And if you’re craving even more telecoms history after that (as I was when I read it a few years ago) Arthur C Clarke’s “How the World Was One” goes into the history of undersea cables and other telecoms technologies https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_World_Was_One
Potentially also of interest is this [0] article which describes the attempts to build a nuclear powered boring machine that worked by melting rather than cutting the rock.
Focuses more on the historical side of undersea cables, but I can’t pass up the opportunity to recommend Arthur C Clarke’s “How the World was One” which is an incredible book on the history of telecommunications infrastructure, including the history and economics of undersea cables.
Can Linux not trivially do the same thing as windows with LD_PRELOAD? If so why is this more of an issue on Linux than Windows? Is it really less a technical challenge and more just a matter of Linux getting less support from upstream developers?
The https certificate “expiration” date is basically just a “fallback to treating this website as http” date. The site is still perfectly accessible and arguably still more secure than an http only site, you just have to click the scary button saying you know what you’re doing and proceed to the website treating it as though it was compromised which isn’t a big deal for the static pages you’re describing.
Small nitpick: it isn’t entirely true that cryptography is “all or nothing”. With things like time lock crypto and proof of work you can effectively have a scheme where large scale snooping is impossible (would take too much compute), but any individual transaction can be decrypted with a bit of work.
very distant: The Culture series by Ian Banks
Somewhat distant: I Robot by Asimov (specifically the ending)
I will not comment on the realism of either of these novels, but will say that both present optimistic visions of futures where super intelligent AGIs are commonplace and both have interesting ideas to consider regardless of exactly the extent to which they are grounded in reality.