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In 1953, on a Los Angeles to New York flight, American Airlines president C.R. Smith sat next to IBM salesman Blair Smith, no relation, and complained about a reservations system of index cards, chalkboards and phone calls. IBM was building SAGE, the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment that tracked Soviet bombers with real-time computing, and the two companies adapted it for seats. Sabre, the Semi-Automatic Business Research Environment, installed its first system in 1960 in Briarcliff Manor, New York, on two IBM 7090 mainframes handling 84,000 calls a day. By 1964 it was the largest civilian real-time data processing system, and in 1976 a Sabre terminal went into a travel agency for the first time, reaching 130 agency locations by year's end.

Bargain Finder automated low-fare searches in 1984, and eAAsy Sabre let home computer owners book flights by dial-up modem in 1985. Sabre held about 38 percent of the reservations market by 1989, launched Travelocity in 1996, and was spun off from American's parent AMR in 2000. Private equity firms TPG and Silver Lake took it private in 2007, it returned to Nasdaq in April 2014, and it sold Travelocity to Expedia for $280 million in 2015 to focus on business-to-business infrastructure. In 2025 it signed a $1.56 billion deal with Coforge to offload legacy systems, and in 2026 it replaced its American Airlines-era red with orange.

• Sabre moved its computing center to Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1972 with IBM System/360 hardware.
• After the spinoff it shifted pricing and shopping engines from mainframes to HP NonStop and Linux servers.
• The 2014 IPO opened at $16 a share for a $3.93 billion valuation.
• Sabre sold its AirCentre airline operations portfolio to CAE for $392.5 million in 2021.
• By the end of 2025 it generated $2.77 billion in revenue and connected agents to over 420 airlines and about 2 million lodging options.

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The Code Red worm was released on July 13, 2001, and by July 19 it had hijacked about 359,000 computers running Microsoft's Internet Information Services, with heavy damage across North America, Europe, China and India. Researchers Marc Maiffret and Ryan Permeh at eEye Digital Security dissected it, building on Riley Hassell's discovery of the underlying flaw, and named it after the Mountain Dew Code Red they were drinking. The worm exploited a buffer overflow documented in Microsoft Security Bulletin MS01-033, sending a long string of the letter N to overwrite memory and run its own command. A patch had been available for a full month before the outbreak.

Infected sites showed the message "hacked by Chinese," but the defacement hid a calendar-driven payload. From day 1 to 19 of each month the worm spread, from day 20 to 27 every infected machine launched a denial-of-service attack on the IP address of the White House web server, and from day 28 to month's end it slept. Kenneth D. Eichman found a way to block its spread and was invited to the White House. On August 4, 2001, Code Red II appeared, using the same IIS hole with a string of X characters and favoring targets on its own subnet, so it spread inside corporate networks behind firewalls.

• Apache servers logged floods of N requests but could not be infected because they lacked the IIS memory flaw.
• Code Red became the first large-scale mixed threat attack to hit enterprise networks, combining self-propagation with a denial-of-service payload.
• The eEye researchers believed Code Red II originated in Makati in the Philippines, the same origin as the ILOVEYOU worm.
• IT departments of the era delayed patches for weeks because updates often broke custom enterprise software.
• The episode credits Code Red with forcing the industry to treat patching as mandatory rather than optional.

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In January 2011, while U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates was in Beijing, China's Chengdu J-20 made its maiden flight, a test that seemed to surprise even President Hu Jintao when Gates raised it. Known in China as the Weilong, or Mighty Dragon, and to NATO as Fagin, the jet is over 69 feet long, with a blended fuselage and diverterless supersonic inlets that use a fixed bump to slow incoming air and hide the engine fan blades from radar. Its forward canards sit on the same plane as the main wings to limit radar returns, and flight control software keeps the deliberately unstable airframe in the air while managing the canards' radar profile. In peacetime it carries a Luneburg lens to enlarge its radar signature and hide its true one.

Early J-20s entered service around 2017 with Russian AL-31 engines, then the domestic WS-10C around 2019, while engineers worked through turbine blade metallurgy for the Shenyang WS-15. By 2023 and 2024 the WS-15 reached mass production, giving roughly 180 kilonewtons of thrust, supercruise and thrust vectoring. The jet has no gun and is built for beyond-visual-range combat with PL-15 and PL-10 missiles. The twin-seat J-20S adds a back-seat officer to direct drone wingmen, and by mid-2026 China had an estimated 500 airframes across all five theater commands, ending the U.S. monopoly on operational stealth fighters.

