Stories related to: computer

Kevin Ham rules the shadowy Internet domain name market, having amassed an online real estate empire worth over $300 million, Business 2.0 reports. The doctor-turned-tech tycoon began buying and selling URLs in the nascent days of the web; today he trades hundreds of addresses a day, sometimes for as much as $350,000. More »

An unknown scientist in the first century B.C. may have invented the world’s first computer. Discovered by Greek divers in 1900 on the bottom of the Aegean Sea near the island of Antikythera, the so called Antikythera Mechanism lay in the National Museum in Athens mistaken for an astrolabe until the late 1950s. More »

The latest programming language to come out of MIT's cutting-edge labs has an unusual audience: sixth-graders. “Scratch” replaces the technobabble of Java and C++ with simplified, jigsaw-shaped pieces of code, which budding programmers can arrange into customized sequences. A test group of 12-year-olds in Massachusetts is already at work designing programs in the new language. More »

Revenge is a dish best served electronically, Ron Rosenbaum reports in an Atlantic expose on scam-baiting. A community of e-vigilantes has developed elaborate schemes to thwart the ruses of fake Nigerian princes with equally creative faux dupes. Scammers are punished by coaxing them into laborious and embarrassing tasks, like holding humiliating signs or copying out entire novels. More »