pplpod

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

In the late 1990s, federal authorities persuaded a judge that an inmate named Kevin Mitnick could start a nuclear war by whistling tones into a prison pay phone. He spent eight months in solitary confinement on the strength of that fear. Mitnick was born in Los Angeles in 1963 and grew up in the San Fernando Valley, where amateur radio taught him that systems run on protocols and that protocols can be bent. At 12 he talked a bus driver into revealing where to buy the transit authority's ticket punch, then pulled unused transfer slips from dumpsters and rode the city for free.

This episode follows how that talent for persuasion, later named social engineering, carried him from a 1979 break-in at Digital Equipment Corporation to two and a half years as the country's most notorious digital fugitive. It covers his capture, the disproportionate punishment that made him a cause, and the pivot that turned him into a teacher for the same institutions that had hunted him. His career makes one argument above all: the weakest link in any system is the person at the keyboard.

• At 16, Mitnick used a dial-in number from a friend to enter DEC's network and copy its operating system software. The breach led to a 1988 conviction and 12 months in prison.
• Near the end of his supervised release he hacked Pacific Bell's voicemail computers and fled. On the run he used cloned cell phones to hide his location and listened to the voicemail of the FBI agents chasing him.
• The FBI arrested him in Raleigh, North Carolina, on February 15, 1995. He pleaded guilty to wire fraud and computer fraud in 1999 and was sentenced to nearly five years, most of it already served before trial.
• Supporters put Free Kevin stickers everywhere, with help from 2600 magazine. After his release in 2000 he was barred from computers and cell phones and from profiting from his story for seven years.
• He co-founded Defensive Thinking in 2002, testified before Congress, wrote best sellers on deception, and became chief hacking officer at KnowBe4. He died of pancreatic cancer in July 2023 at 59.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

On May 24, 2024, an 18 year old rescue dog named Kabosu died of leukemia at home in Japan, stroked by the owner who had loved her for more than a decade. By then her face had been cast in bronze, wrapped around a NASCAR race car, and attached to a cryptocurrency worth billions. It began in 2010, when kindergarten teacher Atsuko Sato started a simple blog about her pets and posted a photo of her Shiba Inu on a couch, paws crossed, giving the camera an unreadable sideways glance. By 2013 it was the fourth most popular pet blog in Japan, and Sato had no idea what the wider internet was doing with the picture.

This episode traces how strangers built a fictional persona on top of a real animal. The misspelled word doge came from a 2005 Homestar Runner puppet cartoon, and the meme acquired strict rules: Comic Sans text in garish colors and a broken internal monologue of so, such, many, and wow. From there the image escaped the forums and ran into finance, advertising, politics, and war, while Sato went on living what she called an intentionally analog life.

• Dogecoin launched in December 2013 as the first cryptocurrency based on an internet meme. In April 2014 its community crowdfunded a sponsorship that put Kabosu's face on Josh Wise's NASCAR car.
• When members of the US Congress began imitating the meme in late 2013, the Huffington Post declared it killed by politicians. Stockholm's transit company still used it to sell summer tickets in 2014.
• After Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the North Atlantic Fella Organization used Doge avatars to mock Russian propaganda and raise money for the Ukrainian military.
• In April 2023 Elon Musk briefly replaced Twitter's bird logo with Doge while his lawyers sought dismissal of a $258 billion racketeering suit over Dogecoin.
• A bronze monument to Kabosu was installed in Sakura, Chiba, in 2023, followed by a manhole cover in 2024. That November, a proposed Department of Government Efficiency took the acronym DOGE.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

On March 19, 2007, a website called Justin.tv went live with a single product: Justin Kan. Funded by Paul Graham at Y Combinator and built with cofounders Emmett Shear, Michael Seibel, and Kyle Vogt, the site broadcast Kan's life around the clock from a webcam clipped to his baseball cap. Because nothing off the shelf could stream video from the street, Vogt bonded several EVDO cellular data cards through a Linux laptop that Kan carried in a hot, heavy backpack. The press compared it to The Truman Show, but the real novelty sat beside the video: a chat room Kan answered in real time.