• Side bays swing PL-10 missiles out on a rail and close their doors before firing to keep the belly sealed.
• A non-stealth configuration with external pylons adds up to eight more missiles or drop tanks.
• A distributed aperture system stitches infrared cameras into a 360-degree view in the pilot's helmet.
• Production runs at roughly $100 million per unit, according to the sources.
• U.S. Pacific Air Forces have confirmed close encounters between F-35s and J-20s over the East and South China Seas.

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Charter Communications traces back to a cable operation Charles H. Leonard set up in Barry County, Michigan in 1980. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen bought control in 1998 to pursue his Wired World vision of merging the PC and the TV, and Charter went on a debt-funded buying spree, including Marcus Cable for $2.8 billion and more than ten acquisitions in 1999 alone. By early 2009 it filed a prearranged Chapter 11 that wiped out $8 billion of debt while the network kept running. Under CEO Thomas Rutledge and with John Malone's Liberty Media holding 27.3 percent, Charter lost a 2014 hostile bid for Time Warner Cable to Comcast, then bought Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks for $89 billion in 2016 after regulators blocked Comcast.

Rebranded as Spectrum, the company passed Comcast in pay TV customers in 2024 and completed a merger with Cox Communications in August 2026, retiring the Charter corporate name. In September 2023 it let ESPN and Disney channels go dark rather than accept standard carriage terms, and won the right to drop niche channels and include Disney+ and ESPN+ at no extra retail cost. The episode also covers a 2018 New York vote to revoke its franchise, a $1.1 billion Texas verdict after a technician murdered an 83-year-old customer, the Salt Typhoon espionage breach, and the June 2025 cutting of 13 fiber lines in Van Nuys.

• New York regulators said Charter counted about 14,000 existing addresses as new rural broadband deployments.
• A 2017 lawsuit by the New York attorney general over advertised internet speeds ended in a $174 million settlement.
• In 2002 the Justice Department indicted four former executives for inflating subscriber numbers.
• The FCC fined Charter $15 million in 2024 for failing to report 911 outages during a denial-of-service attack.
• The Van Nuys cuts severed over 2,600 strands and knocked out internet, cellular and 911 service for 50,000 homes and businesses for nearly 30 hours.

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Carnival Cruise Line was started in 1972 by Ted Arison and Meshulam Riklis, and by 1974 it was so deep in debt that Riklis sold his stake to Arison for $1. Arison restructured, and in the early 1980s the company commissioned its first new ship, the Tropicale, followed by the Holiday, Jubilee and Celebration. A 1987 IPO selling 20 percent of the stock raised about $400 million, which Carnival spent buying heritage lines: Holland America, rooted in Rotterdam in 1871; Costa, an Italian cargo firm from 1854; and Cunard, founded in 1840. A 1993 holding company structure kept each brand separate, and in the early 2000s Carnival took P&O Princess Cruises from Royal Caribbean with a hostile bid, then kept it as a dual-listed company in London for 23 years.

By its 2023 restructuring Carnival ran nine brands and 93 ships, plus private destinations such as Half Moon Cay, Amber Cove and Celebration Key on Grand Bahama. The episode also covers its failures: the Costa Concordia grounding off Tuscany in January 2012, which killed 32 people and sent the captain to prison for 16 years, and repeated pollution cases. COVID-19 halted sailing in March 2020, revenue fell from nearly $21 billion in 2019 to $5.6 billion in 2020, and the company built a $9.5 billion cash reserve to survive. On May 7, 2026, Carnival unified its shares, delisted from London and reincorporated in Bermuda for its tax benefits.

• In 2002 Carnival pleaded guilty to falsifying records of oily bilge water dumped from six ships and paid an $18 million fine.
• Princess Cruise Lines paid a $40 million fine in 2016, then called the largest criminal penalty for intentional vessel pollution, after an engineer exposed a bypass pipe.
• Probation violations in 2019, including plastic discharges in Bahamian waters, cost another $20 million.
• In Q3 2020 Carnival reported a $2.9 billion GAAP net loss and announced plans to dispose of 18 ships.
• Its North American headquarters is moving from Doral to a new Miami-Dade campus scheduled to open in 2028.

