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For years, a small but heavily engaged community has gathered online, entirely dedicated to the goal of identifying a single elusive song. On Monday, following an exhaustive search, they announced they’d found it.

Now that "The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet” has been located, it leaves behind an entire subculture of “lostwave” music that stretches from cassette tapes to Spotify. Even amid their success, many investigators are unsure about what happens to the community now that its goal has been achieved. What happens to lost media once it’s been found?

We now know the song in question is called “Subways of Your Mind” by FEX, but until Monday, it had lived up to its sobriquet for 17 years. The song was recorded off the German radio station NDR in the early ’80s and was just a question mark on a cassette case until 2007, when it was digitized and posted to various Usenet newsgroups and music forums along with requests for the internet’s help in identifying the track. No one knew what it was.

A 2019 article in Rolling Stone tracks how the song’s ambiguity and retro charm helped draw in a community of music lovers and amateur researchers. The community would grow and shift along with the internet itself, moving from YouTube to Reddit to Discord, eventually coming back to Paul Baskerville, the DJ who would have played the song in the first place. He couldn’t find it in his collection of over 10,000 vinyl records, and talking to Rolling Stone, he admitted, “I don’t know what all the fuss is about [...] I don’t think it’s a particular [sic] interesting song.”

This is a relatively common reaction to lostwave, the general term for these unidentified pre-internet songs, which didn’t really have a niche before the search for “The Most Mysterious Song” carved one out. But for music lovers who are used to Genius and Shazam, an unidentified song is both a splinter in the mind and an opportunity to delve into a hidden, undigitized culture.

“Lostwave searches promote community collaboration and participation beyond the scope of digital platforms,” says Josh Chapdelaine, a professor of media studies at Queens College. “They provide people a chance to contribute to investigations that anyone with a critical approach can advance.”

The first advancement in years came in May, when a user on the buzzing Reddit community r/TheMysteriousSong found a reference to Hörfest, a contest for amateur bands the radio station held every year in Hamburg, Germany. “It was a very likely way to solve our riddle,” says Arne, a moderator of the subreddit who posts under the handle LordElend (Arne declined to give their last name, citing privacy concerns), “since this was a good explanation as to why an amateur band tape would have been aired on NDR, which usually had high standards.”

A search of local government archives turned up thousands of pages on Hörfest, but they wouldn’t be easy to comb through. “We realized that 800 bands, most obscure and not on Google, will need a larger group of researchers,” says Arne.

Soon, hundreds of people across multiple platforms were collaborating on extensive spreadsheets, listing band members, sounds, songs, and anything else they could find. One of these investigators, who posts using the handle marijn1412, found that a member of a band on the spreadsheets, Phret, had joined a different band called FEX. Getting in touch with the former members of FEX, they confirmed the song’s origin. They waited to announce the find publicly until the band was able to sign off and provide a clearer recording of the song.

“Subways of Your Mind” isn’t the only lost media mystery to be solved recently. In September, an image from a fabric pattern was traced back to its source. Back in June, another lostwave song known as “Everyone Knows That” was found after it had become a viral sound on TikTok. It may have been helped by a song from a popular YouTube video identified in November 2023.

These searches tend to be a lot less specific and focused than the Hörfest data, but no less organized or collaborative, since whether or not they can find the song, people are finding kindred spirits. “Lost media searches have shared community values,” says Chapdelaine, adding they’re “amplified by the dynamic of social media platforms. Platforms incentivize engagement. Lost media searches promote interactivity and participation.”

Which is why the story isn’t over, even if the so-called “final boss of lostwave” has fallen. Since other communities devoted to searches have since found what they were looking for, they’ve been folded into the larger lostwave and lost-media community. As Baskerville saw, it isn’t really about the song, it’s about the search, the sense of participating in a project that adds to cultural heritage—and, maybe, finding some songs so exclusive they haven’t been heard in decades.

Tech executives are rallying around nuclear energy to fuel the demands of the AI revolution.

From Amazon to Google, tech giants at the forefront of the AI boom are investing in companies building nuclear reactors and forming partnerships with energy providers to power their data centers.

Many of these companies are generating energy through nuclear fission, which involves splitting atoms from elements like uranium and plutonium to release energy. It's cleaner than fossil fuels and more reliable than solar. But fission can release harmful radioactive waste that needs to be disposed of safely and mining uranium can have deleterious effects on the environment.

The solution, in the view of a growing number of leaders in the tech industry, is nuclear fusion, which involves fusing the nuclei of two atoms to release energy. It's considered a safer method because it releases less radioactive waste and greenhouse gases.

Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates distilled the differences between fission and fusion on a recent episode of the Possible podcast. Fission, he said, is "where you take the big atoms like uranium, and as they split, you get energy." Fusion occurs when "you take the small atoms, primarily hydrogen, and as you put them together, you release energy."

Scientists have proven that nuclear fusion is feasible. Experiments at the National Ignition Facility in California over the last year, for instance, hit a milestone when they generated more energy than what was used. Fusion plants, in theory, could produce almost 4 million times as much energy as burning coal or oil — without carbon emissions. However, there are still obstacles to it becoming a widespread energy source.

Tritium, one of the hydrogen isotopes used in fusion reactions, is rare and expensive. It also has radioactive properties. Another challenge is that fusion requires extremely high temperatures, as high as the "center of the sun, millions of degrees," Gates said.

AI tools are now helping to make fusion a reality. Commonwealth Fusion Systems, in which Gates is an investor, is on track to have a system for fusion in 10 years, he said.

"But at some point, fusion energy will be extremely cheap, and it doesn't have the same waste problems that fission does," he said.

Gates, who is also an investor in another nuclear fusion company called Pacific Fusion — which launched in 2023 and announced a more than $900 million Series A funding round this month — believes supporting nuclear will help reduce clean energy costs.

"We, society as a whole, even though a lot more money is coming into it, we're still under-investing in fission and fusion, given that the value of cheap electricity specifically is so fundamental to society," he said.

Venture firm General Catalyst led the funding round for Pacific Fusion, which included participation from Gates's climate solutions investment fund, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, and individual investors like Citadel founder Ken Griffin, Stripe cofounder Patrick Collison, venture capitalist John Doerr, and Mustafa Suleyman, the head of Microsoft AI.

Other veterans in the industry are betting on an even shorter timeline for fusion technology to become a reality.

At TechCrunch Disrupt this week, venture capitalist Vinod Khosla said, "I'll take a bet with anybody, five years from now, we won't be talking about whether fusion is real or not."

He said he hopes that by then fusion will be proven as an economic possibility. "They're engineering all the systems to go directly into production without having to first prove the technology and then do the engineering," he said.

