How Things Work Online
How Cloudflare's Verified Bots Trust Bands Work
Cloudflare has started grading approved crawlers on whether they obey robots.txt and back off when told to. Here is what the new system measures and what it leaves unsaid.
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How Things Work OnlineWhy Website Certificates Now Expire Every 200 Days
The padlock in your browser now has a shorter shelf life, and the limit keeps shrinking until 2029. Here is how it works and why browsers pushed for it.
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How Things Work OnlineHow Internet Shutdowns Work: What Cloudflare's Q2 2026 Report Shows
Exam blackouts, cable cuts and drone strikes all show up as the same dip on a graph. Here is how a country goes offline and how outsiders can tell.
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AI OdditiesHow Hidden Text Can Hijack an AI Browser Assistant
AI browsers read pages the way a person never will, including text you cannot see. That gap is where prompt injection lives.
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Digital LifeHow Your Phone Clock Handles Daylight Saving Time in 2026
Your phone does not guess when the clocks change. It reads a public rulebook, and this fall Manitoba and the Northwest Territories rewrote it.
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How Things Work OnlineHow the Global Privacy Control Browser Signal Works
One header, one character, and a growing pile of state law behind it. Here is what Global Privacy Control sends and why websites must listen.
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How Things Work OnlineHow Caller ID Spoofing Works and Why Your Phone Says Scam Likely
The number on your screen is a claim, not a fact. Here is how scammers fake it, how digital call signatures fight back and where the gaps remain.
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How Things Work OnlineWhy a Passkey Won't Work on a Fake Website
A convincing copy of your bank’s login page can fool you. It cannot fool the cryptography behind a passkey. Here is the small, strict rule that makes the difference.
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How Things Work OnlineWhy the Internet Wants the Leap Second Gone
Every so often, the world’s clocks add an extra second to stay in step with the planet. Computers hate it. Next week, the body that runs global timekeeping is set to discuss ending it.
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IP geolocationHow a Website Can Guess Your City Without Asking
You never told that shopping site where you live, yet it greets you with local prices. The answer is your IP address, a set of commercial maps of the internet and a farm in Kansas that learned how wrong those maps can be.