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 acquired a fax with an unlikely enterprise proposal that may change the whole lot.

It was from an early web entrepreneur from Amsterdam, named Joost Zuurbier. He wished to handle Tokelau’s country-code top-level area, or ccTLD—the quick string of characters that’s tacked onto the top of a URL—in alternate 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 just lately, its .tk area had extra customers than every other nation’s: a staggering 25 million—however the overwhelming majority had been spammers, phishers, and cybercriminals.

Now the territory is desperately making an attempt to scrub up .tk. Its worldwide standing, and even its sovereignty, could rely on it. Learn the complete story.

—Jacob Judah

The rising indicators of bother for international carbon markets

There are rising indicators of bother for the multibillion-dollar international 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 steadiness out their greenhouse-gas air pollution by paying different events to stop emissions or take away carbon dioxide from the air. However the proof is mounting that, moderately than producing much-needed local weather progress, these schemes are principally a large waste of cash. Learn the complete story.