Crows in Vancouver: Unusual Attacks Spark Fear and Curiosity Amid Gathered Crowds

In recent months, residents in Vancouver have found themselves grappling with an unexpected problem: asymmetrical aggression from their local crow population. Lisa Joyce, a local woman, recounted a terrifying experience as crows dive-bombed her multiple times while she screamed for help during a crowded July fireworks celebration. “I’m not a fraidy-cat, I’m not generally nervous of wildlife,” Joyce explained, but the relentless attacks forced her to alter her daily commute to dodge the avian intruders.

Joyce’s plight is echoed in accounts from across North America, with more than 8,000 reports of crow attacks logged on the website CrowTrax, founded by local resident Jim O’Leary. While the aggression seems localized to Vancouver, similar incidents in Los Angeles and Brunswick, Maine, highlight a larger behavioral trend among these intelligent birds, known for their ability to mimic human speech, use tools, and recognize individual faces.

As the summer unfolds, experts note that most aggressive behavior is typically linked to parental instinct during nesting season. Yet, the extent of these attacks raises questions — could it be more than mere territory defense? For some, it’s a reminder of a truth echoed in scripture: “Consider the ravens: They do not sow or reap, they have no storeroom or barn; yet God feeds them. And how much more valuable are you than birds!” (Luke 12:24, NIV).

The understanding of crows as both intelligent and vindictive — capable of holding grudges for years — becomes apparent through anecdotal tales. Gene Carter’s year-long ordeal of being harassed after he defensively deterred a marauding crow from a robin’s nest illustrates the depth of their memory and retribution, ultimately leading to his relocation to escape the torment.

Notably, some reports indicate a potential for mistaken identity, as was the case for Lynne Peeples, who speculated that she may have been confused with a man exhibiting aggressive behavior toward birds. This connection highlights the importance of awareness and understanding in our interactions with wildlife, paralleling biblical principles of compassion and discernment, as Jesus taught in the parable of the Good Samaritan.

Meanwhile, in the face of these threatening avian encounters, residents have had mixed responses. While some victims, like Ruben Jimenez, sought to ward off attacks with reflective surfaces and decoys with little success, others like Jill Bennett have turned to a more relational approach. By feeding crows during her walks, Bennett found herself accompanied by a protective entourage of crows, suggesting a form of coexistence reminiscent of community and connection highlighted in many biblical stories.

The city’s environmental specialist echoed this notion of coexistence, asserting that community appreciation for crows is a reflection of a healthy ecosystem. This aligns with the biblical wisdom found in Romans 12:18, “If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.”

As urban dwellers navigate their encounters with these feathered foes, it presents a unique opportunity to reflect on our interactions with creation. The crows, with their persistence, remind us of the value of resilience, the necessity of understanding, and the importance of peaceful coexistence — not just with fellow humans but also with the intricate tapestry of life that surrounds us.

As we ponder this unusual phenomenon, we are invited to consider the broader lessons of patience, awareness, and community. How can we, much like Jill Bennett, turn potential conflict into a shared experience? Perhaps there’s a subtle invitation within these struggles, guiding us towards a deeper appreciation of living harmoniously, fostering relationships even with those who may not initially seem to share our values.

As we navigate our lives and respond to the challenges we encounter — whether from the skies or within our communities — let us be reminded of the wisdom in Proverbs 12:10: “A righteous man cares for the needs of his animal.” Embracing this principle may just transform our approach, paving the way for new understanding and deeper connections in a world that often feels divided.

What Sank the Tech Tycoon’s ‘Unsinkable’ Yacht?

By Jeffrey Gettleman, James Glanz, Emma Bubola, Elisabetta Povoledo, Pablo Robles, Josh Holder and Sarah Hurtes Oct. 30, 2024

It all happened so fast.

Karsten Borner was planted on the halfdeck of his sailboat in the slanting rain. A grizzled mariner who had survived many storms, he was anchored in the same cove as Mr. Lynch’s yacht, at the same time, as the squall blew in during the early hours of Aug. 19.

Luckily, he was already awake. As the wind picked up, he and his crew scurried around closing hatches, clearing the decks and firing up the engines to keep his boat steady.

He couldn’t see much, but in flashes of lightning, he kept catching glimpses of Mr. Lynch’s long, sleek sloop bobbing behind him. It was only a few hundred feet away and its super-tall aluminum mast — one of the tallest ever made — was lit up with bright white lights, swaying in the wind.

Then he lost sight of it. The rain fell like gravel, drawing a curtain around his boat. When he looked up again, he was stunned. The Bayesian was disappearing, at a very odd angle, into the sea.

In the weeks since, Mr. Borner, who has sailed for more than half a century, still can’t believe the yacht sank in front of him. There weren’t any big waves that night, he said. Both boats were close to shore. His own sailboat — a converted tugboat built in East Germany 66 years ago — weathered the same squall just fine. And that other craft was a superyacht of the superrich, gleaming blue, 184 feet long and drawing stares wherever it went.

“It’s a mystery,” Mr. Borner said.

The seven victims of the Bayesian sinking, clockwise from top left: Hannah Lynch, Mike Lynch, Judy Bloomer, Jonathan Bloomer, Christopher Morvillo, Neda Nassiri and Recaldo Thomas.

via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images; via Reuters; Patrick McMullan, via Getty Images

That mystery has rippled around the globe as several investigations into the tragedy unfold. It has vexed maritime experts and compounded the grief of family and friends of the seven people who perished, including Mr. Lynch and his teenage daughter, Hannah, whose bodies were found trapped below deck.

The investigations turn on three central questions: Why did the Bayesian, which now lies 160 feet at the bottom of the Mediterranean, sink so fast? Did the yacht have any design flaws? Did the captain or crew make any fatal mistakes?

The Bayesian was a one-of-a-kind sailboat, built by Perini Navi, a famous Italian yacht maker. The company says the group of 10 superyachts that the Bayesian belonged to was “the most successful series of large sailing yachts ever conceived.”

But the Bayesian was different. Its original buyer — a Dutch businessman, not the Lynches — insisted on a single, striking mast that would be taller than just about any other mast in the world, according to the Italian yacht maker and three people with detailed knowledge of how this boat was built.

That decision resulted in major engineering consequences that ultimately left the boat significantly more vulnerable than many comparable superyachts, The Times investigation has found.

— More than a dozen naval architects, engineers and other experts consulted by The Times found glaring weaknesses in the Bayesian’s design that they said could have contributed to the disaster.

— Basic design choices, like the two tall doors on the side of the deck, increased the Bayesian’s chances of taking on dangerous amounts of water if high winds pushed the boat over toward its side, several naval architects said.

