The short answer is yes, and the name of that possibility is eBPF (extended Berkeley Packet Filter). Even though the name smells like the packet filtering of the 1990s, eBPF has become the infrastruct...
That an AI assistant manages to “read” a PDF, query a database or run a command is not magic: it is a protocol. It is called the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and, since November 2024, it h...
You switch the computer off and its RAM forgets everything: that is the well-known part. What is told less often is that, even while the machine is running, that memory is “forgetting” non...
In 1994 the mathematician Peter Shor proved something uncomfortable: if we ever build a large enough quantum computer, the asymmetric encryption algorithms that protect the Internet today —RSA, ECDSA,...
If you are reading this page, it has very likely already travelled over HTTP/3. The newest version of the protocol that runs the web has been quietly rolling out for years, and it rides on a surprisin...
When you buy an SSD, the spec sheet promises “200 TB written” or “5 years of warranty”. What it does not say is that every one of its memory cells is born with a finite, counte...
Between your finger pressing the mouse and the pixel changing colour, roughly twenty milliseconds pass. You do not feel them, but in that instant the signal travels an entire chain of hardware and sof...
When your operator promises a “symmetric 1 Gbps fiber” connection, that promise rests on physics that has little to do with electricity. A fiber optic cable does not carry electrons: it ca...
When you save a password on a serious service, the platform does not store the password. It stores a fingerprint of it: a hash. That difference—between storing a secret and storing only the proof that...
When you type a URL and press Enter, your device does not connect straight to the website: every data packet passes through a filter that decides in fractions of a millisecond whether it should contin...
Every time a page scrolls, animates a button or switches theme, your browser is running a production chain that repeats dozens of times per second. It is not magic: it is the rendering pipeline —the s...
Pair of earbuds, a car and a pacemaker have one thing in common: they all communicate through the same technology born almost three decades ago to remove cables: Bluetooth. Its name honours Harald Blu...
A 24 MB photo that weighs under 3 Take a photo with your phone and look at its raw data: uncompressed, a 4000×3000 image would take up about 24 MB. Twenty shots and you have half a gigabyte. Yet your ...
Every time you open a page, your browser sends an HTTP request (the protocol used by web clients and servers to talk to each other) to a machine that may be thousands of kilometers away. If that whole...
You open the maps app, and in under a second you know exactly where you are. The system that makes this possible does not depend on a giant antenna or your carrier: it depends on 31 satellites about 2...
The QR code in your pocket has spent the night crumpled, taken a scratch from your keys, and a coffee stain has decided to settle right on one corner. Even so, at the supermarket checkout it scans on ...
At the door of a nightclub there is a bouncer with two questions: how old are you, and how can you prove it. The usual answer is to pull out your ID and show it, which also reveals your name, your add...
At the door of a nightclub there is a bouncer with two questions: how old are you, and how can you prove it. The usual answer is to pull out your ID and show it, which also reveals your name, your add...
99% of the internet travels along the ocean floor, but that cable has one countable limit: the last mile, the stretch between the exchange in town and your living room, is the most expensive path in t...
The subway car rumbles, the motor vibrates under your feet and the platform horn slips in through the window. Then you put on your headphones, press a button and the roar disappears as if someone had ...
Your phone, your laptop, the living-room TV and the “smart” coffee maker share something: each one needs its own address to talk on the internet. And those addresses are a finite resource....
When someone says “the call looks terrible”, they usually blame the carrier, the router or the laptop. The interesting part is what happened a few hundred milliseconds earlier: the softwar...
In 2026 anyone can play a 1996 title on a laptop, on a phone or even inside a browser. And there is a detail that rarely gets told: that machine does not understand the game’s code. It is not th...
Look at a video game scene: millions of triangles, light reflecting, smoke drifting. It looks like the graphics card is “drawing”. It is not: it is computing. Every pixel on your screen is...
Your SSD has no moving parts, yet it wears out all the same. Every time you write a piece of data, a flash memory cell moves a little closer to the end of its life. The question is not whether it will...
There is a program that runs inside the Linux kernel, the core of the operating system, without needing to reboot the server or touch the kernel’s own source code. It is called eBPF (extended Be...
In an artificial intelligence data centre there are cards that draw more than 700 watts, perform on the order of two thousand trillion floating-point operations per second and need liquid cooling to a...
In a large data center, disks fail every single day. It is not a catastrophe: it is routine. And yet when you open your photo folder in the cloud, everything is there. The usual explanation is that th...
On 31 December 2016, at 23:59:60 UTC, the world lived through a second that does not exist: nobody noticed, but the planet’s official clocks counted a 61-second minute. It was the twenty-seventh...
Two worlds that could not be more different live on the web. One is JavaScript, the language behind most of the sites you visit. The other is binaries: compiled programs that the browser executes dire...