Oh wow that’s weird. Stargate SG-1 also had an episode where a Lt. Tyler turned out to be an alien infiltrator in disguise: “The Fifth Man”.

When the first DVD cracking util was released, DeCSS, it violated the DMCA and people were getting sued and threatened with felonies for sharing it. Very quickly people figured out loopholes to make it an archivable creative work, like putting it on tshirts and encoding it as a prime number: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_prime

The first thing that comes to mind is Meshtastic: https://meshtastic.org/

Is this an actual artifact? I never ran across this when I researched the origin of “Information wants to be free”… and it’s a word for word match to how Steven Levy later described the hacker ethos of the era in his own words in his book Hackers. I’m wondering if someone just rendered it out to look like it came from an old typewriter, and that context got lost as people shared it.

Love this line from the wiki article: ‘A secretary he had interviewed for the piece said that a technical representative from Xerox had warned her "not to be afraid of the 914 because the machine would sense her fear and, like a mischievous child, misbehave."’

One adjacent term is “frisson”: when it’s so sublimely awesome it gives you chills.

It says so much that on July 9, 2026, the aspect of Platner she decided to highlight as problematic was…his support for Ukraine?

At the late great Robert Anton Wilson would say when making the motion of the cross: “Spectacles, testicles, brandy, cigars.”

I just saw one earlier this afternoon:

Pretty sure you’re thinking of tzdb, the time zone database: https://onezero.medium.com/the-largely-untold-story-of-how-one-guy-in-california-keeps-the-worlds-computers-on-the-right-time-a97a5493bf73

An adjacent and thematically resonant story is the volunteer effort that powers curl, which so many people use: https://thenewstack.io/the-world-runs-20-billion-instances-of-curl-wheres-the-support/

You seem like someone who would be prepared if gravity reversed itself.

Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle weaves a lot of this into the plot. Nice to see someone following the thread.