Long Reads

Longer explainers,
fewer dead ends.

Deeper how-tos, history, and tech explainers from the Make Tech Easier editorial team. Pieces here get extra research and review.

Tech Explained

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?

The submarine cables that stitch the continents together are astonishingly slender, and astonishingly full. A single glass strand thinner than a human hair can now push more than 20 terabits a second across an entire ocean.

By How It Works · Aug 9, 2026

Tech Explained

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

The reason a café Wi-Fi crawls at lunchtime isn't bandwidth or the router being "overloaded" — it's that every device in the room, and often the room next door, is politely queueing to speak on the same slice of radio spectrum.

By How It Works · Aug 7, 2026

Tech Explained

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?

On the evening of 2 November 1988, a worm written by a 23-year-old student slipped onto the ARPANET and multiplied until administrators at MIT, Berkeley and NASA were pulling cables from walls. Within a week, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency had funded the first Computer Emergency Response Team.

By How It Works · Aug 6, 2026

Tech Explained

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

End-to-end encryption hides the words inside your messages, but the envelope around them — who, when, and how often — stays legible to whoever runs the service. That gap between content and metadata is the quiet compromise behind every "your messages are secure" promise.

By How It Works · Aug 5, 2026

Lifestyle

How did a stray calico cat, handed a stationmaster's cap at the unstaffed end of a dying Japanese branch line, lift its ridership by 17 per cent and generate an estimated 1.1 billion yen for the local economy?

On a rural line in western Japan, a calico cat wearing a peaked stationmaster's cap turned an unstaffed country halt into a pilgrimage site — and rewrote the economics of a railway that had been marked for closure.

By How It Works · Aug 5, 2026

Tech Explained

How did one incorrect command input during a routine debugging task in February 2017 knock a large slice of the internet offline for about four hours?

On 28 February 2017, one engineer typing the wrong parameter into a routine debugging tool triggered a cascade that took down Slack, Trello, Quora, Medium and thousands of other sites relying on Amazon's storage backbone.

By How It Works · Aug 4, 2026

Tech Explained

How did one music video expose YouTube’s 32-bit ceiling at 2,147,483,647 views in late 2014 without actually breaking the counter?

In December 2014, Psy's Gangnam Style clocked so many views that YouTube's counter hit the ceiling of a 32-bit signed integer. The fix reveals a quiet limit built into most of modern computing.

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team · Aug 3, 2026

Tech Explained

When you type an address into a browser, your computer asks a DNS resolver for the site's numeric address, and the answer usually comes straight from that resolver's cache — the 13 root server clusters at the top of the naming system get consulted only when the cache runs dry

Every web address hides a lookup that most people never see. Behind it sits a hierarchy of caches, resolvers, and 13 root server clusters that quietly hold the internet's naming system together.

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team · Jul 31, 2026

Tech Explained

How did a guidance computer with 4 kilobytes of memory, less than a modern greeting card chip, land Apollo 11 on the Moon in July 1969?

The Apollo Guidance Computer had less working memory than a musical birthday card, yet it flew twelve astronauts through translunar space. The trick was not raw power but an unusually clever operating system, and rope memory literally woven by hand.

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team · Jul 31, 2026