— Witness and survivor accounts revealed how this deadly sequence unfolded in real time: The yacht fell completely on its side and sank within minutes.

The Bayesian’s vulnerabilities

How the Bayesian could have sunk

The large aluminum mast and rigging made the boat more likely to capsize in a strong gust of wind, a computer model shows.

The Bayesian was pushed onto its side in strong winds.

1

STRONG GUST

At this angle, experts say water would have gushed in through open vents, doors and hatches.

2

Two tall glass doors could have let water in if they were left open.

A sunken deck reduced the boat’s buoyancy, naval architects said.

It had many air vents that could let water in when the boat was pushed toward its side.

As flooding worsened, the yacht would have tilted further before sinking.

3

The retractable keel, which helped to keep the boat stable, was not fully extended when it sank.

The Bayesian’s vulnerabilities

The large aluminum mast and rigging made the boat more likely to capsize in a strong gust of wind, a computer model shows.

Two tall glass doors could have let water in if they were left open.

It had many air vents that could let water in when the boat was pushed toward its side.

A sunken deck reduced the boat’s buoyancy, naval architects said.

The retractable keel, which helped to keep the boat stable, was not fully extended when it sank.

How the Bayesian could have sunk

The Bayesian was pushed onto its side in strong winds.

1

STRONG GUST

At this angle, experts say water would have gushed in through open vents, doors and hatches.

2

As flooding worsened, the yacht would have tilted further before sinking.

3

The Bayesian’s vulnerabilities

The large aluminum mast and rigging made the boat more likely to capsize in a strong gust of wind, a computer model shows.

Two tall glass doors could have let water in if they were left open.

It had many air vents that could let water in when the boat was pushed toward its side.

A sunken deck reduced the boat’s buoyancy, naval architects said.

The retractable keel, which helped to keep the boat stable, was not fully extended when it sank.

How the Bayesian could have sunk

The Bayesian was pushed onto its side in strong winds.

1

STRONG GUST

At this angle, experts say water would have gushed in through open vents, doors and hatches.

2

As flooding worsened, the yacht would have tilted further before sinking.

3

Sources: Perini Navi (technical drawing of the yacht) and New York Times reporting.

Seemingly small details on any boat — like how close air vents are to the waterline, or where a ship’s ballast is placed in the hull — might not sound decisive on their own. But when taken together, experts said, they appear to have compromised this vessel.

Such built-in vulnerabilities may not have been solely responsible for the yacht’s sinking, of course. The storm’s unexpected ferocity definitely played a part in the calamitous stew of events. Italian investigators are also looking hard at the actions of the Bayesian’s captain and crew.

Giovanni Costantino, the chief executive of the Italian Sea Group, the company that owns Perini Navi, said that when operated properly, the Bayesian was “unsinkable.” He maintains that the yacht was carefully engineered to survive bad storms, and he has put the blame for the tragedy squarely on the crew, accusing them of making a chain of fatal errors.

“I know, all the crew knows, that they did not do what they should have done,” he said. (Crew members have not revealed much, saying they are under a “gag order.”)

Mr. Costantino said the design was not at fault and that the towering mast, which stood 237 feet tall, had not created “any kind of problem.”

“The ship was an unsinkable ship,” he said. “I say it, I repeat it.”

The world of superyachts is incredibly opaque, the exclusive realm of some of the richest people on the planet, and exactly how these multimillion dollar boats are designed, approved and owned remain closely guarded secrets.

Making sure a superyacht is fit for the seas is a job left to a network of private companies and public agencies, and the Bayesian’s design was approved by the American Bureau of Shipping and the British Maritime and Coastguard Agency.

All the attention this tragedy has received could result in a closer look at yachting regulations. Several naval engineers in different countries who have gained access to the Bayesian’s documents say that as yachts have become more elaborate and subject to owners’ whims, others may be in danger as well.

The Bayesian’s technical documents show just how vulnerable it was. Even without major errors by the crew, the ship could have sunk in a storm that other boats survived, engineers say.

“We can look at it in hindsight and say they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. No, that’s not true,” said Tad Roberts, a Canadian naval architect who has nearly 40 years of experience designing boats, including superyachts.

“This boat had definite shortcomings that kind of uniquely made it vulnerable to what happened.” The Victory Voyages

A cruise on the Bayesian was a voyage into luxury. The days were typically warm, sunny and calm, and finished off with plates of fresh langoustine and sumptuous chocolate. Hours would pass lounging on sun chairs, swimming in the sea or maybe taking out a kayak while the Bayesian crew, in branded polo shirts, watched vigilantly from the deck.

“It felt like a beautiful hotel that was floating on water,” remembers Abbie VanSickle, a New York Times reporter who was invited aboard in July because her husband, Jonathan Baum, was part of Mr. Lynch’s legal defense team.

Mr. Lynch had been acquitted in June in a criminal case in which he was accused of fraudulently inflating the value of his software company when he sold it to Hewlett-Packard for $11 billion. He could have been sent to prison for years. To celebrate his win — and his freedom — he asked friends and lawyers to cruise the Mediterranean with him.

Mr. Lynch seemed proud that his boat had one of the world’s tallest masts — a little booklet in her cabin even said as much, Ms. VanSickle remembered. Whenever they chugged into a harbor, she said, “people would take photos of it constantly because it was so crazy-looking in comparison to other boats.”

Most of the time, though, the Bayesian operated like a motorboat, powered by two enormous diesel engines. During her five-day voyage, Ms. VanSickle said they sailed only once, for just a few hours. But when they did, the boat moved through the water so smoothly, she said, it felt like they were “gliding.”

A promotional photo from Perini Navi of the Bayesian, which Mr. Lynch named after an 18th-century theory on probability.

EPA, via Shutterstock

A few weeks after Ms. VanSickle got off and returned to her life as a reporter in Washington, Mr. Lynch welcomed aboard his next batch of guests. This was the second celebratory voyage, beginning in mid-August, and Mr. Lynch had planned to get back to London, where he lived, around Aug. 20.

Among the 12 passengers were Mr. Lynch; his wife, Angela Bacares; their 18-year-old daughter, Hannah, who was soon off to Oxford; one of his lead lawyers, Chris Morvillo, and his wife, Neda Nassiri, who designed handcrafted jewelry; Jonathan Bloomer, an international banker and trusted adviser, and his wife, Judy, a psychotherapist celebrated for her charity work.

Mr. Lynch also invited some younger colleagues, including a couple who brought a baby on board. The crew was led by James Cutfield, an experienced New Zealand sailor, backed up by a first mate, a ship engineer, several deckhands and hostesses, totaling 10 in all.

