was taken down as a security measure after the DOS attacks. Not unreasonable. But why then was I able to finally get a page at 11pm. Was it brought back up after only a couple of hours? And why did that page then tell me to try again in 15 minutes?
I think they were just too busy. Much too busy. Did they get hit by a DOS? Yeah, could well be. If so, I don’t know that they coped very well. Where did that DOS come from? I don’t know… who has an interest in that not going well? Though, of course, dickhead anarchists are dickhead anarchists sometimes.
Here is my problem…
“In the lead-up to census night, the ABS spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on load testing and said its servers could handle 1 million forms per hour.”
This seems to be true. A quick look at the government tenders website last night indicated to me probably over half a million dollars was spent on load testing the census site. But here is the thing about testing: What if you find something you don’t know how to fix? Or you only find 99% of the issues?
I still haven’t seen the whole site working (for obvious reasons), so it’s a very initial guess. But, does it look to me like the site was on the most efficient technology and deployed the most scalable way? No, not really. But they certainly tried to scale. Did they learn anything from the Obamacare rollout or even from ClickFrenzy or any of the other mass site failures that have been seen very often here and sometimes abroad? I don’t know. I would have hoped so. The result suggests not enough at least.
I also have a problem with the figure from the quote above. 1 million forms per hour. That’s 278 per second. Seems like a lot. Indeed, it is. It’s not really enough, though, is it?
Numbers I saw indicated they expected up to 16 million census responses. That seems high. There are only about 9 million households in Australia. Lets say that has grown a bit and there are 10 million. And we are all “supposed” (not technically required) to fill in our census Tuesday night. Lets say a few get in early, during the day or whatever. Maybe 2 million. Maybe a million will mail in the form. That leaves 7 million to try and fill out their forms probably in the 3 hours between 6 and 9pm (don’t want to leave it too late!) on the specified night. Yeah, well over 2 million an hour. Maybe they are more spread out… but we would probably still see a bunch of attempts around 7-8 o’clock. You might expect a peak around that time of 3 million/hour? I think that’s reasonable. So, 1 million an hour is actually quite inadequate. Furthermore, as people experience failures and come back to try again “15 minutes later” that simply increases load for those already trying those 15 minutes later.
There may have been attacks. If so, your data is probably as safe as it ever was. But, it doesn’t seem like they were really prepared for an operation on this scale. No, let me be clear. This is no reason to defund or attack the ABS. There are maybe people there who made some dumb decisions, but maybe they got the best advice available from the closest things to experts available. And maybe they were just wrong, or inadequate for the scale of the task. Regardless, the ABS still performs a critical role in the management of this country and crippling them will not help them do that job better.
Anyway, it’s the morning after census night. Mine hasn’t been lodged (I will try in 4 days – https://twitter.com/rossmack/status/763018667059650564) and who knows what really went on, but that’s my 2 cents. I guess we will find out more in the coming days.