pplpod

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On June 1st, 1990, KIIS-FM in Los Angeles promised a Porsche 944 S2 to its 102nd caller. Kevin Poulsen, known online as Dark Dante, did not dial fast. He took over Pacific Bell's central office switches, seized the station's 25 phone lines, blocked every other caller in the city, and counted his way to number 102. He had been at this since his teens in Pasadena, when he broke into the ARPANET at 17 using a TRS-80.

This episode follows Poulsen from fugitive to reporter. The FBI found his trail after he failed to pay rent on a storage shed full of equipment, and when Unsolved Mysteries profiled him, its tip lines went dead. Arrested in April 1991, he was sentenced to 51 months and then barred from computers for three years. He came back as a journalist at SecurityFocus and Wired, broke the Chelsea Manning chat logs story, and helped design SecureDrop, the tool newsrooms use to protect whistleblowers.

• Poulsen never attacked the radio station itself. He controlled the telephone company's switches and dropped every incoming call but his own.
• He was the first American released from prison under a court order banning him from computers and the internet, a ban the episode compares to confiscating a burglar's lockpicks.
• In October 2006 he wrote a script that cross-referenced MySpace profiles with sex offender registries, finding 744 matches and leading to the arrest of Andrew Lubrano.
• SecureDrop, first called DeadDrop, was designed with James Dolan and Aaron Swartz. It routes submissions through Tor and has journalists read them on air-gapped machines.
• The first official SecureDrop instance launched at The New Yorker in May 2013, and the project later passed to the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

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In June 2003, more than 130 people gathered around one expensive rug on the ninth floor of Macy's in Manhattan. Each told the confused salesperson the same story: they lived together in a warehouse on the outskirts of New York and were shopping for a love rug. Then they left. It was the first successful flash mob, and its architect was Bill Wasik, a senior editor at Harper's Magazine who wanted to see whether downtown trend chasers would show up for something meaningless if it felt exclusive.

This episode follows the idea from that cynical experiment to its darker afterlife. Wasik's first attempt failed when the target store was tipped off, so he staged participants in four Manhattan bars and handed out the real location on slips of paper. The craze spread worldwide, drew pushback from police and city officials, and by around 2011 had mutated into flash robs, with groups of teenagers overwhelming stores. A 1973 Larry Niven story had predicted nearly all of it.

• Sociologists separate a flash mob, which is deliberately pointless, from a smart mob, a term Howard Rheingold coined in 2002 for gatherings with a political or practical goal.
• Other early Wasik events included 200 people applauding for exactly 15 seconds in a Hyatt Hotel lobby and a crowd posing as lost bus tourists in a SoHo shoe boutique.
• Larry Niven's story Flash Crowd imagined cheap teleportation letting thousands of people appear at a minor incident and turn it into a riot.
• The phrase flash mob was also used in 19th century Tasmania for a subculture of female prisoners, a coincidence with no link to Wasik.
• Duke psychologist Mark Leary ties flash robs to deindividuation, the anonymity of a crowd that lets people do what they would never do alone.

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The first ransomware attack arrived by post. In 1989 a biologist named Joseph Popp mailed around 20,000 floppy disks labeled as AIDS information to attendees of a World Health Organization conference. On the 90th boot, the hidden program locked the machine and demanded a $189 cashier's check sent to a P.O. box in Panama for the fictitious PC Cyborg Corporation. Popp never stood trial. He was declared mentally unfit, and at one point wore cardboard boxes on his head.

This episode tracks how that crude stunt became an industry. In 1996, researchers Adam L. Young and Moti Yung described cryptoviral extortion, a hybrid encryption scheme inspired by the facehugger in Alien. Criminals then spent years looking for a safe way to get paid, moving from premium text messages to fake police warnings to prepaid vouchers, until CryptoLocker paired strong encryption with Bitcoin in 2013. What followed was ransomware as a service, WannaCry, Colonial Pipeline, and data theft that makes backups alone useless.

• Hybrid encryption locks files with a fast symmetric key, then seals that key with the attacker's public key. The private key never touches the victim's computer.
• The Reveton police trojan displayed the FBI seal or the Metropolitan Police logo, accused victims of crimes, and sometimes switched on the webcam to show their own face.
• WannaCry spread in 2017 using EternalBlue, an NSA exploit leaked by the Shadow Brokers. It hit over 230,000 computers in 150 countries and disrupted the UK's National Health Service.
• A 2019 ProPublica investigation found data recovery firms that claimed proprietary technology but were secretly paying the hackers and adding a markup.
• In May 2024, Tokyo police arrested 25-year-old Ryuki Hayashi, who had no deep technical background and used generative AI to write ransomware.

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Reddit exists because Paul Graham turned down an app for ordering food by text message. In the spring of 2005, University of Virginia roommates Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian pitched him My Mobile Menu after a lecture in Boston. He passed on the idea but invited them into the first class of Y Combinator with a new brief: build the front page of the internet. The site launched that June to an empty room, so the founders created hundreds of fake accounts and held conversations with themselves.

