pplpod

On January 22, 2004, Google quietly launched a social network named for the engineer who built it in his 20 percent time, Orkut Büyükkökten. Within months his former employer, Affinity Engines, sued, claiming the site shared code with its own alumni network and pointing to nine identical bugs in both. The product itself was startlingly open: any member could view any profile, and friends could pub...

In 1957 a blind seven-year-old with perfect pitch named Joe Engressia found that whistling a certain note into a telephone made the line behave strangely. He had stumbled on the 2600 hertz tone the Bell network used to signal that a long distance trunk was idle. Because control signals traveled on the same channel as voices, anyone who could produce that tone could seize an unbilled line. John Dra...

Before 1984 the Bell System controlled American communications from end to end. AT&T ran long distance, owned the local operating companies, built nearly all the equipment through Western Electric, and funded the research at Bell Labs. In 1974 the Department of Justice sued, mainly to pry loose Western Electric. Convinced it would lose, AT&T offered a different bargain: keep the factories...

In 1942 Harry Coover Jr. led a team trying to make clear plastic for military gun sights. One compound, cyanoacrylate, stuck to every mold and instrument it touched, so they shelved it as a failure. B.F. Goodrich filed the first patent in 1947, but the real turn came in 1951, when Coover, by then at Eastman Kodak, looked again and saw an adhesive instead of a ruined plastic. Kodak brought it to ma...

In 1997 Deidre LaCarte was an art student at Malaspina University College in Nanaimo, British Columbia, teaching martial arts on the side, when she bet her sister and her best friend over who could draw the most traffic to a personal web page. Her entry, a GeoCities tribute to her pet hamster Hampton, offered rows of four low resolution dancing rodent GIFs and a sped up nine second loop of Roger M...

Apple's Macintosh commercial aired nationally exactly once, during the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII on January 22, 1984, and it is still called the greatest television ad ever made. Directed by Ridley Scott a year and a half after Blade Runner, the 60 second film shows a runner in red shorts hurling a sledgehammer through a giant screen where a Big Brother figure lectures rows of gray, shaven...

In 2000, subscribers to Forbes and Wired opened their mailboxes to find a plastic barcode scanner shaped like a cat that they had never ordered. The CueCat, made by Digital Convergence Corporation, promised to spare people the labor of typing web addresses: swipe a printed code in a magazine and your desktop browser would load the page. Investors including Belo Corporation, RadioShack, Young and R...

On June 4, 1996, the European Space Agency's new Ariane 5 lifted off from Kourou carrying the four Cluster satellites, each about 1,200 kilograms, bound to study Earth's magnetosphere. For thirty seconds the flight was flawless. At 37 seconds the rocket swiveled its nozzles hard to one side, tore itself apart under aerodynamic stress, and self-destructed. Nothing physical had broken. The cause was...

In 1938 a chemist named Roy J. Plunkett opened the valve on a cylinder of tetrafluoroethylene gas in a New Jersey laboratory and nothing came out. The cylinder still weighed as much as a full one, so he and his assistant sawed it in half. Inside was a waxy, slippery white powder. The gas had polymerized into polytetrafluoroethylene, or PTFE, a chain of carbon atoms sheathed in fluorine. Almost not...

The recording industry once demanded 72 trillion dollars in damages from a file sharing program, more than three times the gross domestic product of the planet at the time. The target was LimeWire, created in New York in 2000 by Mark Gorton. Written in Java, it ran on Windows, Mac, and Linux alike and connected users directly to one another over the Gnutella network. It also carried a heavy price....

In the spring of 2011 a handful of anonymous hackers knocked the CIA's public website offline, pulled user data out of Sony Pictures, and planted a story on the PBS site claiming Tupac and Biggie Smalls were alive in New Zealand. They called themselves LulzSec, short for Lulz Security, and said they did it for laughs. The group formed in May 2011 from an older crew known as Internet Feds. Its lead...

In 1983, in the Castro Valley Village shopping center in California, Joseph Marver ran a failing women's clothing shop called Spirit Women's Discount Apparel. Watching crowds pour into a costume store across the street, he cleared out the dresses, stocked costumes, makeup, and props, and took in 100,000 dollars in a 30 day trial. The following year he opened a temporary seasonal storefront in a ma...

