technology

When a tech company files for bankruptcy, the servers don't shut off — the data sitting on them becomes an asset on a balance sheet. In 2015, RadioShack attempted to sell 117 million customer records as part of its bankruptcy estate. Understanding what legally happens to your personal data in these proceedings, and what you can do about it, is more relevant in 2026 than it has ever been.

JPEG compression artifacts are not evenly distributed across an image. Saturated colors next to neutral or differently colored regions suffer far worse than gray gradients. The reason is structural: JPEG splits color information into separate channels, stores most of the color detail at reduced resolution, and quantizes it more coarsely than brightness.

Linux holds a small share of desktop computing, between roughly 3% and 4.5% depending on which 2026 survey you read, and every one of those numbers is volatile. The gains that look real are specific: Valve's Proton and Steam Deck, developer workstations, and public-sector deployments, not a mass defection from Windows.

China has 3,492 buildings standing at 150 metres or taller — more than three times the United States total of 905 — making it the undisputed skyscraper capital of the world. The top ten countries account for roughly 90 percent of the world's tall building stock. This ranking uses Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) data, cross-referenced with the Skyscraper Center database, and covers the top 15 countries with methodology, historical context, and analysis of what drives vertical construction.

The United Arab Emirates leads the world with a median fixed broadband download speed of 413.2 Mbps — more than four times the global average of roughly 90 Mbps. High urbanization rates, state-backed fiber rollout programs, and competitive telecoms markets are the common threads running through every country at the top of the Ookla Speedtest Global Index 2024.

South Korea has 1,012 industrial robots per 10,000 manufacturing workers — the highest robot density ever recorded for a major economy. That is more than six times the global average of 162, and more than double Germany's figure. The IFR World Robotics 2024 report shows a world where automation in factories is accelerating faster than at any point in industrial history.

How ARPANET's 1969 first message, packet switching theory, and Cerf and Kahn's 1974 TCP/IP paper created a network connecting 5.5 billion people.

ENIAC, Z3, Colossus, ABC, Babbage — which was really the first computer? How they worked, who built them, and why the answer depends on definitions.

How 3D printing works explained: FDM, SLA, SLS, metal printing, materials, software workflow, real applications, and what additive manufacturing is good for.

LiDAR fires millions of laser pulses per second to build 3D point clouds. It powers self-driving cars, iPhones, and the discovery of lost Maya cities.

Inside Neuralink's N1 implant — 1024 electrodes, a surgical robot, and the race to give paralyzed patients control of computers with thought alone.

How Google crawls, indexes, and ranks the web — from PageRank to BERT to AI Overviews — and the rise of AI-powered alternatives.