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Brain-computer interfaces can now allow paralyzed people to type at 90 words per minute using thought alone.
The term 'cyberspace' was coined by William Gibson in his 1982 story 'Burning Chrome.'
TLS (Transport Layer Security) protects all HTTPS connections — the padlock in your browser.
The longest-running computer game franchise is Oregon Trail — it first ran on teletype machines in 1971.
Public key cryptography — enabling secure internet transactions — was published in 1976 by Diffie and Hellman.
The original Macintosh (1984) had a 9-inch screen, 128KB of RAM, and a 400KB floppy drive.
Server farms consume about 1% of global electricity — this is expected to rise significantly with AI growth.
The first video game ever patented was a cathode ray tube amusement device in 1947.
Password managers are recommended by security experts — reusing passwords is the leading cause of account breaches.
The global e-waste problem generates 53.6 million tons per year — only 17% is formally recycled.
TikTok's algorithm is widely considered the most powerful recommendation engine ever built.
The 'right to be forgotten' allows Europeans to request removal of personal data from search results.
The first transatlantic telegraph cable was laid in 1858 — it allowed a message to cross in minutes instead of weeks.
Augmented reality overlays digital info on the real world — Apple Vision Pro is the most advanced consumer headset.
The first electronic programmable computer in the world was Colossus, built in Britain in 1943 to crack Nazi codes.
Deepfakes — AI-generated synthetic media — are becoming increasingly difficult to detect.
CAPTCHA tests distinguish humans from bots — the distorted text versions also helped digitize books when users typed them.
The average person spends about 6 hours and 37 minutes per day on digital media.
Encrypted messaging apps use end-to-end encryption — only sender and receiver can read the content.
Social media addiction activates the same dopamine pathways as gambling and drug use.
The first hard drive (1956) stored 5 MB on fifty 24-inch disks and weighed over a ton.
Spam email accounts for about 45% of all email traffic globally.
Open source software underpins most of the internet — Linux, Apache, and Python are free and maintained by communities.
Machine learning models can be fooled by adversarial examples — tiny image perturbations invisible to humans but that fool AI.
The Internet of Things (IoT) has more connected devices than humans on Earth.
GPS signals are so precise that relativistic corrections must be applied — without them, GPS would drift by 11 km per day.
The first domain name ever registered was Symbolics.com in 1985 — it still exists.
Cloud computing has consolidated most of the internet onto infrastructure owned by AWS, Azure, and Google.
The dark web accounts for less than 0.01% of total internet traffic — most of it is mundane rather than criminal.
Net neutrality — treating all internet traffic equally — is a policy debate with major implications for access and innovation.
The first commercially successful video game was Pong (1972) — though Tennis for Two predated it by 14 years.
The total amount of data generated globally doubles approximately every two years.
Quantum computers exist but are not yet powerful enough to threaten current encryption — though this may change.
The first iPhone had no App Store — it launched in 2007 with 15 built-in apps and a web browser.
Deep learning neural networks were inspired by the brain but work on fundamentally different principles.
Wikipedia has over 60 million articles across 300 languages — and is mostly maintained by volunteers.
The first tweet was posted on March 21, 2006 by Jack Dorsey: 'just setting up my twttr.'
The first YouTube video, 'Me at the zoo,' was uploaded on April 23, 2005, by co-founder Jawed Karim.
ARPANET, the precursor to the internet, was designed to survive nuclear attack by rerouting data around damage.
The average webpage in 2023 was 2.4 MB — larger than many software programs in the 1990s.
Social media algorithms optimize for engagement — and high-emotion content is the most engaging.
The first commercial smartphone was IBM's Simon in 1992 — 15 years before the iPhone.
Moore's Law predicted transistor density would double every two years — it held for over 50 years but is slowing.
The first computer virus, Creeper (1971), spread across ARPANET and displayed 'I'm the creeper, catch me if you can!'
Bitcoin's blockchain has never been hacked — every Bitcoin ever created still exists and is traceable.
The term 'bug' in computing was popularized after a real moth was found in a relay of the Harvard Mark II computer in 1947.
The first computer programmer was Ada Lovelace — she wrote an algorithm for Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine in 1843.
Google processes over 8.5 billion searches per day — about 99,000 per second.
The first website ever created is still online — it was made by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1991.
Origami has influenced engineering design for everything from solar panels to stent delivery systems.