The Make Tech Easier archive.
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How does a fibre-optic cable no thicker than a garden hose carry roughly 99 per cent of intercontinental internet traffic across 13,000 kilometres of ocean floor?
Wi-Fi can slow to a crawl in a crowded café even when the fibre connection is fast, because 2.4 GHz offers only three non-overlapping 20 MHz channels in most places, forcing nearby devices on the same channel to compete for airtime and leaving the webpage waiting behind the spinner
How did a Cornell graduate student's 99-line bootstrap program in November 1988 infect roughly 6,000 machines — about 10 per cent of the early internet — and force universities to invent the first computer emergency response team?
When you tap Send on an end-to-end encrypted message, the server passes along a scrambled blob it cannot read — but the timestamps, your contact list and who you spoke to when are still visible to the company running the app
