I checked back on three topics that stirred up your interest and debate in recent months:
By Shira Ovide
“The dumbest website of all time,” as creator Nolen Royalty called it, showed the simple joys of being online together.
In July, Royalty said he was overwhelmed by the number of people using One Million Checkboxes and their creativity in writing software code to automate box checking or to create patterns among the checked boxes.
Royalty hinted then that One Million Checkboxes would be ephemeral, like a beautiful bloom.
How it’s going: Royalty shut down his website two weeks after it started.
In all, Royalty says people checked and unchecked more than 650 million boxes. (You can still go to One Million Checkboxes for a version to play on your own.)
One of Royalty’s favorite moments was finding a group of teenagers and others who sent secret messages to one another in software code on One Million Checkboxes. Their clever tricks including GIFs of Jake Gyllenhaal will make you feel good about the future.
“The story begins with me thinking I was hacked and ends with me crying some (very proud) tears,” Royalty wrote in an email.
This company’s biggest fans are still pretty mad
How it started: In May, the speaker company Sonos was being harangued by customers who said a recent overhaul to its app broke basic functions such as alarms and accessibility features or forced them to dig CDs out of the closet.
It was a warning to all of us: When your speaker, TV, car, printer or digital books are connected to the internet, you’re never truly in control. The manufacturer can botch your product with one bad software update.
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It’s hard to make decisions as a parent. This one remains my happiest and easiest parent tip for grade- and middle-schoolers.” — Amanda Casari
correction
A previous version of this article misspelled the last name of Chris Danielsen, who owns a Sonos speaker. The article has been corrected.
