Technology

Plain explanations of the technology people actually use, written for readers who want to understand something rather than be sold it. The pieces here take a question that usually gets a marketing answer and give the mechanical one instead: what satellite internet is doing differently, why in-flight Wi-Fi is slow, what the levels of self-driving actually mean, how to read a phone rumour without being taken in. Where a technology has genuine limits, those are stated rather than glossed over. Nothing here assumes prior knowledge, and nothing pretends a hard problem is simple.