Editor's note: Ray Tomlinson, who has been credited with propelling email toward becoming the familiar daily regularity we now know, has died at age 74.

The radio interview above and the story below originally ran in 2009, when Tomlinson spoke with NPR's Guy Raz about selecting the ...

One day after congressional lawmakers grilled the FBI chief and Apple's top lawyer about government's access to encrypted data, another smaller, less spotlighted panel convened on Capitol Hill — to tackle the question of the government's warrantless geolocation tracking.

The issues aren't exactly similar. In Apple's legal clash ...

FBI Director James Comey says encryption is making phones "warrantproof" — and the agency's dispute with Apple over an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters shows the challenges encryption poses in criminal and counterterrorism investigations.

Apple is challenging a federal court order obtained by the ...

A magistrate judge in the U.S. District Court in New York has handed Apple a legal victory in a Brooklyn drug case where federal investigators asked for help getting into a locked iPhone.

Though the ruling isn't precedent-setting or binding on other courts, it hits on a similar overarching theme ...

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is scolding employees for what he calls "several recent instances" of people crossing out "black lives matter" on signature walls at the company's headquarters and writing "all lives matter" instead.

In a note posted to employees on a company announcement page, published by Gizmodo, ...

Apple and the FBI are facing off in court over an encrypted iPhone 5C that was used by San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook. The phone stopped backing up to the cloud, which the investigators have already searched, several weeks before the Dec. 2 attack.

It's unclear what, if anything ...

After a court ordered Apple to help federal investigators get into an encrypted iPhone, the company responded with a court filing Thursday that describes the FBI-requested order as illegal, unconstitutional and dangerous.

"No court has ever authorized what the government now seeks, no law supports such unlimited and sweeping use ...

If news headlines were all you read about the Saturday shootings in Kalamazoo, Mich., you might know only the basic details: that six people were killed, that the shootings appeared random, and that the suspect was driving for Uber at the time.

In fact, in many cases, that has been ...

The Department of Justice has filed a motion to compel Apple to cooperate with a government investigation and help access data on an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino assailants.

The motion filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California (read it in full ...

In a few days, Apple will formulate its formal response to the federal judge's order seeking the company's help for the FBI to get inside a phone used by Syed Farook, one of the attackers in the San Bernardino, Calif., shootings.

(Click here for our comprehensive explainer on ...

Remember the cryptex, the little handheld safe from The Da Vinci Code where entering the correct combination will reveal the secret message and entering the wrong one will destroy it?

Now replace the little safe with an iPhone, and instead of a secret message, it's holding evidence in a terrorism ...

Multitasking is a myth, says Daniel Levitin.

This was the premise underlying the first of the tasks posed by WNYC's Note to Self podcast. I had signed up for their five-day set of challenges in hopes of decluttering my brain of the uselessly consumed Internet detritus ...

It was a rumor that had many Twitter old-timers up in arms: Twitter is changing its signature structure of real-time posts in reverse chronological order.

It's true. The company now says it's got a new algorithm to predict which tweets you might not want to miss. Those selected ...

Smartphones are often credited with helping bridge the "digital divide" between people who do and don't have Internet access at home. But is mobile Internet enough for a family with a kid in school?

Tech companies and privacy advocates have been in a stalemate with government officials over how encrypted communication affects the ability of federal investigators to monitor terrorists and other criminals. A new study by Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society convened experts from all sides to put the issue in ...

For more than a quarter of people around the world, for as long as they've been alive, there's always been Wikipedia. This week, the online crowd-sourced encyclopedia turns 15.

It's come a long way: With some 35 million articles, Wikipedia speaks hundreds of languages and cites 80,000 volunteers around ...

A few days back, All Tech got a question from an NPR listener that got us curious.

Tim Callahan from Seattle wrote:

"A friend asked how texting - in all its forms (admittedly a squishy thing to corral) - is contributing to global warming? After saying, 'minimally...', I thought ...

Twitter wasn't always the site where your posts were limited to 140 characters.

It added the restriction early on to make sure that people who used the website through their phones would only have to deal with tweets that can fit within the standard length of a text message, which ...

The notion of a gun smart enough to tell who's holding it isn't new.

Since the 1990s, inventors have been developing firearms geared with technologies that can authenticate their users — for instance by recognizing the fingerprint, the grip or an RFID chip — and stop working if held by ...

The lawsuit alleges that the streaming music service fails to properly compensate artists for the right to reproduce or distribute recordings. It's the latest in the ongoing debate over streaming.