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On October 21, 2016, Netflix, Twitter, Reddit, GitHub, and Airbnb went dark for millions of people. The weapon was an army of baby monitors, cheap webcams, and home routers infected by malware called Mirai. Its creators were three young men: Paras Jha, known online as Anna-senpai, Josiah White, and Dalton Norman. Jha ran ProTraf Solutions, a company that sold protection against the very kind of attack he was launching, and their first targets were rival Minecraft servers.

This episode explains how Mirai worked. It scanned the internet for devices with open Telnet ports and tried a hard-coded list of just over 60 factory default usernames and passwords. Then it follows the escalation, from a 620 gigabit per second attack on journalist Brian Krebs to the flood that crippled DNS provider Dyn. When the FBI closed in, the creators published the source code on Hackforums, and variants have been multiplying ever since.

• As a Rutgers undergraduate, Jha repeatedly knocked out the university's network and gloated on Reddit that he was angry about the campus bus schedule, costing Rutgers $300,000 in emergency consulting.
• Mirai deleted rival malware on devices it infected and carried a blacklist that skipped the US Postal Service and the Department of Defense.
• The malware lived only in volatile memory, so a reboot wiped it, but a device with an unchanged default password was reinfected within minutes.
• A November 2016 Mirai variant aimed at Deutsche Telekom routers failed to take control but crashed about 900,000 of them.
• All three pleaded guilty and received five years of probation after helping the FBI, while Jha was also ordered to pay $8.6 million in restitution and serve six months of home incarceration.

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In 1985, Microsoft asked Encyclopaedia Britannica to partner on a CD-ROM edition. Britannica said no. Its business rested on door-to-door salesmen persuading parents to spend $1,000 to $1,500 on leather-bound prestige, and a cheap plastic disc looked like a toy that would eat its own profits. So Microsoft licensed the text of Funk and Wagnalls, the encyclopedia sold volume by volume at the grocery store, and built a multimedia shell around it under the code name Gandalf.

Encarta launched in 1993 at $395, soon dropped to $99, and then came bundled with new home PCs. This episode covers how it squeezed an interactive world onto a 680 megabyte disc, why its regional editions set off a public argument about whether facts should change by country, and how a closed, professionally edited product lost to a free site anyone could edit. Microsoft discontinued Encarta in 2009, undone by the same kind of shift it had once forced on print.

• Premium editions held over 62,000 articles, 25,000 pictures, and more than 300 videos and animations, made to fit with MIDI audio, vector graphics, and postage-stamp video clips.
• Extras included the MindMaze castle trivia game, 3D virtual tours of sites like the Acropolis, and dynamic maps drawn by the engine behind Microsoft MapPoint.
• Microsoft absorbed the content of rivals such as Collier's, ending their lives in print.
• Former Britannica editor-in-chief Robert McHenry accused Encarta of pandering to local prejudices in its national editions, and Bill Gates answered with an article of his own.
• Encarta moved to a web subscription model around 2000 and let users suggest edits by 2005, but Wikipedia updated by the minute while Encarta still waited on editorial review.

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Microsoft Bob arrived in early 1995 as the answer to a real problem: home computers were moving into living rooms, and nested gray folders scared beginners. Code-named Utopia, designed by researcher Karen Fries and marketed by Melinda Gates, it drew on the Stanford theory of Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves that people treat computers like real people in real places. So Bob replaced the desktop with a cartoon house. Click the wall clock for a calendar, the pen and paper for a word processor, and let Rover the dog guide you.

It sold roughly 58,000 copies and was dead by early 1996. This episode walks through why: the interface slowed every task, reviewers called it patronizing, and it demanded more processing power than a typical family PC with four or eight megabytes of RAM could give. Yet Bob never fully went away. Its assistants moved into Windows XP and Microsoft Office, its speech balloons inspired a famous typeface, and its encrypted remains were buried on Windows XP install discs.

