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News
Content and cloud networks now account for three-quarters of used international bandwidth, while Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon own, co-own or buy capacity on a growing share of the 600-plus submarine cable systems carrying over 99 per cent of data between countries, a private map hidden below the wireless internet
1+ hour, 27+ min ago (1405+ words) More than 99 per cent of international data traffic descends from coastal landing stations into hair-thin glass fibres and crosses the ocean floor in darkness. TeleGeography now tracks more than 600 active and planned submarine cable systems, a number that changes as…...
Your phone's 'battery health' number is mostly marketing — the real wear happens in the charge cycles nobody shows you
2+ hour, 5+ min ago (277+ words) Apple started showing cycle count on iPhone 15 and later, buried under Settings > General > About. It’s the single most useful number on the phone for judging battery wear, and it’s two menus deeper than the health percentage. That placement is a…...
A CAPTCHA no longer asks whether you can read wobbly letters — it silently measures how your mouse moved across the page, because bots trace geometrically perfect arcs and humans wander in tiny, unrepeatable curves
3+ hour, 46+ min ago (337+ words) It had not stopped bothering. It had started watching the mouse. In 2018 Google went a step further. reCAPTCHA v3 has no checkbox at all. It runs invisibly on every page of a site, continuously scoring every visitor from 0.0 (almost certainly a…...
Every year about 27.7 million tonnes of Saharan dust cross the Atlantic on the trade winds, and NASA's CALIPSO satellite has traced it fertilising the Amazon with roughly the same quantity of phosphorus the rainforest loses to rivers
3+ hour, 45+ min ago (302+ words) Today the Bodélé is a low basin flanked by mountains that funnel a low-level jet of wind across it each winter. The wind lifts the diatomite dust, and the same jet steers it out over the Atlantic. In a very…...
When Japan’s trade ministry put the PlayStation 2 under export control in April 2000, its 6.2-gigaflop hardware was considered adaptable for missile guidance, briefly forcing anyone exporting more than one console to seek government approval
2+ day, 23+ hour ago (1434+ words) In April 2000, taking two PlayStation 2 consoles out of Japan could require government paperwork normally associated with technology that might be diverted into a weapons system. The black plastic machine was sold for games and DVD movies, but its ability to…...
How did a failed CD deal between Sony and Nintendo in 1991 accidentally create the console that would sell over 100 million units and reshape gaming?
3+ day, 8+ min ago (978+ words) The double-cross is well documented. As Video Games Chronicle’s retrospective on the console’s thirtieth anniversary recounts, the shock ran through the Sony camp, and its executives, Kutaragi among them, treated the humiliation as licence to push forward alone rather than…...
At 3 gigahertz, a processor has only a third of a nanosecond between clock ticks, enough time for light to travel about 10 centimetres in vacuum before real interconnects, logic gates and capacitance shrink the distance a signal can cross on the chip
2+ day, 20+ hour ago (1305+ words) A processor running at 3 gigahertz gets one clock cycle every 333 picoseconds, roughly a third of a nanosecond. In that interval, light in a vacuum travels just under 10 centimetres, about the width of an adult hand. That distance is an absolute…...
Inside a modern processor, transistors switch on and off billions of times a second — and they've shrunk to about 3 nanometres wide, roughly 15 silicon atoms across, close to the physical limit of how small a switch can be
3+ day, 21+ hour ago (293+ words) Shrinking helps in three ways at once. Smaller transistors switch faster, because electrons cover less distance. They use less energy per switch, because there is less capacitance to charge. And more of them fit in the same area, so a…...
How did a single mistyped command by one AWS engineer in February 2017 knock a huge slice of the internet offline for nearly four hours?
3+ day, 23+ hour ago (904+ words) The cause, as Amazon itself later explained in an unusually candid public post-mortem, was a single command, typed by a single engineer, with one field wrong. The engineer entered the command. One of the inputs was wrong. Instead of removing…...
Wi-Fi doesn't actually slow down when a café gets crowded — the signal is fine, but every device has to wait its turn to speak on the same frequency, and the polite queuing is what you feel as lag
4+ day, 1+ hour ago (1181+ words) Sit down in a packed coffee shop at 10 a.m., open a laptop, and the Wi-Fi crawls. The obvious explanation is that the signal is being stretched thin across too many people, like water pressure dropping when everyone flushes at once. It…...