Tokelau, a string of three remoted atolls strung out throughout the Pacific, is so distant that it was the final place on Earth to be linked to the phone—solely in 1997. Simply three years later, the islands obtained a fax with an unlikely enterprise proposal that might change the whole lot.

It was from an early web entrepreneur from Amsterdam, named Joost Zuurbier. He needed to handle Tokelau’s country-code top-level area, or ccTLD—the brief string of characters that’s tacked onto the top of a URL—in change for cash.

Within the succeeding years, tiny Tokelau grew to become an unlikely web big—however not in the way in which it could have hoped. Till not too long ago, its .tk area had extra customers than every other nation’s: a staggering 25 million—however the overwhelming majority have been spammers, phishers, and cybercriminals.

Now the territory is desperately making an attempt to wash up .tk. Its worldwide standing, and even its sovereignty, might depend upon it. Learn the total story.

—Jacob Judah

The rising indicators of hassle for world carbon markets

There are rising indicators of hassle for the multibillion-dollar world carbon market, as investigative tales and research proceed to erode the credibility of the enterprise world’s go-to device for cleansing up local weather emissions.

The promise of offsets is that corporations or people can stability out their greenhouse-gas air pollution by paying different events to forestall emissions or take away carbon dioxide from the air. However the proof is mounting that, somewhat than producing much-needed local weather progress, these schemes are principally a large waste of cash. Learn the total story.