This episode follows Reddit from that manufactured crowd to a March 2024 IPO that raised $600 million. Along the way: Aaron Swartz's rewrite of the code in Python, a 2006 sale to Conde Nast, a run of chief executives that included one who quit over an office move, and Ellen Pao's contested anti-harassment rules. Beneath it all sits a volunteer workforce of moderators, whose 2023 revolt over API fees turned out to be collateral damage in a fight over who pays for AI training data.

• Aaron Swartz moved Reddit from Huffman's original Common Lisp to Python using his own web.py framework. He was fired in January 2007 after blogging about corporate life at Conde Nast.
• Under CEO Yishan Wong the user base grew from 35 million to 174 million. He resigned in 2014 after a dispute over moving the headquarters to Daly City.
• Researchers estimate that moderators perform about 466 hours of unpaid work every day, worth roughly $3.4 million a year.
• During the June 2023 blackout over API pricing that killed the Apollo app, some large subreddits allowed only pictures of John Oliver, and others marked themselves NSFW to cut off ad revenue.
• In 2024 Reddit signed a licensing deal with Google worth roughly $60 million a year, followed by one with OpenAI. Such deals now make up nearly 10 percent of revenue.

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In 1995, programmer Pierre Omidyar listed a broken laser pointer on his hobby site, AuctionWeb, for less than $15. It sold to a collector of broken laser pointers, and the sale proved a theory: with a big enough network, there is a buyer for anything. This episode follows the 30 years that came after, from a site whose first employee, Chris Agarpao, was hired to open envelopes of mailed checks, to a company that went public in 1998 with shares opening at $18 and closing the first day at $53.

The story is as much about failure as growth. eBay bought PayPal, Skype, and StubHub, then lost China to Alibaba's Taobao after starting with an 85 percent market share. It fought Craigslist in court for years and was disgraced by a 2020 cyberstalking campaign against the publishers of a critical newsletter. Its answer was to rebuild around authentication. That infrastructure is what GameStop appears to want in its May 2026 hostile bid, which eBay rejected as neither credible nor attractive.

• When traffic pushed Omidyar's internet bill from $30 to $250 a month, his grandfather, General Mahmoud Mir Jalali, helped keep the servers running.
• By 1997, Beanie Babies accounted for 10 percent of all eBay listings, as collectors used the site to find a real market price for hard-to-value items.
• In China, eBay's share fell from 85 percent to 7.7 percent by 2007. It kept auctions, charged fees, and ran slow US-based servers while Taobao was free and offered instant messaging.
• eBay employees sent a preserved fetal pig, live spiders, a bloody Halloween mask, and a funeral wreath to the publishers of EcommerceBytes. Several went to prison, and CEO Devin Wenig, who was not charged, left with $57 million.
• GameStop quietly built a 5 percent stake through shares and derivatives before going directly to shareholders with a $56 billion cash and stock offer.

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Anonymous has no face, no leader, and no fixed membership, which makes its life story unusually hard to tell. It began on the image boards of the early 2000s, above all 4chan, where threads vanished quickly and users who posted without a name were all tagged with the same default label. The running joke that this was one hyperactive person gave strangers a shared myth, and in 2006 they tested it by flooding Habbo Hotel with identical avatars and declaring the virtual pool closed.

This episode traces what came next. A 2008 fight with the Church of Scientology over a scrubbed video turned pranksters into protesters in more than a hundred cities, wearing Guy Fawkes masks bought from costume shops. Operation Payback hit PayPal, Visa, and MasterCard and brought FBI arrests. Later campaigns ranged from the Arab Spring to the Ku Klux Klan to Russia in 2022. The question throughout is whether a leaderless swarm is a check on power or a mob with no accountability.

• The Habbo Hotel raid was coordinated through IRC channels and served as proof that thousands of people could act together with no central command.
• The Low Orbit Ion Cannon, a network stress testing tool, let volunteers flood a server with junk packets. Against Visa and PayPal it was not enough, so the group turned to botnets of hijacked devices.
• When security executive Aaron Barr of HBGary claimed he would unmask the group's leaders, hackers used a SQL injection flaw to take over his servers, wipe his iPad, and publish the company's emails.
• In 2020 the collective resurfaced with leaks of police data and a breach of the web host Epik that exposed what it claimed was a decade of customer records.
• After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, affiliated accounts claimed hacks of the Ministry of Defense and the central bank, and broadcast uncensored war footage on Russian state channels.

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In the late 1960s, a single slipped finger on page 49 of a legal brief meant pulling the paper out of the typewriter and starting the page again. Evelyn Berezin ended that. Born in the East Bronx in 1925 to Belarusian Jewish immigrants, a furrier and a seamstress, she grew up reading her brother's copies of Astounding Science Fiction, enrolled at Hunter College at 16, and studied physics while working full time in the rheology department of a printing ink company.

This episode follows her path from a physics career blocked by discrimination to a 1951 job as head of logic design at a Brooklyn startup, Electronic Computer Corporation, despite having no computer design experience. She went on to design a nationwide reservation system for United Airlines, lost a job offer from the New York Stock Exchange because of her sex, and in 1968 invented the Data Secretary. A year later she founded Redactron Corporation to build and sell it herself, in direct competition with IBM.

