When a rare species is a product. Alive or dead, rare or mundane, insects are weirdly easy to find for sale online. However, in some cases, the insects or spiders sold through the various e-commerce sites, both niche and large-scale, may be of dubious provenance. Some may be bred and reared in sustainable programs. Others […]
Enlarge (credit: Kirill Kudryavtsev | Getty Images) Russian Twitter users noticed something strange when they tried to access the service on March 4: They couldn’t. For the previous six days, anyone trying to access Twitter from within Russia saw their Internet speed slow to a crawl, no matter how fast their connection. Then came the […]
Enlarge (credit: bjdlzx | Getty Images) More than 22,000 miles above Earth, the KA-SAT is locked in orbit. Traveling at 7,000 miles per hour, in sync with the planet’s rotation, the satellite beams high-speed Internet down to people across Europe. Since 2011, it has helped homeowners, businesses, and militaries get online. However, as Russian troops […]
A demonstration of the late 1990s dialup experience using nearly period-accurate hardware, connecting to modern websites using outdated browsers over a 31.2kbit/s dialup connection. Be forewarned: page loads are in real time. We all found our coping strategies for riding out the pandemic in 2020. Biomedical engineer Gough Liu likes to tinker with tech—particularly vintage tech—and […]
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Aurich Lawson) Many of us make jokes about how we’ve outsourced part of our brain to electronic devices. But based on a new paper by the University of Texas at Austin’s Adrian Ward, this is just a variation on something that has been happening throughout human history. No person could […]
Enlarge (credit: Sandro Katalina) What could the future of the Internet look like? With the digital world of the 21st century becoming a pit of unwanted ads, tracking, paywalls, unsafe content, and legal threats, “Wayforward Machine” has a dystopian picture in mind. Behind the clickbaity name, Wayforward Machine is an attempt by the Internet Archive […]
Enlarge / More and more these days, your ability to play new games depends on the quality of your Internet connection. (credit: Sean MacEntee / Flickr ) For many players these days, the video game industry’s increasing reliance on online connections is an afterthought. But for the significant portion of the world without the quality […]
Enlarge / Even if the power comes back after the next big solar storm, the internet may not. (credit: Jean Claude Moschetti | REA | REDUX) Scientists have known for decades that an extreme solar storm , or coronal mass ejection , could damage electrical grids and potentially cause prolonged blackouts . The repercussions would […]
Cookieyes.com—a site devoted to providing GDPR/CCPA consent solutions—unsurprisingly has an excellent, minimally-invasive cookie banner. [credit: Jim Salter ] The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), passed in 2018, requires websites to ask visitors for consent prior to placing cookies. As any Internet user is now aware, this means an extra step required when visiting […]
Enlarge / A wild beaver works furiously in Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming. (credit: Getty Images | Jeff R Clow) About 900 Internet users in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, lost service for 36 hours when beavers chewed through an underground fiber cable in what network operator Telus called a “very bizarre and uniquely Canadian […]