Mr. Lynch was on the rebound, fired up about the possibility of starting a nonprofit to help exonerate people wrongly accused of crimes, said Sir David Davis, a friend and prominent conservative British politician.

Mr. Lynch sent Sir David a text message offering the choice of lunch or dinner in London on Aug. 22, when he was back. An Unanticipated Storm

The Mediterranean Sea was flat on Aug. 18. But bad weather was moving south, from Naples toward Sicily. The Italian Air Force’s Meteomar forecast warned of scattered thunderstorms, gusts of wind and a rough sea. Several yacht captains said the weather warning was far from specific or extraordinary.

Mr. Borner, the captain who for decades has been running cruises and diving excursions on his old sailboat, the Sir Robert Baden Powell, was finishing up his own trip, picking his way west along the Sicilian coast.

The wind was blowing from the northwest and Mr. Borner figured that the curvature of Sicily’s rugged coastline at Porticello, a small fishing village built around a cove, would shelter him. He arrived in the cove that afternoon, went ashore with his guests and grabbed some pizza.

“It was a nice evening,” he remembered.

While they were in town, the Bayesian chugged into the same cove. It dropped anchor at 9:35 p.m., about a third of a mile from land. As Mr. Borner went to sleep around 11, the night was clear. The lights of the Bayesian’s mast glowed behind him.

Lights illuminating the mast of the Bayseian on Aug. 18.

Baia Santa Nicolicchia/Fabio La Bianca, via Reuters

At midnight on Aug. 19, the Italian Coast Guard put out a warning for a northwesterly Gale Force 8, a serious storm in which winds could reach 46 miles per hour. But the gale was predicted to hit hundreds of miles from Sicily.

Around 3 a.m., Mr. Borner woke up to help some of his passengers catch an early flight from Palermo, Sicily’s biggest city. But as the winds picked up rapidly, whipping the cove into a frothy chop, he scratched his plan to go ashore.

He and his crew shut the portholes and skylights and started the engine, to keep the bow pointed into the wind and prevent the boat from being hit on its side.

On the Bayesian, a young deckhand, Matthew Griffiths, later told the authorities that when the wind hit 20 knots, he woke up the captain, according to a person close to the crew (who said that neither of them was allowed to speak publicly). The captain then gave the order to wake up others, the person said.

At 3:51 a.m., the Bayesian started to drift — first 80 meters one way, then 80 meters another, its data transmitter shows. Maritime experts said this meant it was being blown around and probably dragging its anchor. It’s unclear whether the engines had been started.

At 4:02 a.m., a camera mounted on a boat in Porticello’s cove shows bright blue flashes of lightning. Three minutes later, another at a Porticello cafe captures the wind tearing down deck umbrellas. So much rain hits one of the cameras, it looks as if it’s being blasted with a hose.

Mr. Borner estimated that the wind gusts reached 60 knots, or nearly 70 miles an hour — just below hurricane strength — and said they had pushed his boat onto its side about 15 degrees, a serious lean but nothing close to capsizing.

Reports immediately after the disaster raised the possibility that the Bayesian had been hit by a tornado-like disturbance called a waterspout, but the authorities don’t think that happened. Still, the wind was doing something dangerous: It was changing direction.

According to a nearby weather station, it was blowing west-southwest then southwest, then north-northwest. This increased the chances of getting ambushed by a random gust that could slam into the side of a boat, which can tilt even a big vessel.

A third video shows the Bayesian rocking back and forth and beginning to lean. Then the lights on its giant mast blink out — all but the top one, which was powered by a battery.

By 4:06 a.m., the rain has turned into a blinding cascade. That same minute, the Bayesian’s location signal cuts out. Mr. Borner’s crew squinted through the nearly impenetrable haze of sea spray and rain and spotted a large object in the water. They first thought it was a reef.

“But I knew there was no reef,” Mr. Borner said.

It was the Bayesian, they now believe, knocked onto its side. “Two Minutes” to Tragedy

At 4:34 a.m., a red emergency flare, bright as a meteor, shot into the sky. The storm had passed, and Mr. Borner and his first mate jumped into a small boat, zooming across the black water.

First they saw cushions floating. Then a flashing light. Then a life raft built for 12 packed with 15 people, bloodied and soaked to the skin, including a baby.

One person had a cut on the head, another on his chest. Some had already been bandaged. They were cold, wet and dazed. They were too shocked, Mr. Borner said, to say what happened.

As he loaded the survivors into his boat and began to head back to the Sir Robert, one woman pleaded with him not to leave.

“Please,” she told him. “Continue searching.”

Some people were still missing.

Mr. Borner decided to unload the survivors onto the Sir Robert, then send his small boat back. His crew gave them blankets and dry clothes. Some survivors were so shaken they needed to be led below deck by hand.

Nobody said much, Mr. Borner remembered.

One man told him: “I was the captain of this.”

Another said the boat had “sunk in two minutes.”

The woman who had begged him to keep searching sat huddled on the deck.

“Are you OK?” Mr. Borner asked her.

“No,” she replied. “I am not OK at all.’’

Capt. Karsten Borner, who rescued the survivors of the Bayesian.

Guglielmo Mangiapane/Reuters

Mr. Borner said he later realized it was Angela Bacares, wife of Mr. Lynch and mother of Hannah Lynch. Neither had made it onto the life raft. (Salamander Davoudi, a spokeswoman for Lynch family, told The Times that Ms. Bacares was not speaking to the media because she was grieving and wanted privacy.)

A few hours after, a string of ambulances arrived at Palermo’s main hospital. Dr. Domenico Cipolla, the head of pediatric emergency, evaluated the youngest survivor, a 1-year-old girl.

The baby was OK, Dr. Cipolla said, but she had experienced quite an ordeal. She and her mother had been sleeping on a sofa on deck because of the rough sea, Dr. Cipolla said, when the boat suddenly lurched and threw them to the deck.

A moment later the boat turned completely on its side, the baby’s father told the doctor, flipping his hand as he described it. The doctor said the mother told him that she and her baby were hurled into the water and that her baby nearly slipped away. But then she grabbed her and swam to a nearby life raft, which was designed to deploy automatically.

The parents were later identified as Charlotte Golunski, a colleague of Mr. Lynch, and James Emslie. Ms. Golunski did not respond to several messages left for her, and efforts to reach Mr. Emslie were unsuccessful.

Mistakes by the Crew?

The biggest question that investigators are focused on is how the Bayesian filled with water so fast. To many in the yachting world, it doesn’t make sense.

The boat had been built with several watertight compartments under the deck, to prevent water from spreading from one area to others. And it had been approved as safe by the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, part of Britain’s Department for Transport, and by the American Bureau of Shipping, a private company that reviews boat designs.

