pplpod

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

On July 15, 2020, the Twitter accounts of Barack Obama, Elon Musk, Joe Biden, and Apple all promised to double any Bitcoin sent their way. The mastermind was a 17-year-old who broke no encryption. He and his accomplices phoned Twitter employees working from home, posed as the IT help desk, and sent them to a fake VPN site, netting about $117,000. This episode uses that breach to explain phishing as a hack of human psychology, delivered by email, phone calls, text messages, and now QR codes.

The history runs from America Online in 1995, where users posed as staff to collect passwords, through the Russian Business Network and the 2013 Target breach, to the state-backed group Fancy Bear. Then comes the present arms race. Language models write flawless lures for about three cents each, subscription kits let anyone launch a campaign, and adversary-in-the-middle attacks relay login codes in real time to steal session cookies. The strongest answer so far is the passkey.

• In a study of 1,876 participants, statistically none could identify a malicious QR code, and scammers in the UK have stuck fake codes over real ones on car park payment machines.
• US computer users lost around $929 million to phishing in a single year in the mid-2000s, and in 2006 the Russian Business Network was tied to almost half of all phishing thefts.
• Attackers reached Target's 110 million customer and card records by spear phishing an HVAC subcontractor with network access.
• A 2024 study found the mandatory training shown after a failed phishing test does not improve behavior, though periodic reminders that tests exist do help.
• Passkeys tie the cryptographic signature to the real domain, so a spoofed site gets nothing an attacker can intercept or relay.

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

The first telephone pager system was patented in 1949 by Al Gross, and the first practical service launched in 1950 for doctors in the New York City area. The device weighed 200 grams, cost $12 a month, and reached 40 kilometers from a single tower. It could only buzz, and physicians hated it, because it invented the condition of being permanently on call. This episode follows the pager from that start through Motorola's transistorized model, the Bellboy shown at the 1962 Seattle World's Fair, and its cheap, citywide networks of the 1990s.

Pagers became a status symbol in hip hop, a tool of the drug trade, and the source of numeric codes like 143 for I love you. When texting killed the consumer market, the technology survived on physics: a pager transmitter puts out a thousand watts against a cell phone's 0.6, and its one-way simulcast broadcast cannot be overloaded. That same passive design explains why Hezbollah adopted pagers to avoid tracking, and how thousands of them were detonated in September 2024.

• The Bellboy used three tiny reed relays, each tuned to one of 33 frequencies, and buzzed only when all three vibrated at once.
• By 1996 Japan alone had over 10 million active pagers, and A Tribe Called Quest, Sir Mix-a-Lot, and Destiny's Child all put them in songs.
• A Miami-Dade schools official called pagers the most dominant symbol of the drug trade, and schools across the country banned them.
• During the 2005 London bombings the two-way TETRA radio system overloaded while paging networks kept delivering, and in 2017 the NHS still ran 130,000 pagers.
• Because the network cannot locate a one-way pager, it broadcasts every message unencrypted from every transmitter, which hides the user's location but exposes the message.

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

In April 2011, Christopher Torres, a 25-year-old artist in Dallas, Texas, was taking drawing requests during a charity livestream for the Red Cross. One viewer asked for a Pop-Tart, another for a cat. He merged them, then animated the result flying through space with a rainbow trail, partly as a tribute to his Russian Blue, Marty. Days later a YouTube user paired his loop with a Japanese song made of a synthesized voice repeating the sound of a meow and titled the upload Nyan Cat. Torres had called his creation Pop-Tart Cat.

This episode uses that accident to ask who owns a meme. The video became the fifth most viewed on YouTube that year and spread into games, a Windows progress bar, and a cryptocurrency called Nyancoin. Torres registered copyrights and trademarks, reclaimed a hijacked domain, and joined Keyboard Cat creator Charles Schmidt in suing Warner Bros. over the game Scribblenauts. A decade after the doodle, he sold a remastered version as an NFT for 300 ether.

• The song began on the Japanese site Niconico in July 2010, built with Hatsune Miku Vocaloid software, and the viral video used a later cover made with the UTAU program.
• Torres accepted the name the internet gave his character instead of fighting it.
• US trademark law obliged Torres to defend his mark or risk losing it, and Warner Bros. and developer 5th Cell settled in September 2013.
• The February 2021 NFT sale brought roughly $587,000 for verified ownership of the artist's official copy, not the copyright.
• In March 2019 the YouTube channel hosting the original viral upload passed to Means TV, a worker-owned streaming cooperative.