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In 1872 Andrew Carnegie began building the Edgar Thomson Steel Works in Braddock, Pennsylvania, and by 1874 it was turning out railroad rails at a 40 percent return on investment. The method was cost accounting brought over from railroading: he weighed coal, measured limestone and tracked labor hours per ton, while running two 12-hour shifts and holding wages down so he could undercut rivals in downturns and buy their mills cheaply. With George Lauder, Henry Phipps Jr. and Henry Clay Frick, he acquired the Homestead Steel Works in 1883 and tied his mills to Pittsburgh's Allegheny, Monongahela and Ohio rivers, floating Frick's coal on Carnegie barges straight to his own furnaces.

The open hearth furnace installed at Homestead in 1886 allowed metallurgists to test and adjust each batch, producing structural steel for skyscrapers and armor plate for the U.S. Navy and foreign militaries. Automation with cranes, hoists and charging machines eroded the bargaining power of skilled union men. In 1892, with Carnegie in Scotland, Frick fenced the Homestead mill with a three-mile barrier known as Fort Frick, and Pinkerton agents arrived by barge to a gun battle that left dead on both sides before the state militia secured the mill. By 1899 the firm earned $21 million in a year, and in 1901 J.P. Morgan bought it for about $492 million to form U.S. Steel.

• Carnegie left the steel frame of his 15-story Pittsburgh headquarters exposed for a year to prove its strength.
• The faster Bessemer process made steel fine for rails but too brittle for structural beams.
• George Lauder ran the armaments business that gave the company high-margin defense revenue during building slumps.
• Carnegie's personal share of the sale was $226 million, which the episode puts at over $8.7 billion today.
• U.S. Steel kept the Carnegie Steel Company name alive as a subsidiary until 1936.

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Canon began in 1933 as the Precision Optical Instruments Laboratory, founded by Takeshi Mitarai, Goro Yoshida, Saburo Uchida and Takeo Maeda. It could build focal plane shutters but not optical glass, so its first commercial camera used lenses from Nippon Kogaku, the company now known as Nikon. Its 1934 prototype, a copy of the Leica design and Japan's first 35mm focal plane shutter camera, was named Kwanon after the Buddhist Bodhisattva of Mercy. The company became Canon Camera Company in 1947, but it had already built Japan's first indirect X-ray camera in 1940 for tuberculosis screening. The 1964 Canola 130 calculator, with a 13-digit display requested by Japan's central bank, prepared it for the 1976 AE-1, the first camera with an embedded microcomputer.

Canon developed its Bubble Jet printer independently in 1985 and built the laser engines inside the first Apple LaserWriters and early HP LaserJets. When smartphones hollowed out point-and-shoot sales, operating profit fell 34 percent in early 2013, and Canon bought its way into new fields: Océ, Milestone Systems, Axis Communications for nearly $3 billion, and Toshiba Medical Systems for $5.9 billion in 2016. In 2023 it introduced nanoimprint lithography, which stamps circuit patterns onto wafers at a claimed five-nanometer equivalent, as an alternative to ASML's extreme ultraviolet machines. The episode also covers a settled lawsuit over printers that would not scan when low on ink and protests over a climate skeptic at the Canon Institute for Global Studies.

• The 1964 Canola 130 used acrylic light pipes to bend light from bulbs into the shapes of numbers.
• The 1987 EOS system replaced mechanical lens linkages with electronic contacts, and the 1992 EOS 5 focused wherever the photographer's eye looked.
• Canon demonstrated a 250-megapixel CMOS sensor in 2015 aimed at industrial, aerospace and surveillance uses.
• The scanner lawsuit was settled in 2023 with Canon admitting no wrongdoing.
• Canon's 1988 corporate philosophy, kyosei, means living and working together for the common good.

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Cambridge Analytica was founded in 2013 by Alexander Nix, Nigel Oakes and Alexander Oakes as a spinoff of SCL Group, a British defense contractor that described itself as a global election management agency and had worked on psychological operations. Backed by a reported $50 million or more from the Mercer family and support from Steve Bannon, it promised to target voters by personality rather than demographics. Its data came from Cambridge University researcher Aleksandr Kogan's Facebook app, This Is Your Digital Life, which paid about 270,000 people around $4 each to take a personality quiz. Facebook's Graph API version 1.0 also handed over their friends' profiles, sweeping in up to 87 million people who never took the quiz.

Using Big Five personality modeling based on Michal Kosinski's research, the firm sorted American adults into 32 personality styles and worked for Ted Cruz's 2015 campaign and Donald Trump's 2016 campaign, while executives claimed work in more than 200 elections worldwide. In March 2018, The New York Times and The Observer published Christopher Wylie's account, and Channel 4 News aired hidden-camera footage of Nix discussing honey traps, bribery stings and self-destructing emails. Facebook lost $37 billion in market value, and Cambridge Analytica and SCL filed for insolvency on May 1, 2018. The episode lays out the academic debate over whether psychographic targeting worked at all.

