Tech Explained
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
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?
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
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?
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?
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?
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
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?
Tech Explained
Fast charging isn’t killing your battery — heat is, and your phone throttles the charger the moment it climbs past 35°C
Tech Explained
Deleting a file usually doesn’t erase it: Windows marks the space as free, HDD data can linger, and SSDs may clear it with TRIM
Tech Explained
A password manager stores your vault in the cloud as encrypted ciphertext, not readable passwords, which is why recovery must be set up before you forget the master password
Tech Explained
Airplane mode was never just about planes: it combines a 1991 FCC network rule with an FAA interference rule dating to 1961
Tech Explained
Incognito mode was never private — it hides your history from the family laptop, not from your ISP, your employer or the site you just logged into
Tech Explained
HTTPS doesn’t encrypt which sites you visit — it hides the page contents, but your DNS lookups still broadcast every domain you open in plain text to your internet provider
Tech Explained
In 1947, Harvard’s Mark II ran on roughly 13,000 electromechanical relays, stored numbers across 100 registers, and read instructions from punched paper tape, turning thousands of clicking metal switches into a Navy calculator vulnerable to dust, loose contacts, and one famously misplaced moth
Tech Explained
In 1971, engineer Ray Tomlinson sent the first networked email between two computers sitting side by side in the same room — he chose the @ symbol to separate user from machine because it was the only punctuation on the keyboard nobody was using
Tech Explained
How did a single computer worm written by a Cornell graduate student in November 1988 crash roughly 6,000 machines and force the internet to invent security?
Tech Explained
When you tilt a smartphone, gravity shifts microscopic silicon fingers inside its accelerometer by only a few nanometres, changing the capacitance between them and producing the electrical imbalance the phone reads as a new direction for down
Tech Explained