On top of that, one Italian official and underwater video footage broadcast on Italian television indicated that there were no holes or other structural damage visible in the hull.

Even so, the Bayesian, like many superyachts, had all kinds of openings in which water could theoretically get in: big air vents for the engines; smaller ones for the kitchen, crew quarters and guest cabins; large glass doors at the back and the sides so that people could walk onto the deck; and various hatches for crew and passenger access.

In interviews with Mr. Costantino, the chief executive of the Italian Sea Group, and his spokeswoman, the company accused the crew of leaving hatches open during the storm, including a doorway-size opening on the left rear of the hull, close to the water line. The spokeswoman claimed that hatch was the only place where so much water could have come gushing in.

The company speculated that the crew did not close a watertight door between this hatch and the engine room. A flooded engine room might explain the sudden blackout that killed the mast lights and then, a few minutes later, the location transmitter.

But witnesses, an Italian official familiar with the investigation and the underwater video challenged the company’s versions of events. The footage appeared to show the watertight door to the engine room closed, and the Italian official said the divers had not seen any open hatches on the hull.

Mr. Borner also said that after rescuing the captain, he asked him if he had shut the hatches. The captain said he had. Mr. Borner shared pictures taken by his guests a few moments before the Bayesian sank that appear to show that hull hatches were closed. A Compromised Design?

The Bayesian’s origins go back to 2000. That year, Perini hired Ron Holland Design, a premier naval architectural firm, to design a series of 56-meter sailboats, said a person with knowledge of the timeline. As the superrich have become even richer, yachts have grown steadily bigger, and Perini was emerging as one of the world’s best-known builders of superyachts, often defined as motor yachts or sailboats longer than 24 meters, or 79 feet.

The Ron Holland firm, based in Ireland at the time, drew up plans for the hull, keel, rudder and, crucially, the placement of the masts — two masts. All other features, like the cabins, decks and vent system, were designed by Perini, according to the person, who did not want to be identified because of the possibility of legal action connected to the sinking.

In 2003, the first yacht in the series hit the water, the Burrasca (which means storm in Italian). Over the next four years, Perini built three more 56-meter superyachts from these blueprints, all with two masts. On Perini’s website, they look nearly identical.

Then came the Bayesian.

Construction on its hull began in 2005 at a shipyard in Tuzla, Turkey, according to the boat’s documents. But the original buyer for this yacht didn’t want the standard two-mast design. Instead, the Italian Sea Group said, he wanted the boat to be built with one large mast for better sailing performance.

That led to a radically different design, said three people with knowledge of what followed, and a cascade of modifications — some to accommodate the gigantic mast, and some apparently for stylistic or other reasons.

A promotional photo from Perini Navi showing the Bayesian’s mast and sails.

EPA, via Shutterstock

The most obvious departure from the previous Perini ships was the mast itself. Beyond being exceptionally tall — more than 40 feet higher than the original foremast — it was also very heavy, at least 24 tons of aluminum, possibly more. This alone would have challenged the boat’s stability, because so much weight was high above deck.

Since then, many yacht makers have switched to lighter, carbon-fiber masts.

“Technology moved on,” Mr. Costantino said.

Naval engineers pointed out that the heavier a yacht is up high, the more ballast it often needs down low — weight at the bottom of the boat to lower its center of gravity and resist its tendency to lean over.

Small notes on hull diagrams in the Bayesian’s documents show that the Turkish shipyard revised the ballast in July 2006, nearly 10 months after the keel was laid, which is one of the first steps of production.

“Values updated as from information by Yildiz,” the notes say in all caps, naming the shipyard.

But where this ballast was placed was curious, maritime experts said. Rather than spreading the ballast evenly across the bottom of the boat — which would have guaranteed the best stability — the builders stacked it toward the rear of the ship’s hull.

“When I first saw this, I couldn’t believe it,” said Mr. Roberts, the naval architect. “It made no sense to me.”

The ballast seems to have been pushed toward the rear of the boat to offset the single, heavy mast closer toward the front, Mr. Roberts concluded. He said he had never seen the main ballast used in such a design tactic before.

That was not the only change, experts said. A single mast would have plunged almost directly through the wheelhouse, an interior station where the ship can be controlled, so that was moved, too. A deck lounge was added, along with two tall doors on the sides. None of the other Perini yachts in the 56-meter series have these design elements.

If the boat tipped over with these tall doors open, water could pour across the deck and down the main staircase.

Sources: Perini Navi (technical drawing of the yacht) and New York Times reporting.

The Bayesian sat lower in the water than other yachts in the same Perini series, said Stephen Edwards, the Bayesian’s captain from 2015 to 2020. Naval architects said this by itself would make it easier for water to pour through vents and other openings when the boat leans on its side.

Whenever a boat leans too far and water starts gushing in through open doors or vents, it can set off a dangerous downward spiral that is hard to stop and that can sink a boat in minutes.

Such risks are calculated and laid out in a lengthy, proprietary document — kind of a safety bible — for many vessels certified to ply the seas.

The Times has obtained that safety bible, called a stability book, for the Bayesian. Copies of the 88-page book are also sweeping through a global community of experts who are obsessively trying to solve the puzzle of how and why the boat sank. More than a dozen of those experts, including naval architects and engineers, found weaknesses in the Bayesian’s design that they said could have contributed to the disaster.

The stability book obtained by The Times was written before the Lynches bought the boat in 2014, when the yacht was called the Salute and owned by John Groenewoud, a Dutch businessman. In an email, he confirmed signing a contract for “the boat with 1 mast” in 2005, but declined to discuss any safety implications that may have had.

The Times obtained the stability book for another 56-meter Perini yacht, with two masts instead of one. A comparison of the boats showed that the Bayesian was significantly less stable.

Specifically, the data shows that the two-masted ship could lean at least 10 degrees farther onto its side before taking on dangerous amounts of water.

The documents also show that the Bayesian could begin taking on some water at angles that appeared to violate the safety threshold set by the British Maritime and Coastguard Agency.

The Italian Sea Group responded that the boat was in line with regulations and had been approved. When asked how that happened, an agency spokesman refused to clarify, citing the continuing investigations.

The other boat’s documents also showed that the sister yacht sat a little higher in the water than the Bayesian did, as Mr. Edwards emphasized. And under many circumstances, experts said, the sister ship had a better center of gravity and was more resistant to capsizing, two additional factors that would have made it safer.

“The other boat is, at least on paper, a better boat,” Mr. Roberts said.

To make boats safer, naval architects said they religiously ensured that vent openings are far from the water line. When showed a picture of a 56-meter Perini yacht that, like the Bayesian, had vents built into the hull, Philipp Luke, a Dutch naval architect, started violently shaking his head.