The heavy metal espresso machine on the counter of a specialty cafe very often carries the name La Marzocco. The company began in Florence in 1927, when brothers Giuseppe and Bruno Bambi opened a mechanical workshop. Giuseppe had trained as a brass artisan with the Italian national railway, and he knew steam boilers. Early machines were tall vertical towers that hid the barista from the customer....

In the 1960s a 4,000 pound, five-axis hydraulic arm rolled onto the stage of The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. It poured a beer without spilling, knocked a golf ball into a cup, waved a conductor's baton, and played an accordion. The machine was the Unimate, the world's first industrial robot, and the stunt was calculated. Its makers, inventor George Devol and Joseph Engelberger of Unimation, w...

In 1982 the mayor of Woodbridge, New Jersey, banned pedestrians from wearing portable cassette players in public. The device behind the panic had started as one executive's complaint. Sony co-founder Masaru Ibuka was tired of hauling the bulky TC-D5 recorder on long flights to hear classical music, so he asked Norio Ohga for a playback-only machine. Engineers gutted a dictation recorder called the...

In 2007 a user named Wesley Williams, posting as Moto42 on a 4chan paranormal board, described a concrete and rebar statue that snaps your neck the moment you blink. He labeled it SCP-173 and wrote it as a cold containment report. Imitators followed, the community moved to Wikidot in 2008, and by mid-2026 the English branch alone held over 10,400 SCP objects and 6,300 tales, with 15 official inter...

The earliest known recording of a human voice was made in 1860, almost two decades before Thomas Edison, by a Parisian typesetter who never meant anyone to hear it. Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville built a mechanical ear from a funnel, a membrane, and a boar's bristle that scratched sound waves into lampblack. He wanted to see sound, not replay it. His tracing of the folk song Au Clair de la Lune...

In 1981 portable computing meant dragging a plastic box of nearly 25 pounds, the size of a sewing machine, through an airport and shoving it under the seat. It had no battery. The Osborne 1 was the idea of Adam Osborne, a successful author and publisher of computer books who believed price was the barrier keeping ordinary people from computers. He hired Lee Felsenstein to engineer a machine with t...

At about 8:30 on the evening of November 2, 1988, a Cornell graduate student released a program onto the ARPANET from a machine at MIT, a choice that hid where it really came from. Robert Tappan Morris said he only wanted to count how many computers were connected. His father, Robert Morris Sr., was a pioneering cryptographer at the National Security Agency. Within hours the son's creation was cop...

On March 26, 1999, a programmer from Aberdeen Township, New Jersey, used a stolen AOL account to post a Word file called list.doc to the Usenet group alt.sex, promising passwords to paid adult websites. The file carried a macro virus named Melissa. Once opened, it lowered Word's security settings, infected the master template, and told Microsoft Outlook to mail itself to the first 50 entries in th...

In the summer of 2014, for about eight weeks, it seemed everyone with a phone was dumping ice water on their head. The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge is remembered as a tidy charity triumph, but it began as something else. Versions of a cold water challenge had circulated since 1991 in the northern United States and northern Norway, with no link to any disease. That May, a New Jersey fire department tha...

In the mid-1960s at MIT, Joseph Weizenbaum walked into his lab and found his secretary typing at a teletype terminal. She asked him to leave the room. She wanted privacy for a personal conversation with ELIZA, the program he had written between 1964 and 1967 and named after Eliza Doolittle of Pygmalion. Weizenbaum had built it to show that conversation between people and machines was a superficial...

On January 19, 2012, Kim Dotcom was marking his 38th birthday in a leased 30 million dollar mansion in Coatesville, New Zealand, with a helicopter on the lawn and a fleet of luxury cars outside. Then local police, acting with the FBI, raided the estate, seized his assets, and froze his accounts. The same day the U.S. Department of Justice took every Megaupload domain offline. The company he had in...

An AI-generated image of Shrimp Jesus sits on Facebook above tens of thousands of comments that all say amen, and the crowd feels empty. That unease has a name. In 2021 a user called IlluminatiPirate posted a sprawling manifesto on the forum Agora Road's Macintosh Cafe, claiming that organic human interaction online had been wiped out and replaced by bots as part of a plot by governments and elite...

The Dancing Baby, also known as Baby Cha-Cha and the Oogachaka Baby, was never meant to be seen by the public. It was a stress test. In 1995 the company Unreal Pictures was building Character Studio, an animation plugin for Autodesk's 3D Studio Max, and needed sample files to impress developers. Animator Robert Lurye took a file of an adult skeleton dancing the cha-cha, added air guitar and should...