Alex Fitzpatrick

It's been a turbulent few months for the online community message board

The chief executive of the online community message board Reddit has resigned, the company announced Thursday after months of internal turbulence, and one of its co-founders will return full-time.

Outgoing CEO Yishan Wong came under fire after employees were asked to relocate to San Francisco or find work elsewhere, and after Wong publicly disputed the details of a former staffer’s termination process with that ex-worker on Reddit itself. An adviser to the company wrote that Wong’s departure came last week after a disagreement with the board over the location and cost of new office space.

Ellen Pao, the company’s strategic partnerships head, will step in as interim CEO during a search for a permanent replacement. But perhaps even more notable is the return of Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, who left four years ago and will return as Executive Chairman.

Ohanian, who founded the site in 2005 alongside his former college roommate Steve Huffman, became a household name in the tech community in 2012 when he positioned himself as a leadership figure and spokesperson at the fore of a since-successful movement against a pair of congressional bills designed to curb online piracy. Many opponents deemed them too broad.

On Thursday, Ohanian told TIME he decided to return to Reddit full-time after getting pressure from the company’s board — of which he was a member — after Wong submitted his resignation.

“I had a bunch of my fellow board members asking me to get back involved,” Ohanian said. “And I had a long conversation with my girlfriend, I talked to my dad about it, and ultimately decided that this was the time to get re-engaged full-time with Reddit.”

For Ohanian, part of the draw of returning to Reddit, which he calls “this baby I’ve watched grow for the last ten years,” is getting its house in order after months of negative press. Aside from personnel issues, Reddit received heavy criticism over its initial reluctance to police a sub-community dedicated to sharing nude photographs of celebrities — some of them minors — that were obtained by hackers targeting users of Apple’s iCloud cloud storage system. Reddit eventually took action against those communities following mounting pressure.

“While I do believe I’m going to bring, as a founder, a kind of stabilizing presence and vision for the company, I know I’m not the only one who has to get it right,” he said. “I’m going to do everything I can to help, and I think it will, but it’s going to take every one of us.”

“Ellen has done a tremendous job,” he acknowledged, “especially in this transition phase — not to mention in the last couple of years she’s been here — and the things that I excel at, the things that are my strengths, are things that compliment her strengths and what she excels at. And so we’re still going to do a CEO search, but it really is her job to lose. I want to see this company do amazing things, and I think Ellen is the person to get us on that path.”

Devices on planes said to simulate cell towers and trick phones into reporting data

The Justice Department is using equipment on board aircraft that simulates cell towers to collect data from criminal suspects’ cell phones, according to a report Thursday.

Citing “people familiar with the operations,” the Wall Street Journal reports that a program operating under the U.S. Marshals Service is said to use small aircraft flying from five different airports around the country. Devices aboard those planes called “dirtboxes” essentially trick the suspects’ cellphones into thinking they’re connecting to legitimate cell towers from big wireless carriers like Verizon or AT&T, allowing the feds to scoop up personal data and location information about those targeted.

However, the report details those devices could be gathering data from “tens of thousands” of Americans in a single flight, meaning nonsuspects are likely to be included in the data roundup. The new report could shed some light on earlier reports of mysterious “phony” cell towers that security researchers have found around the country.

Read more at the Wall Street Journal

Tim Berners-Lee proposed the idea on Nov. 12, 1990

If you’ve ever used a hyperlink — a bit of typically underlined online text like this that, when clicked, helpfully takes you to another website or document — you should thank Sir Tim Berners-Lee, a Briton who on this date 24 years ago first proposed an idea he called at the time “WorldWideWeb.”

“HyperText is a way to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will,” Berners-Lee and Belgian computer scientist Robert Cailliau wrote in the Nov. 12, 1990, proposal for what would become the World Wide Web.

The Web has since become such a dominant means of sharing information over the Internet that many people don’t know there’s a difference between the two. (That difference? The Internet is a network of networks, a way for a handful of computers connected to one another to share data with billions of other such networks worldwide, while the Web is a hypertext-based information-sharing system that runs atop the Internet, literally and figuratively linking websites to one another.)

It took TIME seven years after Berners-Lee first proposed the web to write a profile of him. Here are four fun facts from that May 19, 1997, piece:

1. He credits his status as “inventor of the World Wide Web” to random chance. “I happened to be in the right place at the right time, and I happened to have the right combination of background,” Berners-Lee said of the reasons he wrote the proposal, which he made while working at Switzerland’s CERN nuclear research facility and trying to connect the organization’s resources.

2. Those 404 “Website Not Found” pages are a necessary evil. Earlier hypertext arrangements kept a record of every single link in the system to avoid “dangling links” — links pointing to nothing. But creating the Web at scale meant users would have to be able to delete documents without telling every single other user about the deletion, even if that document was being linked to from elsewhere. Berners-Lee “realized that this dangling-link thing may be a problem, but you have to accept it.”

