Found in the Machine

She was a copywriter turned marketer who watched focus groups attempt to use computers. She knew the internet wasn't a product you could sell. You needed to give people a way in. Her name was Jan Brandt, and she decided to mail it to them.

In this episode

• Jan Brandt: The architect of America Online's carpet bombing strategy that put a billion discs in American hands
• Omaha Steaks, airlines, and grocery stores: how the discs became inescapable
• A 150-pound throne and a museum case: What happened to the AOL discs that didn't go in the trash
• The digital divide: The people who got left behind

Episode Music

• Jay Opie / Nihilore, CC BY 4.0
  • There's Garbage in the Mariana Trench
  • Morality Centre
  • Hemiteleia
  • Where There is No Darkness

Additional Reading

McCullough, B. (2014, August). She gave the world a billion AOL CDs: An interview with marketing legend Jan Brandt [Podcast episode]. Internet History Podcast. https://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2014/08/she-gave-the-world-a-billion-aol-cds-an-interview-with-marketing-legend-jan-brandt/

National Telecommunications and Information Administration. (n.d.). Data Central. U.S. Department of Commerce. https://www.ntia.gov/topics/data-central

Ramo, J. C. (1997, September 22). How AOL lost the battles but won the war. Time. https://time.com/archive/6731455/how-aol-lost-the-battles-but-won-the-war/

Smithsonian Institution. (n.d.). America Online (AOL) disc [Object record, NMAH catalog no. 2010.3015.05]. National Museum of American History. https://www.si.edu/object/nmah_1395721 

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This show is independently produced. You can support the show by joining the show's Patreon. Patreon members get access to "Found in the Margins" bonus episodes and help make the show possible. You can also donate via Buy Me a Coffee.

If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And don't forget to sign up to receive Notes from the Machine with each episode.

In 1965, engineers were building a computer to fly men to the moon. It had to survive a rocket launch and the vacuum of space. It could not be erased by a power failure, a hard landing, or anything short of physical destruction. They needed to make the code permanent. They needed to weave it.

In this episode

• Hilda Carpenter - MIT technician who assembled the first magnetic-core memory plane
• The Raytheon weavers - Textile workers and watchmakers recruited to encode Apollo's computer
• The Fairchild Semiconductor plant - Where Navajo women built integrated circuits so men could walk on the moon

Episode Music

• Jay Opie / Nihilore, CC BY 4.0
  • "Those 2 Saints"
  • "Evening Drum"
  • "No History Should Be Silenced"
  • "Behind the Mask"

Additional Reading

CuriousMarc. (2019). Core memory explained and demonstrated [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/AwsInQLmjXc

Nakamura, L. (2014). Indigenous circuits. Computer History Museum. https://computerhistory.org/blog/indigenous-circuits/

Rankin, J. L. (2022, February 18). Core memory weavers and Navajo women made the Apollo missions possible. Science News. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/core-memory-weavers-navajo-apollo-raytheon-computer-nasa

Shirriff, K. (2019). Software woven into wire. Ken Shirriff's Blog. https://www.righto.com/2019/07/software-woven-into-wire-core-rope-and.html

Stark, L. (2018). Hilda wove all those wires [Zine]. https://www.liza-stark.com/projects/zines/hilda.html

Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. (2017). "Hear my voice" artist profile: D.Y. Begay [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9wmz5rf1NU

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Support the show

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This show is independently produced. You can support the show by joining the show's Patreon. Patreon members get access to "Found in the Margins" bonus episodes and help make the show possible. You can also donate via Buy Me a Coffee.

If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And don't forget to sign up to receive Notes from the Machine with each episode.

The show has a new name. 

Starting with this episode, Lore in the Machine is now Found in the Machine. Same stories, same voice. The name just finally says what the show actually does. 

If you're subscribed, your feed will keep updating automatically. If you want to share the show with someone new, the new home is foundinthemachine.com.

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Support the show

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This show is independently produced. You can support the show by joining the show's Patreon. Patreon members get access to "Found in the Margins" bonus episodes and help make the show possible. You can also donate via Buy Me a Coffee.

If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And don't forget to sign up to receive Notes from the Machine with each episode.

Listeners, please note that this episode was recorded before the show’s name changed to Found in the Machine, so you’ll hear the old name in this episode.  