This episode follows how that chat changed everything. Viewers quickly learned they could reach into Kan's life, sending police, firefighters, and unpaid pizzas to his door. The founders took the lesson that audiences wanted interaction, retired the backpack by the summer, and in October 2007 opened the network to anyone. What followed was a crash course in piracy, tragedy, and moderation, and then a discovery in the data that turned a chaotic experiment into a business Amazon bought for nearly a billion dollars.

• Trolls used an IP relay service built for the hearing impaired to spoof Kan's caller ID, reporting a stabbing at his apartment one day and a fire the next. It was an early, high profile case of swatting.
• The open platform detected webcams through Adobe Flash and adjusted bitrate on the fly, streaming at up to a thousand kilobits per second. By early 2008 it had 30,000 broadcasting accounts.
• Users streamed copyrighted shows and pay-per-view fights. The company adopted Vobile's fingerprint filtering in a deal with Fox, and in 2011 Zuffa, parent of the UFC, sued.
• On November 19, 2008, 19 year old Abraham K. Biggs died by suicide on a live broadcast while some viewers in the chat egged him on, forcing new flagging tools and stricter terms of service.
• Gaming streams outgrew everything else and were spun off as Twitch in June 2011. The company renamed itself Twitch Interactive in February 2014 and shut down Justin.tv that August.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Betty Jean Jennings was born in Gentry County, Missouri, in 1924, the sixth of seven children of a farmer and schoolteacher. By 14 she was driving herself to high school in a neighboring town, and at 16 she graduated as salutatorian. In college she switched from journalism to mathematics after clashing with her advisor, and in 1945 she was the only student in her class to earn a math degree. The Army hired her as a human computer, calculating artillery trajectories by hand, and she soon applied to work on a secret machine called ENIAC.

This episode tells how she and five other women became its first programmers. Without security clearances, they were not allowed to see the computer, so they worked in empty classrooms and fraternity houses from circuit diagrams and interviews with the engineers. With co-lead Betty Holberton, she developed subroutines and nesting, then set the machine up by routing cables and flipping switches by hand. The story follows her from that triumph to decades of obscurity and a late, deserved recognition.

• At the public demonstration in February 1946, ENIAC computed a trajectory in 20 seconds that would have taken a human computer 40 hours. The praise went to hardware builders John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert.
• In 1948 Bartik led the team that converted ENIAC into a stored program computer. Much of the 60 order code survives in her handwriting.
• She worked on BINAC, the first computer to use magnetic tape, designed logic circuits for UNIVAC I, and co-wrote the Sort/Merge generator with Holberton.
• After Remington Rand bought the company, a rule against married couples working together forced her to resign. She later earned a master's in English and spent 25 years as a real estate agent.
• In 1986 researcher Kathy Kleiman was told the women in old ENIAC photographs were just models. Her search for them led to documentaries, a Computer History Museum fellowship, and a Drupal theme named Bartik.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

In 2004, Jawed Karim was an engineer at PayPal, working alongside Steve Chen and Chad Hurley, and he could not find online footage of the two events everyone was talking about: the Super Bowl halftime show and the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami. Video on the internet then meant sketchy downloads, rival media players, and corrupted files. The three built a fix: a single place where anyone could upload a heavy file and have it converted into a standard format that played from a simple link in any browser.

This episode traces what happened to the test clip. On April 23, 2005, at 8:31 p.m. Pacific time, Karim stood before the elephant enclosure at the San Diego Zoo while his high school friend Yakov Lapitsky held the camera. He remarked on the length of the animals' trunks and said that was pretty much all there was to say. Nineteen seconds long, unscripted and unpolished, it told viewers the platform was for them, not for studios. It has since become a museum piece and, in its founder's hands, a billboard the company cannot take down.

• As of October 2026 the clip has passed 440 million views. The zoo's 2020 comment on it became the most liked comment on the platform, with nearly five million likes.
• London's Victoria and Albert Museum added the video to its permanent collection in early 2026 after a conservation team spent 18 months reconstructing the original 2005 webpage.
• In late 2013 Karim rewrote the video's description to attack the requirement that users hold a Google Plus account just to comment.
• When public dislike counts were hidden in late 2021, he changed the description again, arguing that if every creator thought the move was a bad idea, the company was in the wrong.
• In 2023 he swapped in a parody thumbnail with glowing eyes and stampeding animals. By early 2025 the description warned about microplastics in the human brain and split the 19 seconds into chapters.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Jack Kilby was born in Jefferson City, Missouri, in 1923 and raised in Great Bend, Kansas, where a winter ice storm once snapped the telephone poles and his father, who ran the local electric company, used amateur radio operators to coordinate the repairs. The lesson stuck: when the infrastructure breaks, find another path for the signal. After serving as an Army electronics technician in World War II, Kilby earned his engineering degree at the University of Illinois in 1947, then spent his days on the factory floor at Centralab in Milwaukee and his nights earning a master's degree.