• Microsoft traded away the Windows2000.com domain to a man named Bob to get Bob.com.
• Bob's email ran through MCI Mail at $5 a month for exactly 15 messages, each capped at 5,000 characters, with a 45-cent surcharge for every extra one.
• The New York Times said the home looked like the work of an aesthetically challenged sixth grader, and CNET later called Bob the worst product of the decade.
• Engineer David Plummer padded Windows XP install CDs with an encrypted 30-megabyte copy, the Blob of Bob, to slow dial-up pirates and help verify OEM product keys.
• Designer Vincent Connare saw Rover speaking in Times New Roman and drew Comic Sans in response, though the font did not fit Bob's speech bubbles and debuted elsewhere.

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In May 2017, a 22-year-old on a week off sat in his childhood bedroom in Ilfracombe, Devon, and stopped the WannaCry ransomware attack, which had hit more than 230,000 computers in 150 countries and forced UK hospitals to turn away patients. Marcus Hutchins noticed the worm tried to contact a long, gibberish, unregistered domain. He registered it for about $10 to track infections, and the spread stopped. The domain was an anti-analysis check that he had turned into a global kill switch.

A few months later, FBI agents detained him at the Las Vegas airport after DEF CON. This episode explains why. As a teenager on HackForums he built a botnet of 8,000 computers, then wrote a rootkit called UPAS Kit for an anonymous contact named Vinny. After he gave Vinny his home address, Vinny used it to blackmail him into adding keylogging and web injects, and the result was sold as the banking malware Kronos. Hutchins later quit, started the MalwareTech blog, and was hired by Kryptos Logic.

• At 14 he built a password stealer that exploited Internet Explorer's autofill, and his school banned him from its computers over a breach he denied.
• Vinny got his real address by offering to mail him drugs as a birthday present, then threatened to hand his identity to the FBI.
• A power outage cost him over $5,000 of a contact named Randy's Bitcoin, and the chat logs from making it right later tied him to Kronos.
• In 2018 he refused a deal offering zero prison time in exchange for becoming an informant, and prosecutors added four more charges.
• In 2019 he pleaded guilty to two charges and was sentenced to time served and one year of supervised release, with the judge noting he had already turned the corner.

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In February 2000, Yahoo, Amazon, CNN, eBay, and Dell were knocked off the internet within days of each other. Authorities feared sophisticated cyber terrorism. The culprit was Michael Calce, a 15-year-old from the Montreal area who went by Mafiaboy. This episode starts with his childhood: his parents separated when he was five, and at six his father gave him a computer to fill the weekends at the condo. A machine that obeyed every command offered a kind of control his home life did not.

On February 7, 2000, he launched what he called Project Rivolta, flooding Yahoo with traffic from hijacked university and corporate computers and shutting it down for nearly an hour. The motive was a turf war: status for himself and his crew, TNT. The episode weighs his later claim that the attacks were an accident against the week-long timeline, then follows the chat room bragging that led to his arrest, his light sentence, and his later career as a security expert.

• He was labeled a script kiddie because he used attack tools written by others, and he also went after the internet's 13 root name servers, disrupting nine of them.
• He boasted in an IRC chat room about hitting Dell before the attack had been publicly reported, which made him the prime suspect for the FBI and the RCMP.
• He pleaded guilty to over 50 charges, and in late 2001 the Montreal Youth Court gave him eight months of open custody, a year of probation, restricted internet access, and a small fine.
• Damage estimates ranged from the prosecutor's $7.5 million to a Yankee Group analyst's $1.2 billion, and trial records showed he had researched moving to Italy for its lax computer crime laws.
• By 2005 he was writing a security column for Le Journal de Montréal, and in 2008 he published a book on how he broke the internet.

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Type the year 1900 into Microsoft Excel and it still treats it as a leap year. The error is deliberate, copied from Lotus 1-2-3 so that imported spreadsheets would not drift by a day. This episode traces how Mitch Kapor and Jonathan Sachs launched the program in 1983, outpacing a complacent VisiCalc with a spreadsheet, charting, and database package written in x86 assembly that wrote straight to the IBM PC's video memory and refreshed almost instantly.