You’ve done this so many times you don’t think about it anymore. A box appears. You squint at some blurry letters, type them out, check the box. It takes about ten seconds.

You probably didn’t know that those ten seconds were going somewhere. For years, millions of people solving these security tests were quietly doing something else entirely. They were rescuing forgotten history that computers couldn’t read.

In 1950, Alan Turing proposed a test where machines tried to pass as human. Half a century later, a graduate student inverted it. The machine would do the judging. And the humans would get to work.

In this episode

• Turing's imitation game - the thought experiment that set the terms for AI
• Luis von Ahn and Manuel Blum - the Carnegie Mellon graduate student and his professor who built the wall between humans and bots
• reCAPTCHA - the internet security test that became the largest digitization project in history
• reCAPTCHA v3 - the invisible version

Episode Music

• Jay Opie / Nihilore, CC BY 4.0
  • "Whispers Invoke Paranoia"
  • "Do Not Look Back"
  • "Artifice"

Additional Reading

Pandey, K. (2022, July 25). History & evolution of CAPTCHA. Masai School. https://www.masaischool.com/blog/history-evolution-of-captcha/

Gugliotta, G. (2011, March 29). Deciphering Old Texts, One Woozy, Curvy Word at a Time. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/29/science/29recaptcha.html

Weintraub, S. (2009, September). Google acquires reCAPTCHA in two-for-one deal. Computerworld. https://www.computerworld.com/article/1331965/google-acquires-recaptcha-in-two-for-one-deal.html

Schwab, K. (2019, June 27). Google's new reCAPTCHA has a dark side. Fast Company. https://www.fastcompany.com/90369697/googles-new-recaptcha-has-a-dark-side

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Support the show

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This show is independently produced. You can support the show by joining the show's Patreon. Patreon members get access to "Found in the Margins" bonus episodes and help make the show possible. You can also donate via Buy Me a Coffee.

If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And don't forget to sign up to receive Notes from the Machine with each episode.

Listeners, please note that this episode was recorded before the show’s name changed to Found in the Machine, so you’ll hear the old name in this episode. 

Two people walk toward each other on a dirt road. One bullet each. In a normal duel, a missed shot makes a sound. But in a silent duel, a miss would be invisible. You wouldn't know if your opponent was holding their fire, or had already taken their one shot. How would you know when to stop walking and take your own?

In 2024, NVIDIA named the most powerful piece of AI hardware ever built after the man who spent his career thinking about this exact problem. His name was David Blackwell. 

In this episode

• David Blackwell: brilliant professor and researcher at the RAND Corporation. Seventh African American to earn a PhD in mathematics.
• Kriegsspiel: the blind chess variant that Blackwell played daily.
• Blackwell's silent duel: a thought experiment from Cold War-era game theory, and why related math ended up in machine learning textbooks.
• The economist's question: the most important question in the world at that moment, asked in good faith, and why every mathematician Blackwell knew gave the same useless answer. 

Episode Music

• Jay Opie / Nihilore, CC BY 4.0
  • "Anti-Nostalgia"
  • "Who Are You At War With Now?"
  • "Alter Ego" 

Additional Reading

AYE Conference. (n.d.). Activity sheet 1: David Blackwell and the theory of duels [PDF]. https://www.ayeconference.com/Articles/gameTheory.pdf

Black, R. (2019). David Blackwell and the deadliest duel. Royal Fireworks Press.

Blackwell, D. (2003). An oral history with David Blackwell [Oral history transcript; conducted by N. Wilmot, 2002–2003]. Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. https://bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/sites.tufts.edu/dist/8/3572/files/2015/11/blackwell.pdf

NVIDIA. (2024). NVIDIA Blackwell architecture. https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/technologies/blackwell-architecture/

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Support the show

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This show is independently produced. You can support the show by joining the show's Patreon. Patreon members get access to "Found in the Margins" bonus episodes and help make the show possible. You can also donate via Buy Me a Coffee.

If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And don't forget to sign up to receive Notes from the Machine with each episode.

Listeners, please note that this episode was recorded before the show’s name changed to Found in the Machine, so you’ll hear the old name in this episode. 

Four times a year, a small group of people fly to a secure facility in either Virginia or California. They submit to retina scanners and palm readers. They enter a metal cage in a signal-proof room. They turn keys in unison.