“No, no, no,” he said. “You don’t do that.”

In the end, several naval architects said, all these flaws may have come together at the worst time — in a sudden storm.

Two Spanish naval engineers, Guillermo Gefaell and Juan Manuel López, calculated that the sheer size of the Bayesian’s mast and rigging made the yacht a wind catcher, even with the sails down.

Writing for the Association of Naval and Ocean Engineers of Spain, they used a computer model to calculate what would have happened to the Bayesian if a strong gust of roughly 54 knots, around 62 mph, hit its side. Under those conditions, the Spanish engineers estimated, the Bayesian could lean dynamically and take on nearly a ton of water each second through an engine room vent.

In an interview, Mr. Gefaell noted that he, like almost everyone else, did not know everything that happened that night. But if the gusts were as strong as Mr. Borner estimated — 60 knots — the punch would have pushed the boat to an even more severe angle, his calculations showed, very quickly knocking the boat all the way over onto its side, as the witnesses recounted.

At that point, Mr. Gefaell said, “the boat was certainly lost.”

A Watery Maze

Within hours of the sinking, emergency divers plunged in. Their mission: Find survivors.

The Bayesian sat 160 feet below the surface, leaning on its right side on the seabed. The once-gleaming cabins were clogged with chairs, clothes, curtains and the enormous number of seat cushions that Ms. Bacares had brought onboard to make the boat more comfortable. The search was made even more difficult and dangerous, divers said, by the many mirrors installed below deck that now reflected back their lights in a disorienting, watery maze.

On the first day, divers found the body of the yacht’s chef, Recaldo Thomas, floating near the boat. Over the next three days, they found the bodies of Mr. Lynch and four other passengers in a small cabin near the foot of a narrow staircase leading down from the deck to the passenger’s quarters. Finally, divers discovered the body of the last missing person, Hannah Lynch, trapped behind furniture in a nearby cabin.

One Italian official said the six passengers might have been trying to climb the main guest staircase when a surge of water poured down the stairs and knocked them back into the cabins. With the boat flipped on its side, water gushing in, and total darkness, it would have been nearly impossible for anyone below deck to escape, experts said.

The Italian authorities plan to raise the wreck to inspect it more closely. That could take months. In the meantime, at least two major investigations are unfolding, one by Italian prosecutors and the other by the British Marine Accident Investigation Branch.

Rescue workers bringing the body of the final Bayesian victim to shore, in Porticello, Italy, on Aug. 23.

Igor Petyx/EPA, via Shutterstock

From the first weeks after the accident, Italian prosecutors said that Mr. Cutfield, the captain, and two of his crew were under investigation.

Mr. Cutfield hasn’t said a word publicly and did not respond to messages asking for comment. Several crew members, when approached at a hotel in Sicily in August, said they had all been put under a gag order. When asked who imposed it, they responded: “No comment.”

In the yachting world, Mr. Cutfield has some solid references. Turgay Ciner, a Turkish industrial magnate and sailing enthusiast, employed him to run his yacht for 12 years.

“He never made any mistakes,” Mr. Ciner said.

Mr. Ciner, speaking by phone from Istanbul, recounted a bad storm near Capri about 10 years ago that Mr. Cutfield handled. They were sailing on another 56-meter Perini yacht, the Melek, a two-masted boat in the same series as the Bayesian. He said that Mr. Cutfield performed very well and was “one out of a hundred.”

Why Mr. Cutfield left in a lifeboat with the other survivors when a half dozen passengers were still missing is a matter Italian prosecutors are looking into.

But several yacht captains have defended Mr. Cutfield, saying that whatever happened that night, it happened very quickly.

When a boat sinks fast, said Adam Hauck, an American yacht captain, there’s not much hope for anyone still onboard. The adage of the captain going down with the ship, he said, is antiquated and unrealistic.

“It’s not like a Titanic movie where you’re going through the water and you can just look in the rooms,” Mr. Hauck said. “At some point, you can’t go back for people.”

About three weeks after Elon Musk bought Twitter in October 2022, #RIPTwitter started trending. Musk had gutted the staff, and more workers quit when he gave them an ultimatum: Work "hardcore" hours or leave. With the platform on the brink, its users held a funeral. They spent the evening saying goodbye to their followers, shitposting on the #hellsite for the last time, and rounding up the best and worst tweets they had saved in the platform's 16-year history. They were somber, giddy, and anxious about the future of online dialogue. It seemed certain that a competitor would rise.

Right then, Gabor Cselle, a former director at Google and employee at Twitter, was working on a rival app. First called T2 and later Pebble, the goal was to make a trustworthy, safe site to fill the gap left by Twitter.

Cselle was far from alone. As the bird app's outlook grew more bleak, several alternative conversation platforms hatched: Narwhal, Spoutible, Spill, Post, and Cohost among them. In July 2023, Meta tried to seize the moment by launching Threads. Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey tried to fix what he saw as Twitter's wrongs by launching Bluesky. (He quit in May 2024, saying the platform was "literally repeating all the mistakes" Twitter had made.)

Meanwhile, Twitter continued to teeter. Musk told advertisers "go fuck yourself," abandoned most content moderation, and infamously changed the logo from a friendly blue bird to a cold X. At the end of last year, The Verge published a news package declaring that 2023 would go down as "The Year Twitter Died."

But two years after Musk took over, the platform is still the room where it happens. Misinformation has skyrocketed and growth has stagnated; the market-intelligence firm Sensor Tower says its number of active daily users dropped by 28% from October 2022 to September 2024 while Threads' users have grown. But when big news hits, like a major sporting event or a sitting president's decision to drop out of the race or the attempted assassination of a former president, X is where the conversation erupts.

Most of Twitters' upstart challengers have folded. I talked to several founders about what they learned trying to compete with Musk, and the state of civil discussion online. Related stories

"You can't start a Twitter alternative by saying, 'We want to be the new public square.'"
Pebble founder Gabor Cselle

"I sort of misread that moment," Cselle says today. He thought all those mourners wanted something that was just like Twitter but that would reliably work — somewhere without excessive trolling and hate speech and deepfakes. "What #RIPTwitter was about, in retrospect," he says, was a panicked "sense of 'I might lose my status and my following and my handle and all of this network I've built up.'"

Cselle says he's learned that for social media platforms, "trust and safety is a secondary value proposition."

"It becomes important to you as a user — imminently and immediately important — once something goes really bad," he says. But he's learned that people "don't join a new space that is otherwise empty for it. You can't start a Twitter alternative by saying, 'We want to be the new public square.'"

