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In 1994 the Japanese auto parts company Denso Wave had a bottleneck. A standard barcode held about 20 characters, so workers sometimes scanned up to ten labels on a single box of parts. Engineer Masahiro Hara was asked for one label that could hold far more, handle kanji, and scan in a fraction of a second. Playing Go on his lunch breaks, he saw that a two-dimensional grid of black and white could carry vastly more information than a row of bars.

This episode explains what a phone actually computes when it reads a QR code. The three corner squares follow a 1 to 1 to 3 to 1 to 1 ratio of black and white chosen because it almost never appears in ordinary print. An alignment pattern lets software flatten a tilted or curved image, masking breaks up confusing clusters, and Reed-Solomon error correction rebuilds missing data. That toughness carried the code into payments, pandemic check-ins, currency, and crime.

• Hara's team fed magazines, newspapers, and packaging into a computer to find a pattern that would not occur by accident, which produced the corner marker ratio.
• Reed-Solomon math was first developed to protect data from deep space probes. At the highest setting, level H, a code still reads with up to 30 percent of its data destroyed.
• Logos in the middle of QR codes work only because the scanner treats them as damage and repairs around them.
• Singapore's SGQR replaced a counter full of payment stickers with one unified code, and monument makers in Japan, Uruguay, and Wisconsin carve codes into gravestones that link to memorials.
• Scammers have pasted fake codes over real ones on parking meters in Austin, San Antonio, and Boston, and phishing emails use QR images because security filters scan text, not pictures.

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We still say we are dialing a number, though the dial itself is long gone. In 1892 Almon Brown Strowger's automatic exchange in La Porte, Indiana, removed the human operator but made callers tap out each digit on three push buttons, one press at a time. The rotary dial, introduced around 1907, handed that counting to a machine. Pulling the wheel forward only wound a spring. The signal went out on the return trip, as a switch broke the line current once per pulse.

This episode treats the dial as an early mechanical modem sending about ten pulses per second, and shows how its quirks hardened into national standards. Western Electric and Automatic Electric built rival speed governors to keep the timing steady. Sweden, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom each encoded digits differently, with lasting effects on their emergency numbers. The story ends in 1980s Washington, D.C., where old dials became a weapon against drug dealing.

• Western Electric slowed the return spin with a centrifugal governor whose weights rubbed inside a metal cup. Automatic Electric used a worm gear arrangement much like the speed regulator in a wind-up music box.
• Off-normal contacts shorted the earpiece whenever the dial left its resting position, sparing callers a burst of loud electrical pops in the ear.
• Britain chose 999 because pay phones already had a cam that let a zero through without a coin. Extending it slightly made the neighboring nine free as well.
• New Zealand dials sent ten minus the digit in pulses and fed British exchanges that expected 999, so the public dialed 111 to produce the same signal.
• In Washington's Anacostia neighborhood, the Fairlawn Coalition had pay phones switched back to rotary dials. Without tones, buyers could not punch a number into a dealer's pager.

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In the early 1990s a formatted document sent from one computer to another often arrived scrambled, with shifted paragraphs, broken fonts, and missing images. In 1991 Adobe co-founder John Warnock launched the Camelot Project to fix that with a simplified form of PostScript, the page description language Adobe had built for printers. The result was the Portable Document Format, released as a free specification in 1993 and made an open ISO standard in 2008.

This episode opens the container. PostScript is a full programming language that a printer had to run from start to finish, so one error meant resending the whole job. A PDF freezes that program into static data, isolates each page, and stores everything as objects in a tree. A cross-reference table near the end of the file gives the exact byte offset of each object, which is why page 800 of a huge manual opens instantly. The same layered structure also gives attackers places to hide.