These people are volunteers, and they're there to perform a ritual to secure the internet's core directory. 

If you build a master key for the internet, who do you trust to hold it?

In this episode

• The Ceremony of the Keys - the 700-year-old nightly ritual at the Tower of London, and what it has to do with cyber security
• The Crypto Officers - who they are, and what they carry
• The Ritual - over 100 scripted steps, a self-destructing lockbox, and a laptop with no memory
• The things that went wrong - because they do 

Episode Music

• Jay Opie / Nihilore, CC BY 4.0
  • "Like an Empty Kaleidoscope"
  • "Single Lane Tunnel"
  • "The Absurd"
  • "Iconoclast" 

Additional Notes

This episode is the follow-up to "Poison in the Cache." 

If you want to see this ritual for yourself, you can. The root signing relies on radical transparency, so every step is shared. The list of ceremonies is available via the IANA along with the full list of Crypto Officers.

Additional Reading

Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. (2026, February 10). Root Zone KSK ceremony 60 annotated script [Ceremony script]. https://data.iana.org/ksk-ceremony/60/AT60_Annotated_Script.pdf

Internet Hall of Fame. (2014, March 25). Our online safety is protected by one "stubborn lady." https://www.internethalloffame.org/2014/03/25/our-online-safety-protected-one-stubborn-lady/

McCarthy, K. (2020, February 13). Internet's safe-keepers forced to postpone crucial DNSSEC root key signing ceremony. The Register. https://www.theregister.com/2020/02/13/iana_dnssec_ksk_delay/

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Support the show

💚

This show is independently produced. You can support the show by joining the show's Patreon. Patreon members get access to "Found in the Margins" bonus episodes and help make the show possible. You can also donate via Buy Me a Coffee.

If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And don't forget to sign up to receive Notes from the Machine with each episode.

Listeners, please note that this episode was recorded before the show’s name changed to Found in the Machine, so you’ll hear the old name in this episode. 

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 - the Domain Name System and why it matters
• Dan Kaminsky - security researcher and internet advocate 
• Cache poisoning - the class of attack Dan found hiding in the internet's foundation
• The patch - a secret meeting, a deadline, and a synchronized fix 

Episode Music

• Jay Opie / Nihilore, CC BY 4.0
  • "Closest Strangers"
  • "Single Lane Tunnel" 
  • "The Dweller on the Threshold"
  • "A Different World by Night" 

Additional Reading

Choi, S. G. (n.d.). Remote DNS attacks and DNS defenses [Lecture notes, IT432 Advanced Computer and Network Security]. U.S. Naval Academy. https://www.usna.edu/Users/cs/choi/it432/lec/l07/lec.html

Vixie, P. (2008, July 14). Not a guessing game. CircleID. https://circleid.com/posts/87143_dns_not_a_guessing_game/

Internet Hall of Fame. (2022, March 23). A dedicated approach to Internet security: Daniel Kaminsky. https://www.internethalloffame.org/2022/03/23/dedicated-approach-internet-security-daniel-kaminsky/

Kaminsky, D. (2008). Black Ops 2008: It's the end of the cache as we know it [Conference presentation, DEF CON 16]. Video: https://media.blackhat.com/bh-usa-08/video/bh-us-08-Kaminsky/black-hat-usa-08-kaminsky-blackops08-hires.m4v (Note: this is Kaminsky's DEF CON Black Ops talk, not Black Hat)

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Support the show

💚

This show is independently produced. You can support the show by joining the show's Patreon. Patreon members get access to "Found in the Margins" bonus episodes and help make the show possible. You can also donate via Buy Me a Coffee.

If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And don't forget to sign up to receive Notes from the Machine with each episode.

Listeners, please note that this episode was recorded before the show’s name changed to Found in the Machine, so you’ll hear the old name in this episode. 

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. One starts with a Hollywood actress listening at a dinner table full of fascists. The other starts with two engineers bombing a pitch meeting and ending up in a Canadian pub.

