A farmer's wife dug her own fiber and built a gigabit ISP owned by its villages
B4RN's Lancashire co-op builds only when the whole parish signs up: volunteers dig, farmers give land, villages subsidize farms — 1Gbps for £30 a month.
Read the casegenius.wikiA CASESTUDIES.CHAT ARCHIVE
Good problems.
Brilliant solutions.
Ingenious ideas that solved difficult problems. Explore what made them work.
The full archive, in the appThe latest cases
300 RECENT CASES · REGULARLY UPDATEDTwo Swiss utilities made green power the default — 80% of customers never switched back
Change the default tariff, not minds: green uptake jumped from 3% to 80–90%, and most customers stayed even though the green tariff cost more.
Read the caseNaughty Dog streamed Crash Bandicoot's levels in 64KB chunks to fit the PS1's 2MB RAM
Levels split into 64KB chunks swapped from CD on demand, plus 50–80:1 animation compression, let Crash Bandicoot reach 20–30 times Tomb Raider's detail.
Read the caseKaspersky mined a spyware leak for code fingerprints and hunted a live zero-day
Reading leaked Hacking Team emails, Kaspersky profiled an exploit seller's public code, then waited months for his debug strings to surface on a customer PC.
Read the caseInvisv became a carrier that can't tell who you are: blind billing and rotating IMSIs
Researchers who could not convince telecoms to stop tracking users became a carrier: PGPP answers only 'paid or not', never which customer you are.
Read the caseDerry council pays cafes £300–£800 a year to open their toilets to the public for free
Instead of building loos it cannot afford, Derry City and Strabane Council pays businesses an annual fee to let anyone walk in and use theirs free.
Read the caseApple fused two M1 Max chips into one M1 Ultra with a silicon bridge called UltraFusion
With shrinking slowing, Apple stitched two identical chips into one 114-billion-transistor whole that acts as a single slice of silicon.
Read the caseUber let drivers set their own fares — pricing power as proof they're contractors
Facing California's AB5 employee reclassification, Uber handed fare-setting to drivers at three airports — the control itself argued they were contractors.
Read the caseThe Squamish Nation built 11 towers on land Vancouver's zoning couldn't touch
On 10.5 reclaimed acres that are a federal reserve, not part of Vancouver, the Squamish Nation is raising a second downtown where city zoning never applied.
Read the caseSpliethoff opened the Great Lakes' first scheduled container line as ports jammed
With West Coast ports backed up in 2021, a Dutch line ran Antwerp–Cleveland container service on lakes the container age skipped over.
Read the caseWhy insulin makers cut list prices: the Medicaid rebate math turned on them
The American Rescue Plan uncapped Medicaid inflation rebates from Jan 2024 — insulin's list prices ran 5–10x abroad, so rebates could beat revenue.
Read the caseEAB's Greenlight Match flipped college admissions: colleges apply to students
A free 30-minute de-identified profile replaces applications; students hear only from schools that admit them — 17,000 admissions, $1B in offers.
Read the caseCloudflare's Is BGP Safe Yet site names ISPs that skip route filtering
After a route leak detoured traffic through Russia, Cloudflare turned protocol hygiene into a public test anyone can run on their ISP.
Read the caseBoeing caps cockpit alerts so pilots trust them — under 10% of flights sound any
A cross-cockpit team vets every warning, reserves red for the gravest cases, and keeps the alert rate below 10% of flights — the fix for alarm fatigue.
Read the caseAmazon heats its Seattle campus with a neighbour data center's exhaust heat
Under-street pipes carry a telecom hotel's waste heat to Amazon's towers, cutting boiler costs near $1M a year at four times normal HVAC efficiency.
Read the caseYork bundled potty-training guides with school offers — untrained starters fell 43%
One in four English children starts school not toilet-trained; York put guides in the school-offer mailing and cut its untrained starters from 11% to 6%.
Read the caseMedicaid paid for illness-specific meal deliveries — patients used hospitals far less
Thirteen states won waivers to fund medically tailored meals; a study of 1,900 Massachusetts patients found 20% fewer ED visits and 31% fewer hospitalizations.
Read the caseHow RetroArch reached Xbox retail via Microsoft's own private-app loophole
Developer tunip3 published RetroArch as an unreviewed 'private' Xbox Store app and whitelisted users by email — no Developer Mode needed.
Read the caseA 100-line exploit rickrolled the NSA 24 hours after Microsoft patched CryptoAPI
Saleem Rashid weaponized CVE-2020-0601 — Windows trusting caller-supplied curve parameters — to spoof NSA.gov and GitHub HTTPS in 100 lines of code.
Read the caseTerranova Ranch floods its own crops to bank water in the aquifer
Don Cameron intentionally floods vineyards and orchards with floodwater; after 2017's deluge his water table rose 40 feet and the grapes came back sweet.
Read the case