• Linearized, or web-optimized, PDFs place everything needed for the first page at the start of the file, so a browser can show page one while the rest downloads.
• Fourteen standard fonts, including Times, Courier, Helvetica, Symbol, and Zapf Dingbats, were expected in every reader. Any other font must be embedded or the viewer will substitute its own.
• A user password truly encrypts a PDF. An owner password that blocks printing or copying encrypts nothing and depends on the reader software choosing to obey it.
• In 2019 researchers at Ruhr University Bochum showed shadow attacks that abuse incremental updates to change the visible content of a digitally signed PDF without invalidating the signature.
• Nested compression filters make zip bombs possible: a file of about five kilobytes can expand toward a petabyte in memory and crash the machine that opens it.

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In 1978 Milton Bradley launched a beeping plastic saucer at Studio 54, the most exclusive nightclub in New York. The toy was Simon, and its origin lay in someone else's failure. At a 1976 trade show, inventors Ralph H. Baer and Howard J. Morrison of Marvin Glass and Associates saw Touch Me, an Atari arcade memory game with four identical black buttons and harsh, rasping sounds. Baer liked the gameplay and hated everything else about it.

This episode explains how they rebuilt the idea around a friendlier interface. Their prototype, first called Follow Me, ran on the Texas Instruments TMS 1000, one of the first computers on a chip, with software by Lenny Cope. Baer tuned the four tones to the notes of a bugle, so any random sequence would sound like music instead of punishment. Priced at $24.95, Simon sold 1.5 million units by 1979 and has kept changing its interface ever since.

• The game tests working memory, which psychologists have long described as holding about seven items, plus or minus two, before a sequence collapses.
• The classic model plays an A major triad in second inversion: E, C sharp, A, and a second E. Some early 1978 units used a B flat minor triad that collectors now seek out.
• Clones followed quickly, including Nintendo's Flagman and Castle Toy's Einstein. In 2001 the same memory mechanic even appeared in a Harry Potter wand that players tilted on command.
• In 1978 Atari released a handheld Touch Me with colored buttons, musical tones, and Simon's circular layout, with the colors flipped. The originator had become the imitator.
• Later versions track changing interfaces: eight buttons on Super Simon in 1979, touch surfaces on Simon Swipe in 2014, motion sensing on Simon Air in 2016, and a wearable headset, Simon Optix, in 2017.

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In October 2011, days after the world mourned Steve Jobs, Dennis Ritchie was found dead at 70 in his home in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, where he lived alone. The news first spread through a short online post by former colleague Rob Pike. Few outside computing noticed, yet the iPhones and MacBooks that made Jobs famous ran on foundations Ritchie built: the C programming language and the Unix operating system he created with Ken Thompson at Bell Labs.

This episode follows Ritchie from Bronxville, New York, where he was born on September 9, 1941, to Harvard degrees in physics and applied mathematics and a doctoral dissertation he finished but never filed. At Bell Labs he and Thompson abandoned the bloated Multics project, salvaged a discarded PDP-7, and built something lean. To free Unix from one machine, Ritchie reworked Thompson's B language into C, a bridge between hardware control and readable code.

• Ritchie drafted his Harvard dissertation by 1968 but never received the PhD. The document was thought lost until the Computer History Museum recovered a copy in 2020.
• Brian Kernighan suggested the name Unix in 1970 as a pun on Multics, and in 1978 he and Ritchie published The C Programming Language, known as the K and R book.
• In the 1970s Ritchie, James Reeds, and Robert Morris broke the M-209 cipher machine using ciphertext alone. After consulting the National Security Agency, they chose not to publish.
• He stayed at Bell Labs for his whole career, worked on Plan 9, Inferno, and the Limbo language, and retired in 2007 as head of system software research at Lucent Technologies.
• He and Thompson won the Turing Award in 1983 and the National Medal of Technology in 1998. After his death, Fedora 16 and FreeBSD 9.0 were dedicated to him, and an asteroid carries his name.

