On August 11, 1994, a man in Philadelphia sat down at a computer and bought a CD. The album was Sting’s Ten Summoner’s Tales, the price was $12.48 plus shipping, and the seller was a young company called NetMarket. Nothing about the object...
Read article
The little hat-and-glasses icon has become shorthand for secrecy. Open an Incognito window in Chrome — or a Private Browsing window in another browser — and it feels as though you have stepp...
Read
Wi-Fi feels almost absurdly simple from the outside. Tap a network name, enter a password, and within seconds a phone can stream a film from a server thousands of kilometers away. No cable r...
Read
Open the Voynich Manuscript and almost everything about it looks tantalizingly close to comprehension. Lines of neat handwriting run from left to right. Words are separated by spaces. Paragr...
Read
Imagine owning a fortune… but being locked out of it. That’s exactly what happened to Stefan Thomas, a programmer who was given 7,002 Bitcoin back in 2011 for making a video about crypto....
Read
In 1993, the U.S. government proposed a small hardware chip called the Clipper Chip, meant to be embedded in phones and computers. The goal? Allow federal agencies to access encrypted commun...
Read