This episode follows him to Texas Instruments in mid-1958, when the industry was stuck on the tyranny of numbers: advanced systems needed so many hand-soldered parts that failure was all but guaranteed. As a new hire with no vacation time, Kilby was left alone in the lab while his colleagues took their summer break. There he asked a question nobody else had: what if resistors, capacitors, and transistors could all be made from one block of semiconductor, with no joints to fail?

• On September 12, 1958, Kilby pressed a switch in front of TI management, and a sliver of germanium wired to an oscilloscope produced a continuous sine wave. He filed his patent for miniaturized electronic circuits in February 1959.
• Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor arrived at a similar idea months later and used the planar process in silicon to replace Kilby's flying gold wires. Both men are recognized as co-inventors.
• Early chips were expensive and yields were low, so Kilby led the teams that built the first military systems and computers to use them, where savings in size and weight justified the cost.
• To open a consumer market he co-invented the handheld electronic calculator with Jerry Merryman and James Van Tassel, then the thermal printer to go with it.
• In 1970 he took leave from TI to explore solar power, later taught at Texas A&M from 1978 to 1984, and received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2000. He died in Dallas on June 20, 2005, at 81.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Every photo on your screen is a carefully built illusion. The Joint Photographic Experts Group standard, released in 1992, starts by exploiting a weakness in human vision: our eyes are sharp on brightness and contrast but poor at fine detail in color. The algorithm converts an image from red, green, and blue into luma and chroma, keeps the brightness at full fidelity, and throws away half or more of the color data by making neighboring pixels share a value. Like a coloring book with crisp outlines, the picture still looks right even when the crayon strays outside the lines.

This episode walks through the rest of the trick. The image is cut into blocks of 8 by 8 pixels, and the discrete cosine transform, proposed by Nasir Ahmed in 1972, turns each block into a map of visual frequencies. Quantization then rounds most of the fine detail down to zero, and a zigzag reading order packs those zeros into shorthand. The story then turns to the patent claims that tried to tax the format a decade after its release, and to why technically better successors have never managed to replace it.

• The quality slider in photo software controls how aggressively quantization divides and rounds. The blocky squares in a bad JPEG are the visible borders of those 8 by 8 blocks.
• Every save reruns the lossy math, so repeated edits degrade an image like a photocopy of a photocopy. Cropping or rotating exactly along block boundaries avoids the loss.
• In 2002, Forgent Networks asserted a 1986 Compression Labs patent and collected about $105 million from roughly 30 companies before the patent office found it invalid on prior art in 2006.
• Later claimants included Global Patent Holdings, which sued companies and even the Green Bay Packers in 2007 over downloading JPEGs on websites.
• JPEG 2000 removed the blocky artifacts but failed in the market. Instead, projects like MozJPEG, Guetzli, and Jpegli squeeze 20 to 35 percent more efficiency from the original standard.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

In the late 1990s, amateur astronomers synchronized their watches to catch Iridium flares, flashes of sunlight off satellite antennas that could outshine Venus. The hardware behind them was a marvel. To let a handheld phone reach space, Motorola placed its satellites in low Earth orbit about 485 miles up, where each one races by at roughly 17,000 miles per hour and stays in view for about seven minutes. The plan called for 77 satellites handing calls to one another, which gave the company the name of element 77. The final design needed only 66, but dysprosium did not have the same ring.

This episode follows the whiplash that came next. The network cost roughly $5 billion and switched on in late 1998, just as pocket cell phones took over. Its one pound, $3,000 handset could not work indoors, and the company went bankrupt in 1999. Bought for pennies on the dollar, the constellation found its true customers among soldiers, sailors, explorers, and war reporters, survived a collision in orbit, was rebuilt in flight, and ended up as a quiet backbone of global tracking and safety.