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Coat a crumpled sheet of aluminum foil in Vantablack and the ridges disappear. What remains looks like a flat hole cut out of the world. Unveiled in July 2014 by Surrey NanoSystems, the UK company founded by Ben Jensen, the original material is a forest of vertically aligned carbon nanotubes that absorbs up to 99.965 percent of visible light. Photons enter the gaps between the tubes, ricochet until they are spent, and leave as a trace of heat.

This episode covers the physics, the purpose, and the fight. Vantablack was made for aerospace work: lining telescope baffles so stray light cannot wash out faint images, and possibly darkening satellites that streak across observatory photos. Then the company granted artist Anish Kapoor an exclusive license for artistic use, and the art world erupted. Rival paints followed, as did sprayable versions that carried the void to the Olympics, the Met Gala, and a BMW.

• NASA had made a similar super black coating earlier, but it had to be grown at 750 degrees Celsius. Surrey NanoSystems cut that to 400, low enough to coat practical aerospace parts.
• In 2019 engineers at MIT produced a material that reflects a tenth as much light, yet Vantablack kept its commercial edge through durability, vibration resistance, and low particle fallout.
• Boston artist Jason Chase and Massachusetts manufacturer NanoLab answered the Kapoor monopoly with a rival nanotube paint named Singularity Black, meant to open super black to every artist.
• The irony of the feud: original Vantablack is grown in a chamber, not painted, and falls under UK export controls. A canvas would have burned long before it was coated.
• The later VBX2 spray, which contains no nanotubes, covered a pavilion at the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, a Call of Duty Black Ops house in London, and a BMW X6 concept shown in Frankfurt in 2019.

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In June 2006 a 95 second video appeared on YouTube, shot on a Logitech webcam in a bedroom dressed with thrift store furniture and a pink feather boa. Its star, a homeschooled 16-year-old named Bree, talked about her strict religious parents and her purple monkey puppet, and viewers adored her. She became the most subscribed channel on the site and the first to reach 50,000 subscribers. She was also entirely fictional, played by 19-year-old film school graduate Jessica Lee Rose.

This episode tells how Miles Beckett, a doctor who had left a plastic surgery residency, and filmmaker Mesh Flinders built Bree for $130 and hid their actress from the world. They cast Rose through a disguised Craigslist ad, bound her with a strict nondisclosure agreement, and paid her to stay indoors for three months. Then the plot swerved into cult thriller, fans turned detective, and by September 2006 the creators confessed, calling their work the birth of a new art form.

• The creators gamed early YouTube by replying to every single comment, since the site ranked videos by raw engagement, and they planned shots so the automatic thumbnail would draw clicks.
• When the three month script ran out, Bree's religion became a shadowy cult called the Order that wanted her blood, and the series turned into an alternate reality game with puzzles for fans.
• Viewers spotted a photo of occultist Aleister Crowley on her wall, identified a hiking trail plant as native to the Los Angeles area, and matched her bedroom furnishings to Target inventory.
• In August 2006 forum users sent Bree's account a message with a hidden IP tracker. It traced back to a major Hollywood talent agency, and an archived MySpace page soon revealed Rose's name.
• The audience tripled after the reveal. The show ran paid product placement for Hershey's gum and Neutrogena, killed Bree off in August 2007 at Rose's request, and earned her a Webby Award for Best Actress.

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On January 22, 2004, Google quietly launched a social network named for the engineer who built it in his 20 percent time, Orkut Büyükkökten. Within months his former employer, Affinity Engines, sued, claiming the site shared code with its own alumni network and pointing to nine identical bugs in both. The product itself was startlingly open: any member could view any profile, and friends could publicly rate one another as trustworthy, cool, or sexy.

This episode follows Orkut from side project to accidental giant. It flatlined in the United States but spread through internet cafes in Brazil and India, and in 2008 Google moved its operations to Belo Horizonte. Growth brought fake profiles, state censorship, criminal cases, and a standoff with a Brazilian judge over user data. Worms and a botched redesign weakened it further, and on September 30, 2014, the site went dark.