Lotus became so central that buyers judged clone computers by one question: can it run Lotus? By 1987, one in four of the 15 million Americans using a computer at work used it, and its macros locked whole businesses in. Then came the missteps: a slow, bloated rewrite in C called Release 3, a refusal to take Windows seriously, and a 1995 sale to IBM that drew punishing retaliation from Microsoft. The program survived for 31 years, and its leap year bug outlived it.

• Kapor spent an unheard-of $1 million on advertising in early 1983 and watched a focus group participant try to tear the plastic housing off a floppy disk, which led to manuals rewritten in plain English.
• Lotus 1-2-3 popularized the F1 key for context-sensitive help and let users run two video cards at once, with sharp text on one monitor and a live chart on the other.
• Its appetite for memory pushed past the 640 kilobyte DOS ceiling, leading Lotus to work with Intel and Microsoft on expanded memory standards.
• Lotus v. Borland ran six years over Quattro Pro's copied menu hierarchy and ended in 1996 with a 4-4 Supreme Court tie after Justice John Paul Stevens recused himself.
• Microsoft withheld IBM's Windows 95 license until 15 minutes before the retail launch, leaving IBM with nothing on shelves while Compaq and HP sold new machines.

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Linus Torvalds was named after both Nobel chemist Linus Pauling and the blanket-carrying kid from Peanuts, and this episode argues the pairing fits. Born in Helsinki in 1969 to journalist parents in Finland's Swedish-speaking minority, he started on a VIC-20 at age 11 and, because software was so hard to buy, taught himself to write machine code directly. After 11 months in the Finnish Navy as an artillery observer, he bought an Intel 386 clone in 1991 and began a kernel he described as just a hobby.

That hobby became the engine under Android phones, web servers, and smart thermostats. The episode follows the choices that made it possible: switching Linux to the GPLv2 license, refusing Steve Jobs when Apple asked him to drop Linux, and building Git in a matter of days in 2005 after the BitKeeper arrangement collapsed. It also covers the cost of his role as benevolent dictator, from years of abusive mailing list emails to his 2018 apology and time away.

• He wanted to call the kernel Freax, but the friend who ran the university server named the directory Linux without asking him.
• Stock options from Red Hat and VA Linux briefly pushed his net worth to around $20 million during the dot-com boom.
• In 2000 he turned down a Mac OS job from Steve Jobs, partly because he disliked Apple's Mach microkernel design and preferred a monolithic kernel.
• After a 2012 talk where he gave Nvidia the middle finger on camera, and questions from The New Yorker in 2018, he apologized and the Linux community adopted a code of conduct.
• He met his wife Tove, a six-time Finnish national karate champion, when she answered a class test email by asking him out, and the kernel's reboot magic values encode their daughters' birth dates in hexadecimal.

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Chemist Leo Baekeland sold a new photographic paper to Eastman Kodak in a $750,000 buyout, with about $215,000 as his personal share. He never needed to work again. Instead he went back to the laboratory at his home in Yonkers, New York, to attack a supply problem. The booming electrical industry depended on shellac as an insulator, and shellac was scraped from tree branches in Asia, where it was secreted by the lac insect. Baekeland set out to make a synthetic substitute from phenol and formaldehyde. His first result, a coating he called Novolac, was a commercial flop.

This episode follows what he did next. Others, including the German chemist Adolf von Baeyer in 1872, had heated the same two chemicals and gotten useless foam. Baekeland built an egg shaped iron pressure vessel he named the Bakelizer and cooked the mixture at about 150 degrees Celsius under pressure, so the gases could not escape. What came out was the first fully synthetic thermosetting plastic: hard, insoluble, electrically non-conductive, and impossible to melt again.

