Tech Time Warp: How human error leads to July 1997 email outage
This week’s Tech Time Warp looks at how, in a world that’s so utterly reliant on the internet, service outages are hardly uncommon anymore, whether they’re the result of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, like that which caused Microsoft...
Pioneers in Tech: Joan L. Mitchell, co-inventor of the JPEG
This week’s Pioneers in Tech looks at how today’s social media influencers owe much to Joan L. Mitchell, a self-professed “Sputnik baby” who came of age during the space race and ended up co-creating one of the file formats most...
Tech Time Warp: Tron captivates audiences with 15 minutes of CGI
As with all things technological, it’s easy to take computer-generated imagery, or CGI, for granted—or even complain about CGI, in the case of the much-maligned CGI Flounder from Disney’s recent remake of The Little Mermaid. But in this week’s Tech...
Tech Time Warp: Malware in the “Form” of a boot sector virus
Although this week’s Tech Time Warp topic is not as prevalent today, boot sector viruses were a widespread issue in the 1990s and 2000s. Especially common during the days of MS-DOS and floppy disks, a boot sector virus attacks a...
Tech Time Warp: 80s viruses that hit the Apple II
Apple products have a reputation for being immune to malware, but that is not 100 percent true. In 1988, hackers released two viruses targeting ProDOS, the Apple II operating system. Admittedly, it took hackers five years to attack ProDOS —...
Tech Time Warp: Morto worm relishes on common usernames and weak passwords
Before you read any more of this post, ask yourself: Are you using “administrator” as a username for any service? If the answer is yes, stop what you’re doing and change that immediately. Then return here to find out why....
Pioneers in Tech: LGBTQ+ activist Edith Windsor’s first career
The late Edith Windsor is best known as the plaintiff in the 2013 Supreme Court case United States v. Windsor, which struck down the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and helped paved the way for the legalization of same-sex...
Tech Time Warp: Making nothing of mobile malware
An early case of mobile malware provoked an interesting reaction from pundits: swift dismissal as much ado about nothing. In June 2000, users of mobile phones made by the Spanish telecommunications company Telefonica began receiving strange text messages. The messages...
Tech Time Warp: Burning questions about Flame’s origins
The Flame virus first flickered publicly in May 2012 when the United Nations’ International Telecommunications Union requested the hacking of Iranian computers be investigated. Although not widespread — only a few hundred targeted computers were thought to have been infected...
Tech Time Warp: Kodak plays for KEEPS
Eastman Kodak’s major product announcements on May 29, 1985, remind us yet again of how far we’ve come in less than 40 years. The New York Times, The Washington Post and Associated Press all covered Kodak’s news about KEEPS (short...