• When the platform was winding down in 2014, Brazil supplied 55.5 percent of its traffic and India 18.4 percent. The United States accounted for just 3.3 percent.
• In 2006 a Brazilian federal judge fined Google $23,000 a day for refusing to hand over data on about 24 users, while Google argued the data sat on servers in the United States under American law.
• A 2007 flaw kept sessions alive for 14 days after users clicked log out, a serious danger for people signing in at public cyber cafes.
• A worm written by a Brazilian user infected more than 700,000 accounts by exploiting scrapbook messages that accepted raw HTML.
• The 2009 redesign split users between old and new versions, and private messages sent across the divide simply vanished. In April 2022 the old address came back with a letter from the founder promising something new.

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In 1957 a blind seven-year-old with perfect pitch named Joe Engressia found that whistling a certain note into a telephone made the line behave strangely. He had stumbled on the 2600 hertz tone the Bell network used to signal that a long distance trunk was idle. Because control signals traveled on the same channel as voices, anyone who could produce that tone could seize an unbilled line. John Draper later found the tone in a toy whistle from Cap'n Crunch cereal.

This episode traces phreaking from rotary pulse tricks to the birth of hacker culture. A 1954 Bell System Technical Journal article published the multi-frequency routing tones, and students used it to build blue boxes that turned a home phone into an operator's console. A 1971 Esquire article spread the secret to Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. By the 1980s, modems, bulletin boards, and calling card codes had turned curious exploration into toll fraud.

• Before tones, teenagers beat padlocked rotary dials by tapping the switch hook in rhythm, since the exchange only counted interruptions in the current.
• Wozniak engineered a digital blue box and Jobs sold them door to door in Berkeley dorms for $150 each. Jobs later said there would have been no Apple without them.
• Abbie Hoffman helped launch a newsletter, the Youth International Party Line, that taught readers to dodge phone billing as political protest. It later became TAP.
• After the 1984 AT&T breakup, hackers ran overnight scripts that had modems guess calling card codes for new long distance carriers, and groups like the Legion of Doom and Masters of Deception traded finds on bulletin boards.
• The fix was SS7, which moved control signals to a separate channel. The last switch that could still be phreaked in the contiguous United States was decommissioned on June 15, 2006, in Minnesota.

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Before 1984 the Bell System controlled American communications from end to end. AT&T ran long distance, owned the local operating companies, built nearly all the equipment through Western Electric, and funded the research at Bell Labs. In 1974 the Department of Justice sued, mainly to pry loose Western Electric. Convinced it would lose, AT&T offered a different bargain: keep the factories and the labs, and give up the local phone companies instead.

This episode follows that gamble and its consequences. The 1982 consent decree took effect on January 1, 1984, creating seven independent Baby Bells and cutting AT&T's book value by about 70 percent. In exchange the company won freedom from a 1956 decree that had barred it from selling computers. The computer push failed, local bills rose while long distance rates fell, broadcasters fled to satellites, and after the Telecommunications Act of 1996 the pieces began merging again.

• Mathematician and investor Edward O. Thorp spotted a price gap between old AT&T shares and the when-issued shares of the new companies. His trade, the largest block trade on the exchange to that point, earned $2.5 million.
• The Baby Bells received the Bell trademark and the lucrative Yellow Pages, while AT&T kept the assets it thought held the future: long distance, manufacturing, and research.
• Long distance profits had quietly subsidized local service. After the split, access charges became a long legal fight that reached internet calling, settled by a 2011 FCC order.
• Western Electric struggled without its captive customers. AT&T eventually spun it off anyway as Lucent, later Alcatel-Lucent and now part of Nokia.
• Southwestern Bell absorbed Pacific Telesis and Ameritech, then bought its former parent in 2005 and took the AT&T name. Bell Atlantic followed a parallel path and became Verizon.