3. He also hated how hard it once was to write on the Web. “The Web . . . is this thing where you click around to read,” Berners-Lee said, but if you want to write, “you have to go through this procedure.” That’s much less true now in 2014, with services like WordPress, Blogspot and social media making it dead simple to share your writing and other creativity online.

4. He played with the idea of starting a company to make a browser, a move that would’ve set him up to compete with the likes of Mosaic and perhaps make him rich. But he feared sparking a war between incompatible browsers and permanently dividing the web. “The world is full of moments when one might be other things,” Berners-Lee said. “One is the decisions one’s taken.” Meanwhile, Marc Andreessen, coauthor of the Mosaic browser, later cofounded Netscape and has since become a wealthy and outspoken tech investor.

Comcast says it agrees with President Obama on net neutrality. It doesn't.

Oh, Comcast.

The country’s largest Internet provider wants you to know that it “agrees with the President’s principles on net neutrality,” as a headline on a Tuesday afternoon blog post from EVP David Cohen reads. Net neutrality is the idea that all Internet content should be treated equally in terms of speed, a concept that’s in jeopardy because of a Supreme Court decision at the beginning of this year that struck down the Federal Communications Commission’s 2010 Open Internet rules enforcing it.

It’s an attention-grabbing headline from Comcast, a company that net neutrality advocates are making out to be among the most nefarious of the bad guys in the ongoing open Internet debate. Right off the bat, it looks like Comcast is agreeing with President Obama, who on Monday unexpectedly came out in favor of reclassifying broadband Internet as a utility. That’s a move big telecoms like Comcast should hate, because it would give the Federal government more authority to regulate their business. So what’s the deal?

It turns out Comcast’s post is just clickbait.

Cohen’s post claims Comcast agrees with Obama’s goals for an open Internet — no blocking content, no slowing down content, more transparency about network practices and no paid fast lanes. Cohen goes on to say that Comcast disagrees with the President on how those rules should be enforced. There’s a wide gulf here: Obama only made news Monday because he called for the Internet to be reclassified under Title II of the Communications Act, a bold move that would categorize Internet providers as “common carriers” and trigger an all-out legislative and judicial war between telecoms, the FCC and advocacy groups.

Comcast, meanwhile, says the Internet should fall under Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act, which gives the government far less authority to regulate Comcast’s business. So there’s no real agreement here at all.

That aside, the problem with Comcast’s Title II/Section 706 logic is that the FCC tried to use non-Title II authority to enforce its Open Internet rules starting back in 2010. But the courts ruled that wasn’t a valid approach, because the agency had previously and explicitly decided not to classify broadband under Title II — meaning the agency starved itself of the regulatory power it would need to legally enforce those rules. Since that ruling, the FCC under Chairman Tom Wheeler has been scrambling to find a way to enforce the Open Internet rules without running afoul of the courts.

Comcast, in its blog post, maintains that the courts left the FCC a way of doing that without triggering the Title II nuclear option — but the reality is that scenario is looking increasingly unlikely. Instead, many observers, including the President, see the FCC’s best path forward as reclassifying broadband providers as common carriers under Title II, but practice what’s called “forbearance,” or use only the regulatory power afforded under Title II the agency deems necessary to enforce its Open Internet rules. How comfortable you feel with that idea, of course, entirely depends on how much you trust a government agency to practice regulatory restraint.

It’s also worth pointing out that Comcast’s blog post makes it a point to advertise that it already practices the Open Internet rules for which Obama’s arguing — but it’s also legally obligated to do so through 2018 as a condition of its merger with NBCUniversal, a fact that’s missing from the post. Comcast also makes a dubious-at-best claim that it doesn’t “prioritize Internet traffic or have paid fast lanes,” even though Netflix is paying Comcast (and, since, other Internet Service Providers) to more quickly deliver Netflix’s content to Comcast subscribers. Whether or not the Comcast/Netflix deal violates “net neutrality” per se is a subject of debate, but that’s splitting hairs: It’s hard to see the arrangement as anything other than a “paid fast lane.”

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How to use the cloud to free up more room

We’ve all been there: Running low on iPhone storage space, scrambling to delete photos we can live without to record new memories. Well, Apple’s newest iOS update gave us a handy new way to get more storage out of our iPhones without upgrading the hardware.

Apple’s iOS 8.1 activated a feature called the iCloud Photo Library, which automatically uploads your photos and videos to your iCloud account — Apple’s version of cloud storage. iCloud users get 5GB of storage space for free, but can bump that up to 20GB for $.99/month, 200GB for $3.99/month, 500GB for $9.99/month and so on.

If you choose to activate iCloud Photo Library, your iPhone will by default keep big, high-resolution files both on your device and on iCloud. But here’s where the storage-saving trick comes in: You can set the iCloud Photo Library to upload the higher-resolution files to the cloud and keep only compressed (read: smaller) versions on your iPhone. Those compressed versions are still good enough to show off your photos to family and friends on your iPhone screen, but they take up much less space on your device — leaving you free to take more photos and videos.