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

In November 1992 there were exactly 26 websites in the world. By August 1995 there were more than 10,000. The difference was NCSA Mosaic, a browser begun in December 1992 by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in a lab funded through the High Performance Computing Act of 1991. Mosaic was not the first graphical browser, but it was the first to place images inline with text on the same page, and by September 1993 it ran on Windows and the Macintosh.

This episode treats the software like a biography subject, from birth to early death. Version 2.0 added HTML forms in November 1993, turning the web from a read-only library into a two-way medium and laying the ground for online commerce. Then the commercial potential it revealed destroyed it. Andreessen left to co-found Netscape, Microsoft licensed a Mosaic descendant to build Internet Explorer, and NCSA ended development in January 1997.

• Before Mosaic, the internet meant text tools like Archie, Gopher, and WAIS, and clicking an image link opened it in a separate program.
• Some academic purists hated inline images, seeing them as frivolous decoration that turned a serious research network into a glossy brochure.
• Netscape Navigator displayed text while images were still loading, and its internal code name, Mozilla, stood for Mosaic Killer.
• Mosaic was never open source: NCSA licensed it to Spyglass, which rewrote the browser from scratch and then licensed that code to Microsoft.
• Microsoft paid Spyglass a $2 million fee plus a share of browser revenue, gave Internet Explorer away for free, and later settled the resulting dispute for $8 million.

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

On June 26, 1974, a cashier at a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio, scanned a 10-pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum. That beep ended a 20-year struggle. It began in 1948 at the Drexel Institute of Technology, where graduate student Bernard Silver overheard a food chain president begging for automated checkout. Silver and Norman Joseph Woodland first tried ultraviolet ink, which was costly and faded. Then Woodland, sitting on a Florida beach, drew Morse code in the sand and pulled the dots and dashes down into thick and thin lines.

This episode follows the idea through every near failure. Woodland's first reader paired a 500 watt bulb with a movie projector's sound technology, and IBM judged the concept decades ahead of affordable computing. David Collins tried colored stripes on railroad cars, lost to mud and grime, and turned to lasers. IBM's George Laurer then replaced the circular bullseye design with vertical stripes, and a military mandate finally forced manufacturers to print the codes.

• The original 1952 patent showed a bullseye of concentric rings so a cashier could scan an item from any angle.
• The railroads' KarTrak system was made the mandatory industry standard in 1967 and abandoned by the late 1970s because dirt blinded the scanners.
• RCA's bullseye failed in an 18-month Kroger test in Cincinnati because fast printing presses smeared the rings, while smearing only makes vertical bars taller.
• In 1976 Businessweek ran a piece titled The Supermarket Scanner That Failed, as stores and manufacturers each waited for the other to commit first.
• Barcodes set off a 1970s panic, with Phil Donahue calling them a corporate plot and some religious groups linking them to the number of the beast.

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

In 2014, Mac Miller made fans build a virtual sandwich before they could download Faces. He could get away with it because Faces was a mixtape, not an album. This episode traces how that label came to carry so much freedom. It begins in the Bronx in the 1970s, where DJs like Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa ran cables from their mixers into cassette decks and sold copies from car trunks and barber shops, and with Les Kippel, who organized Grateful Dead fans into a mail-order tape trading network.

From there the format keeps changing shape. DJ Screw slowed tapes to a crawl in Houston and defined Southern hip hop. Warez groups leaked albums through hidden chat servers until the FBI raided them, and DatPiff let artists give music away legally. 50 Cent rapped over other stars' beats until labels fought to sign him. Then in 2015 Drake sold If You're Reading This It's Too Late for $12.99 while calling it a mixtape, and the word became an aesthetic choice.

• The Sony Walkman arrived in 1979 and made listening private, portable, and curated, turning the mixtape into a personal soundtrack.
• The Grateful Dead let fans set up microphones and recording decks at shows, a policy at odds with bands that guarded their live audio.
• Piracy groups recruited insiders at CD pressing plants and radio stations, prompting federal sweeps such as Operation Fastlink and Operation Buccaneer.
• Travis Scott's Days Before Rodeo and Kehlani's While We Wait show the mixtape's modern job: keeping fans fed between official albums.
• Sample clearance remains the real dividing line: Frank Ocean's Nostalgia Ultra, which used the full instrumental of Hotel California, cannot be hosted on Spotify or Apple Music.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.