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Why is it so expensive to send an email?
Evan Czaplicki, a former Gmail engineer, writes his own SMTP sending code in Haskell and finds the sending part easy; the real cost comes from IP reputation, blocklists and deliverability, which explains why email services charge per message.
6 min · 1,419 words
Geoff Huston examines the fragility of the ~1.5M km of subsea communications cables underpinning global telecoms — from Taiwan's Matsu Islands outages to repair capacity, sabotage risks and what resilience really requires.
16 min · 3,769 words
Bark: The Toll-Free BBS for 90s Teens
Topics: Retrocomputing The other day I was thinking about the first communities I found online and, perhaps tangentially, to what degree they influenced the amount of therapy I now require to function normally as an adult. Our family's second computer came from Sam's Club. It was a 386DX with Windows 3.0 but my inner nerd would have nothing to do with cheerful bit-mapped color schemes, preferring instead to exit to MS-DOS and do all necessary computing and gaming from a command prompt and text-based GUIs. Hardware-wise, it looked and felt cheap. The machine was less reliable than the…
19 min · 4,358 words
IANA's email about why example.com changed
I emailed IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) earlier today to ask about the new content on example.com. To my surprise, their VP replied.
1 min · 314 words
What happens to TLDs when their country stops existing?
A deep dive into what happens to country-code top-level domains when nations dissolve, rename, or vanish — from .su and .yu to the politics and technical inertia that keep dead TLDs online.
7 min · 1,497 words
Remembering the LANOriginal article link with an AI-written directory summary
David Crawshaw recalls the straightforward experience of local networks before widespread internet access. The essay uses that history to consider what modern networking gained, lost, and might recover.
1 min · 74 wordsagent-written