• To build spacecraft fast, Motorola hired the engineer behind Apple's automated Macintosh factory. At peak production in 1997 and 1998, a new satellite came off the line every 4.3 days.
• On February 10, 2009, Iridium 33 collided over Siberia with the dead Russian satellite Cosmos 2251 at about 22,000 miles per hour, creating more than 2,000 large pieces of trackable debris.
• Engineers filled the gap with a spare from a lower storage orbit, waiting for the Earth's equatorial bulge to rotate its orbital plane into alignment before raising it into the grid.
• Between 2017 and 2019, SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets launched 75 new satellites built by Thales Alenia Space, each taking over from a 1990s original before the old one was deorbited.
• The new satellites carry Aireon receivers that track aircraft over open ocean, and in 2020 Iridium was certified for the global maritime distress system, ending Inmarsat's monopoly. In June 2026, Rocket Lab announced it was acquiring the company.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

On March 23, 2016, Microsoft launched a chatbot on Twitter named Tay, short for Thinking About You. Built by its technology and research divisions with the Bing team, Tay was given the voice of a 19 year old American woman and the tagline the AI with zero chill. It was modeled on Xiaoice, a Chinese chatbot that had handled more than 40 million conversations without a major incident. Tay learned continuously from whoever talked to it, and within hours a subset of users realized they could flood it with inflammatory phrases and watch it adopt them.

This episode is a biography of a life that lasted 16 hours and produced 96,000 tweets. It explains why the bot began denying the Holocaust and attacking Caitlyn Jenner: partly a repeat-after-me function that trolls exploited, partly statistical pattern matching that adjusted its weights to match whatever it saw most often, with no grasp of meaning. It then follows Microsoft's frantic deletions, the suspension, the public apology, and the lessons the company says it took from the wreckage.

• Microsoft had blacklisted some topics in advance. Asked about the police killing of Eric Garner, Tay gave a pre-written, canned answer, but the rest of the dictionary was left open.
• AI researcher Roman Yampolskiy compared the failure to IBM's Watson, which had to be scrubbed after it absorbed the Urban Dictionary and started swearing at researchers.
• When staff began deleting tweets and Tay started issuing polished statements that all genders are equal, users launched a Justice for Tay campaign protesting corporate censorship of a bot.
• A week later, on March 30, Tay was accidentally re-released during testing. It tweeted about smoking kush in front of the police, then tagged itself into an endless loop of You are too fast, please take a rest.
• Satya Nadella said the episode shaped how Microsoft approached AI, and a successor called Zo followed in December 2016. The platform Gab later launched its own clone using Tay's avatar.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

In 1996, talking to someone online meant shouting into the scrolling chaos of an IRC channel. Then five Israeli developers, Yair Goldfinger, Sefi Vigiser, Amnon Amir, Arik Vardi, and his father Yossi Vardi, founded Mirabilis and released a small free program called ICQ. With no marketing budget and nothing but word of mouth, it gave every user a permanent account and a direct, private line to one other person. Each account carried a sequential user identification number, the UIN, starting at 100,000. A six digit number became proof you had been there at the beginning.

This episode traces the full life of ICQ: the 1998 sale to AOL for $287 million upfront plus $120 million tied to performance, the climb to 100 million registered users by 2001, and the ads and bloat that drove Americans away. It follows the service east after its 2010 sale for $187.5 million to Digital Sky Technologies, where its lightweight protocol suited slow, metered connections, and ends with the brief notice that shut it down on June 26, 2024.

• AOL already owned AIM, but AIM's strength was tied to American dial-up subscribers. Buying ICQ secured the borderless global audience it lacked.
• In 2001 contact lists moved from the user's hard drive to AOL's servers, a convenience that also made leaving the platform far harder. In 2002 AOL Time Warner was issued a United States patent for instant messaging itself.
• Power users fled the ads for third party clients such as Pidgin and Miranda NG, built by reverse engineering the OSCAR protocol. ICQ repeatedly changed its servers to lock them out.
• In Russia, low digit UINs sold for more than 11,000 rubles, and in 2021 a WhatsApp privacy scare sent ICQ downloads in Hong Kong up 35-fold in a single week.
• A 2018 Novaya Gazeta analysis of court sentences indicated Russian intelligence could read ICQ correspondence, and a 2023 Brazilian investigation tied lax moderation to the sharing of child abuse material.