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Clear how-tos, explainers, and tech updates — published as we verify them.
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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
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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
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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
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Aug 3
Bluetooth was named after a 10th-century Viking king who united Denmark and Norway
How It Works
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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
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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
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Jul 30
Fast charging isn't killing your battery
How It Works
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Jul 30
Deleting a file usually doesn't erase it
How It Works
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Jul 30
A password manager stores your vault in the cloud as encrypted ciphertext, not readable passwords, which is why…
How It Works
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Jul 29
Airplane mode was never just about planes
How It Works
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Jul 29
Incognito mode was never private
How It Works
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Jul 28
HTTPS doesn't encrypt which sites you visit
How It Works
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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
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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
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Jul 27
How did a single computer worm written by a Cornell graduate student in November 1988 crash roughly 6,000 machines and…
Make Tech Easier Editorial Team
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Jul 27
When you tilt a smartphone, gravity shifts microscopic silicon fingers inside its accelerometer by only a few…
Make Tech Easier Editorial Team
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Jul 27
A microwave oven works because water molecules have a slight positive and negative end
Make Tech Easier Editorial Team
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Jul 27
The retina of the mantis shrimp carries twelve types of colour receptor to the human eye's three
Make Tech Easier Editorial Team
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Jul 27
When a lightning return stroke heats a channel only centimetres wide to roughly 30,000 kelvin, about five times the…
Make Tech Easier Editorial Team
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Jul 27
In October 1957, a beachball-sized aluminium sphere called Sputnik 1 began sending 0.3-second pulses on two radio…
Make Tech Easier Editorial Team