Lore in the Machine

Every time you type a web address, you're trusting a directory. A vast, invisible system that translates the names you know into the numbers that actually move data across the internet. You trust it the way a town trusts its well. In 2008, a security researcher named Dan Kaminsky discovered that the well had no lid. In this episode DNS - what the Domain Name System is, and why it mattersDan Kaminsky - security researcher and internet advocate Cache poisoning - the class of attack Dan Kam...

Every programmer knows foo. It's the placeholder name, the stand-in variable, the "insert name here" of software development. But where did it actually come from? In this episode, we trace the history of foo and bar in programming back through three unlikely chapters: a Depression-era comic strip, a WWII air squadron, and a group of MIT students who built a computer underneath a model train set. It's a story that runs through hacker culture, computing folklore, and one very strange corner of ...

On December 9th, 1968, a Stanford researcher named Douglas Engelbart took the stage in San Francisco and showed a thousand computer professionals something they had never seen: text editing, clickable links, and video conferencing, all controlled by a small wooden block with a wire trailing out the back. The audience gave him a standing ovation. One witness said he was "dealing lightning with both hands." But the mouse didn't begin with Engelbart. In this episode, we follow the surprisingly t...

Every software project has one. It's easy to scroll past. Most of the time it's just a manual telling you system requirements, installation steps, and known bugs. But the README file owes a debt to Lewis Carroll, and a quiet trick built into its name that has been manipulating computers for decades. In this episode, we follow the README from its earliest appearances through the conventions that made it a standard, and to the programmers who decided it could be much more than documentation. In...

Look at your phone settings. There's a small angular icon there that you've probably never thought about much. It's a bind rune showing two characters from the ancient Younger Futhark alphabet, fused together. It's on billions of devices worldwide. How that symbol ended up there is two stories, separated by half a century, that have no business belonging together. One starts with a Hollywood actress listening at a dinner table full of fascists. The other starts with two engineers bombing a pi...