Interest

957 Articles

Back To The Future, 40 Years Old, Looks Like The Past

July 3, 2025 by 81 Comments

Great Scott! If my calculations are correct, when this baby hits 88 miles per hour, you’re gonna see some serious shit. — Doc Brown

On this day, forty years ago, July 3rd, 1985 the movie Back to the Future was released. While not as fundamental as Hackers or realistic as Sneakers, this movie worked its way into our pantheon. We thought it would be appropriate to commemorate this element of hacker culture on this day, its forty year anniversary.

If you just never got around to watching it, or if it has been a few decades since you did, then you might not recall that the movie is set in two periods. It opens in 1985 and then goes back to 1955. Most of the movie is set in 1955 with Marty trying to get back to 1985 — “back to the future”. The movie celebrates the advanced technology and fashions of 1985 and is all about how silly the technology and fashions of 1955 are as compared with the advancements of 1985. But now it’s the far future, the year 2025, and we thought we might take a look at some of the technology that was enchanting in 1985 but that turned out to be obsolete in “the future”, forty years on. Continue reading “Back To The Future, 40 Years Old, Looks Like The Past” →

Finally, An Extension To Copyright Law We Can Get Behind

July 2, 2025 by 31 Comments

Normally when a government extends a piece of copyright law we expect it to be in the favour of commercial interests with deep pockets and little care for their consumers. But in Denmark they do things differently it seems, which is why they are giving Danes the copyright over their own features such as their faces or voices. Why? To combat deepfakes, meaning that if you deepfake a Dane, they can come after you for big bucks, or indeed kronor. It’s a major win, in privacy terms.

You might of course ask, whether it’s now risky to photograph a Dane. We are not of course lawyers here but like any journalists we have to possess a knowledge of how copyright works, and we are guessing that the idea in play here is that of passing off. If you take a photograph of a Volkswagen you will have captured the VW logo on its front, but the car company will not sue you because you are not passing off something that’s not a Volkswagen as the real thing. So it will be with Danes; if you take a picture of their now-copyrighted face in a crowd you are not passing it off as anything but a real picture of them, so we think you should be safe.

We welcome this move, and wish other countries would follow suit.

Pope Francis, Midjourney, Public domain, (Which is a copyright story all of its own!)

One Laptop Manufacturer Had To Stop Janet Jackson Crashing Laptops

July 1, 2025 by 34 Comments

There are all manner of musical myths, covering tones and melodies that have effects ranging from the profound to the supernatural. The Pied Piper, for example, or the infamous “brown note.”

But what about a song that could crash your laptop just by playing it? Even better, a song that could crash nearby laptops in the vicinity, too? It’s not magic, and it’s not a trick—it was just a punchy pop song that Janet Jackson wrote back in 1989.

Continue reading “One Laptop Manufacturer Had To Stop Janet Jackson Crashing Laptops” →

Field Guide To The North American Weigh Station

June 26, 2025 by 39 Comments

A lot of people complain that driving across the United States is boring. Having done the coast-to-coast trip seven times now, I can’t agree. Sure, the stretches through the Corn Belt get a little monotonous, but for someone like me who wants to know how everything works, even endless agriculture is fascinating; I love me some center-pivot irrigation.

One thing that has always attracted my attention while on these long road trips is the weigh stations that pop up along the way, particularly when you transition from one state to another. Maybe it’s just getting a chance to look at something other than wheat, but weigh stations are interesting in their own right because of everything that’s going on in these massive roadside plazas. Gone are the days of a simple pull-off with a mechanical scale that was closed far more often than it was open. Today’s weigh stations are critical infrastructure installations that are bristling with sensors to provide a multi-modal insight into the state of the trucks — and drivers — plying our increasingly crowded highways.

Continue reading “Field Guide To The North American Weigh Station” →

The Rise And The Fall Of The Mail Chute

June 25, 2025 by 17 Comments

As the Industrial Age took the world by storm, city centers became burgeoning hubs of commerce and activity. New offices and apartments were built higher and higher as density increased and skylines grew ever upwards. One could live and work at height, but this created a simple inconvenience—if you wanted to send any mail, you had to go all the way down to ground level.

In true American fashion, this minor inconvenience would not be allowed to stand. A simple invention would solve the problem, only to later fall out of vogue as technology and safety standards moved on. Today, we explore the rise and fall of the humble mail chute.

Continue reading “The Rise And The Fall Of The Mail Chute” →

Eulogy For The Satellite Phone

June 23, 2025 by 54 Comments

We take it for granted that we almost always have cell service, no matter where you go around town. But there are places — the desert, the forest, or the ocean — where you might not have cell service. In addition, there are certain jobs where you must be able to make a call even if the cell towers are down, for example, after a hurricane. Recently, a combination of technological advancements has made it possible for your ordinary cell phone to connect to a satellite for at least some kind of service. But before that, you needed a satellite phone.

On TV and in movies, these are simple. You pull out your cell phone that has a bulkier-than-usual antenna, and you make a call. But the real-life version is quite different. While some satellite phones were connected to something like a ship, I’m going to consider a satellite phone, for the purpose of this post, to be a handheld device that can make calls.

Continue reading “Eulogy For The Satellite Phone” →

Just For Laughs: Charlie Douglass And The Laugh Track

June 18, 2025 by 40 Comments

I ran into an old episode of Hogan’s Heroes the other day that stuck me as odd. It didn’t have a laugh track. Ironically, the show was one where two pilots were shown, one with and one without a laugh track. The resulting data ensured future shows would have fake laughter. This wasn’t the pilot, though, so I think it was just an error on the part of the streaming service.

However, it was very odd. Many of the jokes didn’t come off as funny without the laugh track. Many of them came off as cruel. That got me to thinking about how they had to put laughter in these shows to begin with. I had my suspicions, but was I way off!

Well, to be honest, my suspicions were well-founded if you go back far enough. Bing Crosby was tired of running two live broadcasts, one for each coast, so he invested in tape recording, using German recorders Jack Mullin had brought back after World War II. Apparently, one week, Crosby’s guest was a comic named Bob Burns. He told some off-color stories, and the audience was howling. Of course, none of that would make it on the air in those days. But they saved the recording.

A few weeks later, either a bit of the show wasn’t as funny or the audience was in a bad mood. So they spliced in some of the laughs from the Burns performance. You could guess that would happen, and that’s the apparent birth of the laugh track. But that method didn’t last long before someone — Charley Douglass — came up with something better. Continue reading “Just For Laughs: Charlie Douglass And The Laugh Track” →