Technology Commentary

Lauren Goode: I miss Away Messages. This nostalgia is layered in abstraction; I probably miss the newness of the internet of the 1990s, and I also miss just being … away. But this is about Away Messages themselves—the bits of code that constructed Maginot Lines around our availability. An Away Message was a text box...

"No keys, push to start."

For a friend’s memorial I signed up to make a batch of images into a slideshow. All I wanted was the Simplest Possible Thing: a web page that would cycle through a batch of images. It’s…

a series of online zines about the ways organizations coordinate.

For your consideration: A reasonable list of the least bad distros

Considering companies that ended up in a far different place from where they started. You know, like Samsung, Shell, Hasbro, and American Express.

A lot has changed since Yahoo and AOL were the homepages of choice. This visualization looks at the largest internet giants in the U.S. since 1998.

The Mac and Web have a long history together. From the very beginning, Mac OS X included the ability to run an Apache web server by clicking a Start button: About a decade ago, things started to change. Since then it’s gotten harder and harder to start a simple web server for testing HTML, CSS, […]

Over the last 25 years, the web has grown from a simple idea to the most important technological breakthrough of our time.

The metaphors we use are like a map. They can guide us or lead us astray. When British mathematician Clive Humby said “Data is the new oil” back in 2006, he meant that data, like oil, must be refined and transformed to make it into useful products and services. Only then does it become valuable. ...

Data is the new oil, we are told. Every country needs a data strategy, and all of us should own our data, and be paid for it. But really, there is no such thing as data, it’s not yours, and it’s not worth anything.

Blogging has been good to me. Blogging has been good for me.

The Microsoft and Stripe developer keynotes were both examples of the rise of Thin Platforms

The live chats of the past are now in our pockets and inescapable. We need better boundaries.

News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication

Decarbonization, carbon capture, and solar-radiation management will provide work for decades to come

Long-distance ocean travel began with watercraft using zero-emission propulsion systems. Gigantic sails harnessed the power of the wind. As technology developed, oceangoing craft switched to fossil-fuel-based propulsion. Fascinatingly, spacecraft may be taking the opposite trajectory: Our first rockets traveled through space by burning fuel, but now NASA is

On the evolution and growth of fluorescent colors in modern culture—especially in bright, neon, DayGlo form.

With so much hype and hate around Web3, let's take a measured look at what it is and what it can do.

My last post (“The balance has shifted away from SPAs”) attracted a fair amount of controversy, so I’d like to do a follow-up post with some clarifying points. First off, a defini…

Please go ahead, screenshot that NFT - reupload it; hell, use the screenshot as your Twitter PFP despite not having paid a single Wei for it! Yes, I don't care - It's because an NFT's i

If you could properly replace an iPhone battery with a couple of simple tools, Apple would surely just send you the simple tools. But if that were the case there’d be no need for this program.

DISCLAIMER: this post is purely for educational purposes, the author assumes no responsibility for potential criminal actions derived from the information contained therein. Hundreds of new web vulnerabilities are discovered every year.Some are communicated to the vendor or to organizations such as MITRE, others are sold on the deep web as sinister intellectual property.Some are

Years of bad decisions finally catch up to them

Building a better internet won't happen by chance or simply maximizing freedom. We have to build systems that support justice. How can we do that?

No-code programming is shaping everything from gaming to website development, and soon it’ll have a role in machine-learning too.