• The Cruz campaign paid Cambridge Analytica $750,000.
• In 2020 the UK Information Commissioner's Office concluded that Cambridge Analytica was not involved in the EU referendum campaign, despite whistleblower claims from Wylie and Brittany Kaiser.
• The U.S. Federal Trade Commission placed 20-year restrictions on both Nix and Kogan.
• Meta agreed in 2022 to a $725 million settlement of a class action over the data harvesting.
• Former staff resurfaced at firms including Emerdata, Auspex International and Data Propria, and in July 2026 the Cambridge Analytica website reappeared as an automated content farm.

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In the 1890s, Benjamin Holt watched his steam tractors, which weighed 1,000 pounds for every unit of horsepower, sink into the peaty soil of California's San Joaquin Valley Delta near Stockton. He tried seven-and-a-half-foot wheels, a 46-foot-wide machine and crews laying wooden plank roads before deciding the tractor had to carry its own road. On Thanksgiving Day, November 24, 1904, he bolted redwood slats to chains on steamer number 77 and plowed the mud of Roberts Island. Company photographer Charles Clements said the rolling track looked like a caterpillar, and Holt adopted the name. By 1909 his crawlers sold for $5,500 each, and a bankrupt plant in East Peoria, Illinois grew from 12 workers to 625 in two years.

World War I turned farm machines into artillery tractors hauling six-inch howitzers across the Western Front, and British correspondent Ernest Swinton's observations of them inspired the first tanks. Peace brought canceled orders, cheap surplus and a costly rivalry with C.L. Best. Holt died on December 5, 1920, bankers took control, and in 1925 the two companies merged as Caterpillar Tractor Co., with Best as CEO until 1951. The episode follows the company to 118,000 employees and more than $67 billion in revenue by 2025, along with the 1999 Clean Air Act case over diesel engines with defeat devices, UAW strikes, and scrutiny of armored D9 bulldozers used by the Israel Defense Forces.

• Britain's Richard Hornsby and Sons patented a steel-plate tracked vehicle in 1904 with differential braking for steering, then sold the patent to Holt five years later.
• Before the U.S. entered World War I, European governments bought 1,200 Holt tractors for farming and sent them straight to the battlefield.
• Holt and Best spent about $1.5 million in legal fees fighting over track patents between 1907 and 1918.
• The Federal Aid Highway Act of 1921 put $1 billion into road building, and the company pivoted to road equipment to survive.
• The EPA estimated the defeat-device engines produced 1.3 million tons of excess emissions in 1998 alone.

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On March 7, 2010, Cablevision customers in the New York area tuned to ABC for the 82nd Academy Awards and got a black screen during a fee dispute with Disney. The company traces to Charles Dolan, who built Sterling Manhattan Cable, launched Home Box Office, sold both to Time Life and founded Cablevision on Long Island in 1973. After a 1980s national expansion to almost three million subscribers in 19 states, Dolan swapped systems in Boston, Cleveland and elsewhere with TCI and MediaOne to concentrate on the New York, New Jersey and Connecticut region.

Cablevision then bought content and local businesses: a stake in Madison Square Garden in 1994, later full control, with the Knicks, Rangers and their regional networks, plus Rainbow Media (later AMC Networks), The Wiz electronics stores, Clearview Cinemas and Newsday for $650 million. It dropped Food Network and HGTV in a January 2010 dispute with Scripps, lost Fox during NFL games and part of the World Series that October, and kept the YES Network off for a year. In 2004 and 2005, to protect Madison Square Garden, it fought Mayor Michael Bloomberg's West Side stadium with tens of millions in ads and a roughly $400 million bid for the MTA rail yards.

• During blackouts, Cablevision force-tuned cable boxes to its own channel looping messages about the dispute.
• The stadium, planned for the Jets and New York's 2012 Olympic bid, died when state politicians refused subsidies, and London won the Games.
• Cablevision boycotted the NFL Network until 2012 and stalled Verizon Fios access to HD feeds of its sports networks.
• It spun off Madison Square Garden in 2010 and AMC Networks in 2011.
• In 2016 Altice bought the core cable business for $17.7 billion, and the service continues under the Optimum brand.