• At Teleregister in 1957, Berezin designed the Reservisor for United Airlines, a transistor-based network that answered queries from distant terminals in one second.
• The New York Stock Exchange offered her a role managing its computer operations in 1960, then withdrew it, saying the language on the trading floor was too rough for a woman.
• The Data Secretary was the size of a small refrigerator, had no screen, and used a modified IBM Selectric typewriter as its keyboard.
• Keystrokes were recorded on magnetic tape, so a secretary could rewind to an error, type over it, and have the machine print a clean copy at high speed.
• Berezin held nine patents and died in December 2018 at age 93. She was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2020.

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Control-Alt-Delete was never meant for the public. In 1981 in Boca Raton, Florida, IBM engineer David Bradley was writing the ROM BIOS for the IBM PC 5150, and the prototype crashed constantly. Every crash meant a hard reboot and a slow power-on self-test of every kilobyte of memory. Bradley spent five or ten minutes coding a keyboard interrupt that would skip the test and restart the machine, then moved on to the next crisis.

This episode follows that hidden shortcut out of the lab and into daily life. IBM printed it in its technical reference manual, users found it, and Microsoft had to manage it: first as an early task manager in the multitasking era, then as the secure attention sequence in Windows NT, where it defeated fake login screens by reaching the kernel directly. Along the way come Bradley's famous jab at Bill Gates and Gates's later admission that the three-key login was a mistake.

• Bradley's first choice was Control-Alt-Escape, but those keys sat together on the left side of the keyboard and developers kept triggering resets by accident.
• Chief programmer Mel Hallerman suggested swapping in the Delete key, which sat on the far right and made the command impossible to press with one hand.
• The text on the Windows 3.1 blue screen that appeared after the keystroke was written by Steve Ballmer.
• At the 20th anniversary of the IBM PC in 2001, Bradley said: I may have invented it, but Bill made it famous.
• In 2013 at Harvard, Gates said Microsoft wanted a single dedicated login button but could not convince IBM's hardware designers to add the key.

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Bill Gates has been two very different public figures: the desk-pounding monopolist of the 1990s and the sweater-wearing philanthropist trying to eradicate disease. This episode argues that both run on the same engine. It begins in a Seattle household where card games and swims to the dock at Hood Canal were contests with penalties for losing, then moves to the Lakeside School, where a 1968 rummage sale by the Mothers' Club bought computer time and a teletype terminal for a 13-year-old who became instantly obsessed.

From there the story covers the bluff that launched Microsoft, when Gates and Paul Allen sold software for an Altair 8800 they had never seen, and the IBM deal that let Gates keep the copyright to MS-DOS. It also covers the damage: the friction with Allen during his cancer treatment, the evasive 1998 antitrust deposition, and the later revelations about workplace conduct and meetings with Jeffrey Epstein. The pivot to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is weighed against all of it.

• After being banned for exploiting bugs to get free computer time, Gates and his friends negotiated a deal to find vulnerabilities in exchange for free access.
• At Harvard, Gates devised an algorithm for the pancake sorting problem that held the speed record for over three decades.
• Gates and Allen wrote an emulator on Harvard's mainframe to simulate the Altair. Their BASIC code touched the real hardware for the first time during Allen's demo in New Mexico, and it worked.
• Microsoft bought 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products, renamed it MS-DOS, and licensed it to IBM for a flat fee while retaining the copyright.
• Gates gave a 2015 TED Talk warning about pandemic preparedness, then became the target of baseless microchip and depopulation conspiracy theories during COVID-19.

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In 1984, Dr. An Wang was the fifth richest person in America, worth about $1.6 billion and employing 30,000 people. Born in Shanghai in 1920, he immigrated to the United States in June 1945, finished a Harvard doctorate in applied physics by 1948, and went to work with Howard Aiken. There he co-invented the pulse transfer controlling device, which solved the destructive readout problem and made magnetic core memory practical for continuous computing.

This episode traces how Wang turned that invention into Wang Laboratories, founded in 1951 as a sole proprietorship after Harvard cut back its computer research. He sold his core memory patent to IBM for a flat $500,000, cornered the desktop calculator market, then pivoted into word processing and minicomputers. At the peak of his power he insisted on handing the company to his son Fred, a decision that collided with the rise of the personal computer and ended in a public and painful removal.

• Early computer memory erased data in the act of reading it. Wang's device rewrote the data immediately afterward, a mechanism engineers call write after read.
• To raise $50,000 in working capital, Wang gave up a third of his young company to the Warner and Swasey Company, a machine tools manufacturer.
• His 1976 multi-user word processing system put a Zilog Z80 processor and disk storage in a central master unit, with coaxial cables running to diskless terminals.
• The Wang VS minicomputer mimicked the instruction set of the IBM System 370, making it easy for IBM-trained programmers to adapt their software.
• Fred Wang became CEO in 1986 and was removed by his father in 1989. An Wang died of cancer on March 24th, 1990, at age 70, leaving his name on a Boston theater and a Massachusetts General Hospital building.