Internet
14 cards from across every topic, each citing a source. Tap one to open it in the feed.
- How a second factor makes stolen passwords worthless.
A password is something you know. A second factor is something you have, like your phone with an authenticator app, or …
- How country codes work and why Switzerland is CH.
ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 from 1974 gives every country two letters; 249 codes live in internet domains and IBANs. The codes …
- How to open a web page that has been deleted.
The Internet Archive has been collecting web pages since 1995 and has offered them as the Wayback Machine since October …
- How to spot that ten sources are really one.
In circular reporting an unsourced claim moves from a Wikipedia article into a news story and returns as a footnote in …
- How your browser finds wikipedia.org.
Computers reach each other by numbers, the IP addresses. When you type a name, your device asks a DNS server, which …
- Refuting nonsense costs ten times more than producing it.
Brandolini’s law, coined in 2013 by programmer Alberto Brandolini: the energy needed to refute nonsense is an order of …
- The Web was given away in 1993. On purpose.
Tim Berners-Lee proposed the World Wide Web at CERN in March 1989; the first website ran there by late 1990, and the …
- The first internet message was two letters long.
On 29 October 1969, student Charley Kline at UCLA typed "LOGIN" to a computer at the Stanford Research Institute, about …
- The internet lies on the seafloor, not in space.
The vast majority of intercontinental data traffic runs through fiber-optic cables on the ocean floor, not via …
- The internet ran out of addresses in 2011.
An IPv4 address has 32 bits, so there are about 4.3 billion of them, for over 8 billion people and even more devices. …
- The web is not the internet.
The internet is the road network: cables, routers and protocols that have linked computers since the 1970s. The World …
- What the padlock in your address bar actually does.
With HTTPS, your browser and the website first exchange public keys and a certificate that vouches for the site's …
- Why there's an @ in your email address.
In 1971, programmer Ray Tomlinson sent the first email between two ARPANET computers standing side by side. He needed a …
- Your video arrives in thousands of separate pieces.
The internet doesn't send files whole; it chops them into packets, usually up to 1,500 bytes each. Every packet carries …