Pebble got about 20,000 registered users before stagnating and shutting down in November 2023. It lives on as a smaller server on Mastodon, which itself peaked at 2.5 million active users in December 2022 but is down to about 865,000. Cohost, made by the Anti Software Software Club (which describes itself as "a not-for-profit software company that hates the software industry"), said last month that it was running out of money and would become read-only by the end of the year.

When Post, a platform "built for news," launched in fall 2022, publishers like Politico, The Boston Globe, and Fortune signed up, and hundreds of thousands of people joined the waitlist. Founded by former Waze CEO Noam Bardin and funded in part by Andreessen Horowitz, the idea was that people could pay small amounts to read individual news articles rather than subscribing to many outlets. "I believe the future newspaper is the feed and want to make it more civil for users, profitable for publishers and better for society," Bardin said in a tweet announcing Post. But it shut down in April 2024, citing slow growth that gave it no path toward becoming a "significant platform."

Several of these alternative conversation platforms were born from a similar ethos, searching to fix the chaos and bile that legacy social media had incentivized. Narwhal, backed by Laurene Powell Jobs' Emerson Collective, marketed itself as a platform for "productive discussions grounded in good faith." It began as invite-only, and dialogue centered on topics of the day that Narwhal would determine — sometimes about the environment, politics, or tech. Nicholas Thompson, the CEO of The Atlantic and a cofounder of Narwhal, says that while the conversations among the hundreds of users were substantive and engaging, Narwhal lacked Twitter's bite. "That was also the tradeoff," Thompson says. "If there had been a way to make it more fun while also thoughtful, that would have been the road to success."

After a few months, Narwhal pivoted to become an AI software-as-a-service platform, Speakeasy AI, which aimed to enable civil, engaging dialogue on other platforms. Thompson says the goal wasn't to replace Twitter but to fix toxicity online. He wanted to build something that Twitter, Reddit, or Facebook might use. The company didn't grow much, and in April, Speakeasy's tech was acquired by Amplica Labs.

But Thompson says the civil conversations on Narwhal gave him hope. Social media is fracturing — even if it's a leak rather than a flood. That gives people opportunities to find different communities or uses for social sites. A legacy platform like X or a large one like TikTok, have their advantages, too, and might become a crowded center for discussion, but users are left to the whims of its CEO. "There's a ton of power in whoever controls" a big social media platform, Thompson says. Last week, Musk shared an image edited to show an Atlantic story with the headline "Trump is literally Hitler." The post has more than 25 million views. Musk hasn't deleted the tweet, though a community note posted below it clarifies that the headline is fabricated.

Some places where Twitter's former users went are still growing. Spill, a Black-owned social platform, has been downloaded more than half a million times. Like other Twitter alternatives, it set out to solve the problems with hate speech on big platforms. But its mission is broader: Its cofounder Alphonzo Terrell says that while the app is open to everyone, it prioritizes elevating minority communities, like Black and LGBTQ+, and protecting them from harassment and hate Spill has raised nearly $5 million in pre-seed funding, with the actor Kerry Washington recently investing.

Spill uses large language models and AI for content moderation, Terrell tells me. As with Narwhal, its algorithm rewards positive posts. But there's still room for political discussion: When President Joe Biden announced this summer that he would not seek reelection and Vice President Kamala Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee, Spill saw a flurry of activity, Terrell says. Black women on the platform in particular talked about preparing themselves for an onslaught of racism and misogyny as the result of Harris' rise. It's a more nuanced political conversation than what might trend on something like X, but it worked on Spill. "People don't need to code switch" on Spill, Terrell says.

The rush to become the next Twitter has slowed — though there's still a chance an alternative could become popular enough to replace it. Threads has the potential to lure advertisers, but culturally it hasn't proved the Twitter killer many thought it might be. A lot of these brand-safe or news-focused apps have tended to feel more like homework than recess, though Spill may be the exception for now.

I've been on Twitter since 2010. Recently I've found it less useful for my work as a journalist, but I'm still lurking. And early this month, when my beloved Phillies tanked their playoff chances spectacularly, I turned to X. The algorithm knew I cared about this; it knew I wanted to commiserate with fellow fans and look at memes and watch highlights from the one game where the team played well over and over and over, which I'll be doing until opening day in 2025. I wasn't engaging in elevated, thought-provoking dialogue, nor was I spreading misinformation or hate. I was doing something in the middle — something cathartic. It was just what I was looking for.

John Graham-Cumming doesn’t ping me often, but when he does I pay attention. His day job is the CTO of the security giant Cloudflare, but he is also a lay historian of technology, guided by a righteous compass. He might be best known for successfully leading a campaign to force the UK government to apologize to the legendary computer scientist Alan Turing for prosecuting him for homosexuality and essentially harassing him to death. So when he DM’d me to say that he had “a hell of a story”—promising “one-time pads! 8-bit computers! Flight attendants smuggling floppies full of random numbers into South Africa!”—I responded.

The story he shared centers around Tim Jenkin, a former anti-apartheid activist. Jenkin grew up “as a regular racist white South African,” as he described it when I contacted him. But when Jenkin traveled abroad—beyond the filters of the police-state government—he learned about the brutal oppression in his home country, and in 1974 he offered his help to the African National Congress, the banned organization trying to overthrow the white regime. He returned to South Africa and engaged as an activist, distributing pamphlets. He had always had a penchant for gadgetry and was skilled in creating “leaflet bombs”—devices placed on the street that, when triggered, shot anti-government flyers into the air to be spread by the wind. Unfortunately, he says, in 1978 “we got nicked.” Jenkin was sentenced to 12 years in prison.

Jenkin has a hacker mind—even as a kid he was fiddling with gadgets, and as a teen he took apart and reassembled his motorcycle. Those skills proved his salvation. Working in the woodshop, he crafted mockups of the large keys that could unlock the prison doors. After months of surreptitious carpentry and testing, he and two colleagues walked out of the prison and eventually got to London.

It was the early 1980s, and the ANC’s efforts were flagging. The problem was communications. Activists, especially ANC leaders, were under constant surveillance by South African officials. “The decision was taken to get leadership figures back into the country to be closer to the activists, but to do that they still had to be in touch with the outside,” says Jenkin, who was given a mandate to solve the problem. Rudimentary methods—like invisible ink and sending codes by touch-tone dials—weren’t terribly effective. They wanted a communication system that was computerized and unbreakable. The plan was dubbed Operation Vula.

Working in his small council flat in the Islington neighborhood in London—nicknamed GCHQ, after the top-secret British intelligence agency—Jenkins set about learning to code. It was the early days of PCs, and the equipment by today’s standards was laughably weak. Breakthroughs in public key cryptography had come out a few years earlier, but there was no easily available implementation. And Jenkin was suspicious of prepackaged cryptosystems, fearing they might harbor back doors that would provide governments access.