To turn on the iCloud Photo Library on your iPhone or iPad, first make sure you’ve got the latest iOS 8.1 update installed and that you’re signed up for iCloud. Then go to Settings, select iCloud, find Photos and turn on iCloud Photo Library. Then, for the space-saving trick, activate the “Optimize” feature, which is also accessible by going to Settings, selecting Photos & Camera, then iCloud Photo Library.

Read next:

• 30-Second Tech Trick: Get Better iPhone Battery Life
• How to Install the iOS 8 Update Without Deleting a Bunch of Photos From Your iPhone
• 30-Second Tech Trick: Permanently Delete Photos in iOS 8

Maybe not $5,000, but it'll cost you

The monopoly ruling never led to the creation of "Baby Bill" companies

It was Friday, Nov. 5, 1999 when then-Microsoft CEO Bill Gates got the bad news. Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson had declared that his company was a monopoly. And not just any monopoly, but the very worst kind: one that uses its power to squash would-be rivals before they’re even out of the gate. At the time, Microsoft packaged its Internet Explorer web browser with its Windows operating systems, which gave Microsoft an incredible advantage over rivals like Netscape in an era when dial-up Internet meant that downloading and installing alternative web browsers was a slog at best.

“It’s actually hard to imagine how, for Microsoft, it could have come out any worse,” TIME wrote in a Nov. 15, 1999 cover story on Jackson’s decision. But Jackson wasn’t done yet — the declaration that Microsoft was a monopolist was only the first half of his decision. Jackson’s conclusions and remedy wouldn’t come until April and June of the next year, respectively, after Gates had already stepped down as CEO and transitioned into the newly created role of “chief software architect.”

“Assuming he says yea [to the question of whether Microsoft's monopoly was used to violate antitrust laws]–a near certainty considering Friday’s findings–he can impose a remedy as far-reaching as the total dismemberment of the Gates empire,” TIME wrote in 1999. “The gamut of possible outcomes runs from a mild go-forth-and-sin-no-more to the truly Draconian stuff: forcing Microsoft to share its Windows source code with its competitors or carving up the company into the so-called Baby Bills.” (“Baby Bills” was a clever riff on the “Baby Bells” born of the 1982 breakup of the Bell telephone system.)

In 2000, Judge Jackson took the harsher path, decreeing that Microsoft should be split into two halves, one dedicated to Windows and the other to everything else Microsoft.

So why aren’t there two Microsofts today?

Jackson’s word was far from final. The case found its way to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, which rejected Jackson’s remedy and accused him of unethical conduct after it was revealed he had private conversations with reporters about the trial while it was still ongoing. Microsoft would settle the case with the Department of Justice in November of 2001 by agreeing to make it easier for Microsoft’s competitors to get their software more closely integrated with the Windows operating system — a tough pill for Microsoft to swallow, but hardly on the same level as a forced breakup.

These days, it’s harder to see Microsoft as the big monopolist bully Judge Jackson once described. Microsoft Windows operating systems still dominate the PC OS market, but PC OSes are less important than they’ve ever been before, diminishing Microsoft’s ability to use Windows’ market share to make life harder for its rivals. Thanks to the rise of high-speed Internet, web-based solutions and cloud computing in general, it doesn’t really matter what OS you use — Facebook and Gmail don’t care if you’re accessing them from Windows, OS X or Linux. On top of that, we do more of our daily computing on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, a sphere that’s owned not by Microsoft but by rivals Apple and Google. (Interestingly, that latter company has increasingly run afoul of antitrust regulators, particularly in Europe, where a four-year investigation of Google’s potential abuse of its dominance in search to favor its own secondary products over those of its competitors was just reopened. As the power has shifted from Microsoft to its rivals, so have the watchful eyes of regulators.)

Sure, there have been fresh calls to split up Microsoft — except they’re not coming from regulators, but from Microsoft stockholders and analysts, surely inspired by the trend of corporate spinoffs that’s already hit massive players in tech like eBay, HP and now, potentially, security and storage firm Symantec. Microsoft, the spinoff advocates say, would be better off jettisoning its consumer-facing products, like the Xbox and its Bing search engine, so it can focus on enterprise solutions for corporate customers.

Will we ever see the birth of the Baby Bills? Maybe, but not for a long while: Microsoft’s newest CEO, Satya Nadella, hasn’t even had the reins for a full year yet, but he’s already well underway in changing course to a mostly software-oriented, platform-agnostic company. Microsoft’s stockholders seem to be willing to give Nadella some time to enact his vision, which could preserve the single Microsoft that’s been around since Gates and Paul Allen founded it in 1975 — a single company, even if that’s not so threatening anymore.