• Baekeland filed his patent in July 1907 and announced the invention to the American Chemical Society in February 1909. He formed the General Bakelite Company in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, in 1910.
• With advertising director Allan Brown he marketed Bakelite under a B over an infinity symbol and the slogan the material of a thousand uses, from telephone and radio casings to billiard balls that replaced ivory.
• In World War I the material went into the electrical systems of the Liberty airplane engine, propellers, field telephones, and wireless radios.
• Bakelite needed fillers such as wood flour or asbestos, which kept it dark and opaque. After the patents expired in 1927, rivals like Catalin sold filler-free resins in bright colors that Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli took into fashion.
• Baekeland retired in 1939 and Union Carbide acquired his companies. The formula survives in brake pads and welding equipment, and Soviet engineers used Bakelite resin in reentry heat shields.

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In December 1978, in Atlanta, Georgia, MCA launched a home video format called DiscoVision with Jaws as its first title. It arrived two years after VHS and four years before the audio CD, and it read a 12 inch disc with a laser. The earliest players used a glass tube filled with helium neon gas. Yet the format was analog: the microscopic pits and lands on the disc modulated a continuous wave, with light acting as a needle that never touched the surface. The result was 425 to 440 lines of resolution against roughly 240 for VHS, and no wear from playback.

This episode explains why a format so far ahead never won the American living room, and why it mattered anyway. Discs weighed half a pound, held at most 60 minutes per side, could not record television, and cost over $5 each to press when a VHS tape cost about $1. But LaserDisc gave film lovers frame by frame control, surround sound, and the first special editions, found devoted markets abroad, and funded the optical research that later formats relied on.

• CAV discs spun at a constant 1,800 revolutions per minute with one frame per rotation, allowing perfect freeze frames but only 30 minutes per side. CLV discs slowed toward the outer edge to fit 60.
• The Criterion Collection used the format to create the special edition, releasing Citizen Kane with supplementary materials and King Kong with the first audio commentary track.
• Collectors feared laser rot, in which impurities in the glue joining a disc's two sides slowly oxidized the reflective aluminum layer and filled the picture with speckles.
• By 1999 the format had reached 10 percent of Japanese households. Its instant seeking powered the 1983 arcade game Dragon's Lair and Lucasfilm's EditDroid, an early nonlinear editing system.
• The last North American release was Bringing Out the Dead in late 2000, and Pioneer stopped making players in July 2009.

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In 1984, in Spokane, Washington, a bored Charlie Schmidt dressed his cat Fatso in a light blue infant's shirt, sat him at an Ensoniq Mirage keyboard, and worked the animal's paws from below while a VHS camcorder rolled. Then the tape went into a drawer. Schmidt did not upload it to YouTube until June 2007, under the title Charlie Schmidt's Cool Cat, and even then it drew little notice. The internet assumed the cat had died in 1987. Schmidt and his wife later corrected the record: Fatso, born in 1978, lived until about 1999, unaware of what was coming.

This episode traces how the clip became a fixture of online humor and then a legal test case. In early 2009, Brad O'Farrell of My Damn Channel got Schmidt's permission and attached the cat to the end of a blooper, titling it Play Him Off, Keyboard Cat. It worked like a vaudeville hook for any public failure, and hundreds of versions followed by May. Schmidt then recast the role with new cats, signed commercial deals, and went to court over who may profit from a meme.

• Within months the joke reached The Daily Show, Ashton Kutcher's million followers, and Andy Samberg's MTV Movie Awards monologue. Weezer and Blink-182 used the footage to play themselves off stage.
• Schmidt adopted a lookalike named Bento, who debuted in Keyboard Cat Reincarnated in March 2010 and went on to star in a Wonderful Pistachios commercial. Skinny and then Presley later took over the blue shirt.
• Warner Music Group forced YouTube to mute a popular mashup that set the cat inside the Hall and Oates video for You Make My Dreams, igniting a debate over remix culture.
• In 2011 Schmidt sued Threadless over its Three Keyboard Cat Moon shirt. Threadless countered that his copyright was registered only in September 2010, and the case settled by 2013.
• Schmidt and Nyan Cat creator Christopher Torres sued 5th Cell and Warner Brothers in 2013 for putting their characters in Scribblenauts without permission, and were paid in a settlement.