Latest

New from Make Tech Easier

Clear how-tos, explainers, and tech updates — published as we verify them.

By How It Works · Aug 10, 2026

How did a publicly humiliated Japanese electronics firm turn a failed CD partnership with Nintendo into a console that…

Aug 9 How does a fibre-optic cable no thicker than a garden hose carry roughly 99 per cent of intercontinental internet… How It Works
Aug 7 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… How It Works
Aug 6 How did a Cornell graduate student's 99-line bootstrap program in November 1988 infect roughly 6,000 machines How It Works
Aug 5 When you tap Send on an end-to-end encrypted message, the server passes along a scrambled blob it cannot read How It Works
Aug 5 How did a stray calico cat, handed a stationmaster's cap at the unstaffed end of a dying Japanese branch line, lift its… How It Works
Aug 4 When you type bbc.com, the invisible DNS lookup that may end in a nearby cache or climb from one of 13 named… How It Works
Aug 4 How did one incorrect command input during a routine debugging task in February 2017 knock a large slice of the… How It Works
Aug 3 How did one music video expose YouTube’s 32-bit ceiling at 2,147,483,647 views in late 2014 without actually breaking… Make Tech Easier Editorial Team
Aug 3 Bluetooth was named after a 10th-century Viking king who united Denmark and Norway How It Works
Jul 31 When you type an address into a browser, your computer asks a DNS resolver for the site's numeric address, and the… Make Tech Easier Editorial Team
Jul 31 How did a guidance computer with 4 kilobytes of memory, less than a modern greeting card chip, land Apollo 11 on the… Make Tech Easier Editorial Team
Jul 30 Fast charging isn't killing your battery How It Works
Jul 30 Deleting a file usually doesn't erase it How It Works
Jul 30 A password manager stores your vault in the cloud as encrypted ciphertext, not readable passwords, which is why… How It Works
Jul 29 Airplane mode was never just about planes How It Works
Jul 29 Incognito mode was never private How It Works
Jul 28 HTTPS doesn't encrypt which sites you visit How It Works
Jul 27 In 1947, Harvard’s Mark II ran on roughly 13,000 electromechanical relays, stored numbers across 100 registers, and… Make Tech Easier Editorial Team
Jul 27 In 1971, engineer Ray Tomlinson sent the first networked email between two computers sitting side by side in the same… Make Tech Easier Editorial Team