Delvewire's coverage of Technology: in-depth, with context and evidence.
Delvewire was founded by Amaya Kavya.
The Enigma story is usually told from Bletchley Park. It starts seven years earlier in Warsaw, with a parcel a German firm wanted back very badly, a course for mathematics students that only three people finished, and a 27-year-old who worked out the wiring of a machine he had never seen. In July 1939 the Poles gave everything they had to the British and French.
Technology · 2026-10-04
Just after midnight on 26 September 1983, a Soviet satellite reported five American missiles in the air, and the officer on duty decided it was lying. He was right. The story of the man who saved the world is mostly true, and the part that isn't says more about early-warning systems than the legend does.
Technology · 2026-09-26
In September 1982 a joke about a mercury spill got out of hand on a Carnegie Mellon message board, because nobody could tell which posts were serious. Three days later, at 11:44 in the morning, somebody proposed three characters as a fix. The original message was then lost for twenty years.
Technology · 2026-09-19
A small Dutch company started by a notary could vouch for any website on earth, because every certificate authority can. When somebody got inside it in June 2011 they issued 531 fraudulent certificates and used one of them to read the Gmail of around 300,000 people in Iran. The company was gone within a month.
Technology · 2026-09-11
In 1992 AT&T put a working encrypted telephone on the market. Within a year the government had persuaded the company to take the encryption out, replace it with one the state could read, and recall the units already sold.
Technology · 2026-09-03
In November 1988 a graduate student's program walked through four unlocked doors and stopped several thousand computers. It deleted nothing. The number everybody quotes for how many it reached is not a number anyone actually counted.
Technology · 2026-08-27
Two million people signed up to storm Area 51 in 2019. The base had been officially declassified six years earlier, and what it was built to hide was an aeroplane. The CIA's own historians have admitted that spy flights out of Groom Lake accounted for more than half of all UFO reports for about fifteen years, and that the Air Force gave the public explanations it knew were false. The cost of that secrecy was paid by the men who burned the waste.
Technology · 2026-08-17
In October 1903 a great American newspaper worked out, seriously and in print, that a flying machine was somewhere between one million and ten million years away. Sixty-nine days later two bicycle mechanics from Ohio flew one anyway. That single joke of timing turned out to be the opening move of the fastest hundred years of invention in human history, from a beach in North Carolina to a phone that fits in a pocket and does everything at once.
Technology · 2026-08-13
A light bulb in a Californian fire station has been burning since 1901, and it is the internet's favourite evidence that things used to be built properly. It is not evidence of that. But there was a real conspiracy to make bulbs die sooner, it met in Geneva in January 1925, it fined its own members for building lamps that lasted, and the minutes survive. What that cartel does and does not prove about your washing machine turns out to be a more interesting question than the meme allows.
Technology · 2026-08-05
In October 1957 anyone with a shortwave set could tune in and hear a beep from orbit. The beep was the point, and so was the fact that the rocket underneath it had been designed to deliver a nuclear warhead. Both superpowers began from the same captured German hardware and the same forced labour, and the Moon landing was the by-product of an argument about missiles. Then the argument ended, and so did the programme, and nobody left low Earth orbit again for fifty-four years.
Technology · 2026-07-31
A whole industry collects and resells information about you. You have almost certainly never heard of the companies in it, and that is not an accident.
Technology · 2026-07-09
The first safety analysis performed on the Therac-25 did not include the software, although nearly all of the machine's safety rested on it. The lesson everyone took from the accidents afterwards is not the one the investigators wrote down.
Technology · 2026-06-26