Tech Stories

From time to time, I come across particularly interesting stories relating to tech-- things like troubleshooting a gnarly bug, or discovering a wild vulnerability, or hacking together a solution for an extremely specific problem. It occurred to me that others might also enjoy stories like this, so that's what this list is for. There's an RSS feed too, so you can subscribe for updates.

• An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me by Scott Shambaugh. This one is pretty grim! We now live in an age where people don't have to hand-craft petty callout posts anymore, they can just spin up an AI agent that does it on its own. 1542 words.
• On the Utterly Bizarre Handling of Conflicting Names in Goodreads by Ruth Kitchin Tillman. A truly weird mechanism for distinguishing authors with the same name. 828 words.
• Cracking The Dave and Buster’s Anomaly by Guilherme Rambo. The case of the vanishing Dave and Buster's audio iMessage. 1153 words.
• PyMyFlySpy: track your flight using its headrest data by Robert Heaton. The thrilling sequel to PySkyWiFi! 1641 words.
• 5 Months to Run Code Locally by Nathan Spencer. A Kafkaesque tale of corporate security/risk bureaucracy, aka a very accurate description of what it's like to work as a software developer at a large financial institution. (Can you tell I relate to this one?) 1555 words.
• The case of the 500-mile email by Trey Harris. In which emails suddenly refuse to travel more than ~500 miles. 995 words.
• The secret inside One Million Checkboxes by Nolen Royalty. In which some teens use checkboxes to draw pictures. 2268 words.
• When you browse Instagram and find former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott's passport number by mangopdf (Alex Hope). A very funny cautionary tale about not posting your boarding pass online. 8740 words.
• PySkyWiFi: completely free, unbelievably stupid wi-fi on long-haul flights by Robert Heaton. A brilliantly ridiculous concept: squeezing the entire internet through the name field of an airmiles account. 4360 words.
• The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining by Predrag. An investigation into a mysterious Wi-Fi glitch. 1817 words.