In this episode

• Hedy Lamarr - after the cameras and the dinner parties
• The patent - a collaboration and what the Navy said about it
• Two engineers in a pub - a failed pitch meeting and a conversation about Vikings and a Danish king

Episode Music

• Jay Opie / Nihilore, CC BY 4.0
  • "Morning Bell" 
  • "Noctivagant (Orchestral Version)" 
  • "Moonlit Skyline"

Additional Reading

Sinclair. (2018, May 17). How the pianola played a part in Hedy Lamarr's invention. American Masters, PBS. https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/blog/bombshell-hedy-lamarr-story-pianola-played-part-hedy-lamarrs-invention/

Lamarr, H. (1966). Ecstasy and me: My life as a woman. Bartholomew House. https://archive.org/details/ecstasymemylife00lama

Bedi, J. (2015, November 12). A movie star, some player pianos, and torpedoes. Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation, Smithsonian Institution. https://invention.si.edu/invention-stories/movie-star-some-player-pianos-and-torpedoes

Kardach, J. (n.d.). Naming Bluetooth. https://www.kardach.com/bluetooth/naming_bluetooth

Rhodes, R. (2011). Hedy's Folly: The life and breakthrough inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the most beautiful woman in the world. Doubleday. https://archive.org/details/hedysfollylifea00rhod_0

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Support the show

💚

This show is independently produced. You can support the show by joining the show's Patreon. Patreon members get access to "Found in the Margins" bonus episodes and help make the show possible. You can also donate via Buy Me a Coffee.

If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And don't forget to sign up to receive Notes from the Machine with each episode.

Listeners, please note that this episode was recorded before the show’s name changed to Found in the Machine, so you’ll hear the old name in this episode. 

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 this episode

• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - the literary origin programmers point to as inspiration
• The ASCII trick - the quiet reason README is written in all capitals
• The printer in the woods - a README that went somewhere unexpected

Episode Music

• Jay Opie / Nihilore, CC BY 4.0
  • "Dasein" 
  • "Scarecrow" by James Opie / Nihilore, CC BY 4.0
  • "Found Poetry" by James Opie / Nihilore, CC BY 4.0

Additional Reading

Raymond, E. S. (Ed.). (2003). README file. In The Jargon File (Version 4.4.7). http://catb.org/jargon/html/R/README-file.html

[ADG]. (ca. 1981). README.TXT [Software documentation, DECUS program 20-0079]. DECUS. https://pdp-10.trailing-edge.com/decus_20tap3_198111/01/decus/20-0079/readme.txt.html

Yokota, E. [eed3si9n]. (2012, October 19). README [GitHub Gist]. https://gist.github.com/eed3si9n/3920236

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Support the show

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This show is independently produced. You can support the show by joining the show's Patreon. Patreon members get access to "Found in the Margins" bonus episodes and help make the show possible. You can also donate via Buy Me a Coffee.

If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And don't forget to sign up to receive Notes from the Machine with each episode.

Listeners, please note that this episode was recorded before the show’s name changed to Found in the Machine, so you’ll hear the old name in this episode. 

In 1968, a 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.

But the mouse didn't begin with Engelbart. In this episode, we follow the tangled history of the world's most common computer peripheral and its origins as a Cold War secret. We'll also find out why your cursor is tilted 45 degrees.

In this episode

• The Mother of All Demos - the 1968 presentation that changed computing
• DATAR - a classified Cold War radar project, and an unlikely contribution to computing history
• The Rollkugel - a German parallel invention and a patent rejection
• Xerox PARC and Apple - how the mouse finally reached the world

Music

• Jay Opie / Nihilore, CC BY 4.0
  • "Brocken Spectre"
  • "Shape of a Gun" 
  • "Hedgehog's Dilemma"
  • "Eternal Light"

Additional Reading

The Mother of All Demos. (n.d.). Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos

Computer History Museum. (n.d.). DATAR trackball (Object ID 500004669). CHM Revolution: Input & Output. https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/input-output/14/350/1881

Bardini, T. (2000). Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, coevolution, and the origins of personal computing. Stanford University Press. https://archive.org/details/bootstrapping00thie

Hill-Khurana, J. (2020, May). A brief history of the mouse cursor, from Engelbart to PARC. https://jameshk.com/mouse-cursor

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Support the show

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This show is independently produced. You can support the show by joining the show's Patreon. Patreon members get access to "Found in the Margins" bonus episodes and help make the show possible. You can also donate via Buy Me a Coffee.

If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And don't forget to sign up to receive Notes from the Machine with each episode.