Using a Toshiba T1000 PC running an early version of MS-DOS, Jenkin wrote a system using the most secure form of crypto, a one-time pad, which scrambles messages character by character using a shared key that’s as long as the message itself. Using the program, an activist could type a message on a computer and encrypt it with a floppy disk containing the one-time pad of random numbers. The activist could then convert the encrypted text into audio signals and play them to a tape recorder, which would store them. Then, using a public phone, the activist could call, say, ANC leaders in London or Lusaka, Zambia, and play the tape. The recipient would use a modem with an acoustic coupler to capture the sounds, translate them back into digital signals, and decrypt the message with Jenkin’s program. Most Popular

One potential problem was getting the materials—the disks and computers—to Africa. The solution, as Graham-Cumming noted, was accomplished by enlisting a sympathetic Dutch flight attendant who routinely flew to Pretoria. “She didn't know what she was taking in, because everything was packaged up; we didn't talk about it at all,” says Jenkin. “She just volunteered to take the stuff, and she took in the laptops and acoustic modems and those sorts of things.” This is an edition of Steven Levy's Plaintext newsletter. SIGN UP for Plaintext and tap Steven's unique insights and unmatched contacts for the long view on tech.

Operation Vula gave the ANC the confidence to sneak some leaders back into the country to supervise anti-government actions, coordinating efforts with the top leaders abroad. The Vula coding system even made it possible for the ANC brain trust to establish contact with the incarcerated Nelson Mandela. He received local visitors who came in carrying books that hid the decrypted dispatches—another product of Jenkin’s MacGyver-esque powers. “We smuggled these specially doctored books—innocuous looking books, maybe about flowers or travel—with a secret hidden compartment in the cover,” says Jenkin. “If you knew how to do it, you could extract the message and put another one back in there.”

Jenkin’s system allowed countless messages to be sent securely, as the ANC reached closer to its goal of defeating apartheid. He is unaware of any instance where the authorities decoded a single communication. When the ANC was ultimately unbanned in 1991, it credited Operation Vula as a key factor in its victory. In April 1994, Nelson Mandela became the president of South Africa.

You might be thinking that Jenkin’s story is so amazing that someone should make a movie out of it. Someone already has—focusing on the prison break. It’s called Escape From Pretoria and stars Daniel Radcliffe as Jenkin. There’s also a short documentary about Jenkin and Operation Vula. But until this year one thing had not been documented—Jenkin’s artisanal cryptosystem.

That’s where Graham-Cumming enters the picture. Years ago, he’d heard about Operation Vula and found the story fascinating. Earlier this year, he came across a mention of it and wondered—what happened to the code? He felt it should be open-sourced and uploaded to GitHub for all to see and play with. So he contacted Jenkin—and heard a sad story.

When Jenkin returned to South Africa in 1992, he had been worried about taking his tools with him, as some elements of the operation were still ongoing. “I didn't want to just walk in with all this communication equipment and have this coding wind up in their hands, so I compressed everything into single files, zipped it with passwords, and brought in the disks like that.” He had no problem at the border. Eventually, people felt safe meeting face-to-face and no longer needed Jenkin’s system. “Then life caught up with me,” he says. “I got married, had kids and all that. And one day, I thought, 'Let me have a look at this thing again.’ And I couldn't remember the password.” Over the years, Jenkin and others tried to break the encryption, and failed. Most Popular

Rather than being disappointed, Graham-Cumming was thrilled. “I’ve got to have a go at this,” he told himself, and asked for the files.

When Graham-Cumming received them on May 20, he was encouraged that they were compressed and encrypted in the old encrypted PKZIP format. It had a known flaw you could exploit if you knew some part of the original unencrypted message. But you’d have to know where in the zipped file that text is represented. He asked if Jenkin had any unencrypted versions of the code files, and indeed there were a few. But they turned out to be different from what was in the zip file, so they weren’t immediately helpful.

Graham-Cumming took a few days to think out his next attack. He realized the zip file contained another zip file, and that since all he needed was the right original text for a specific part of the scrambled text, his best chance was using the first file name mentioned in the zip within the zip. “You could predict the very first bit of that zip file using that name,” he says. “And I knew the names he was using. I was like, ‘Oh, I'm gonna try out a name,’ and I wrote a little program to try it.” (This is a much simplified explanation—Graham-Cumming provides more details in a blog post.)

On May 29, Graham-Cumming ran the program and stepped away to eat a breakfast of scrambled eggs. Twenty-three minutes later, the program finished. He’d broken the encryption and unzipped the file. The workings of Jenkin’s cryptosystem were exposed. It had been nine days since he first exchanged emails with Jenkin.

The next step was to actually run the code, which Graham-Cumming did using an emulator of the ancient version of MS-DOS used in the Toshiba T1000. It worked perfectly. Jenkin had feared that a professional coder like Graham-Cumming might find his work hopelessly amateurish, but his reaction was quite the opposite. “I’m pretty amazed, given the limitations he had in terms of knowledge, in terms of hardware, that they built something that was pretty credible, especially for the time,” says Graham-Cumming. Even more impressive: It did a job in the wild.

Jenkin, who has spent the past few decades in South Africa as a computer programmer and web designer, has now uploaded the code to GitHub and open-sourced it. He plans to unzip and upload some of the messages exchanged in the ’80s that helped bring down apartheid. Most Popular

“The code itself is a historical document,” says Graham-Cumming. “It wasn't like, ‘Oh, I'm going to create some theoretical crypto system.’ It was like, ‘I’ve got real activists, real people in danger. I need real communications, and I need to be practical.’” It’s also, as he promised me, a hell of a story. Time Travel

In November 2014, I wrote for Backchannel about Graham-Cumming’s campaign to evoke an apology from the UK for its shameful actions against Alan Turing.

On September 10, Graham-Cumming was sick with the flu. He stayed in bed most of the day. Late in the afternoon, he dragged himself to his computer to check his email. Sitting there, in rumpled gym garb, he found the following message from one Kirsty McNeill, a person he did not know. The email signature, as well as the email domain, indicated an association with 10 Downing Street.

Graham-Cumming, even in his flu-addled state, knew that this might just be some prank. It wasn’t hard to spoof an address, even from the Prime Minister’s office. He Googled the telephone number in the signature. It was the switchboard to 10 Downing Street. He dialed, asked for Ms. McNeill, and was quickly connected. “We are doing the apology tonight,” she told him. Was it all right if she read him the text? Somewhat stunned, he listened and approved.