pplpod

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.