You know that familiar orange traffic cone icon? The one that pops up when you desperately need to play some weird video file at midnight, and it just… works? That’s VLC – the media player that’s been quietly saving our bacon for over 25 years. It’s on billions of devices, plays pretty much anything you throw at it (even half-downloaded or scratched-up files), and best of all, it’s completely free, with no ads, no tracking, and no nonsense. But how did this little gem come to be? It’s a story of rebellious students, late-night partying, and one guy’s stubborn refusal to sell out.

It all started back in the late 1990s at École Centrale Paris, one of France’s top engineering schools. A bunch of students were annoyed that their campus network had tons of bandwidth but no good way to stream movies or music to watch together in the dorms. So, they decided to build their own solution – a streaming server and player called VideoLAN (because it was for the local area network, or LAN).

The project kicked off as a fun academic side hustle, but it was technically bending the rules by hogging network resources. The school mostly looked the other way – these were brilliant kids, after all.

Now, about that cone: The students in the networking club had a quirky tradition. They’d “collect” traffic cones from roadworks around campus (you know, after a few parties), and pile them up as decorations or beer-pong obstacles. One night, someone snapped a photo of a cone sitting on a monitor during a coding session, and boom – that became the logo. It’s been the same cheeky orange cone ever since, a perfect symbol of the project’s playful, DIY roots.

Fast forward to 2001: The first public version of the VLC player drops on February 1st. It was clunky, Windows-only, and looked like it was from the ’90s, but it already played almost every format because the students bundled in every open-source codec they could find.

Things almost fell apart a few times. The university tried to claim ownership and turn it commercial. The students’ response? Over a weekend, they relicensed everything under the GNU GPL (a super-strict open-source license), making it impossible for anyone to ever monetize it. Then they broke away and restarted as an independent volunteer project.

Around 2005–2007, when many original contributors graduated and moved on, the project was fading. That’s when Jean-Baptiste Kempf (often called JB) stepped up big time. He’d joined as a student a few years earlier and became the driving force – leading development, keeping it alive, and turning it into the powerhouse it is today.

JB has turned down massive offers – we’re talking tens of millions – to add ads or sell out. He even started a separate company (VideoLabs) to do paid consulting work around video tech, which helps fund things without touching VLC itself. The core player stays pure: run by a global community of volunteers, with the non-profit VideoLAN organization relying mostly on donations.

As of 2025, VLC has racked up over 6 billion downloads. It runs on everything from Windows and Mac to Android, iOS, Linux, and even obscure systems. No ads. No data collection. Just reliable playback, whether you’re watching anime with rare codecs, rescuing old family videos, or streaming something obscure.

Next time that little cone spins up and saves your corrupted file (or just plays your movie without fuss), think of those French students sneaking traffic cones, the weekend licensing rebellion, and JB saying “no” to the big money. VLC isn’t just software – it’s a reminder that some things on the internet can still be genuinely good, free, and built for people, not profit. And honestly? In today’s world, that’s pretty damn heartwarming.

On 9th July, 2025, Earth completed its shortest day since official records began, spinning approximately 1.3 milliseconds faster than the standard 24-hour rotation. While the change went unnoticed in our daily routines, it triggered global attention among scientists and timekeeping institutions that monitor the planet’s rotation with extreme precision.

Experts believe the Moon played a key role in this rare event. When the Moon is positioned farther from Earth’s equator, it can weaken tidal forces that normally act as a brake on Earth’s spin. Other factors such as movement within the Earth’s molten core, changes in ocean currents, and even shifting weather systems could also have contributed to the faster rotation.

Although the difference was just over a millisecond, such variations carry weight in the world of high-precision technology. Systems like GPS, satellite navigation, and financial trading rely on atomic clocks and exact synchronization with Earth’s rotation. A deviation this small can still affect calculations and require adjustments to maintain global accuracy.

This shortened day is not expected to be an isolated case. Scientists have identified similar anomalies expected later this summer, with projections showing that both 22nd July and 5th August may also be milliseconds shorter than usual. If this pattern continues over the next few years, 2029 could see the introduction of the first-ever negative leap second, where a second is subtracted from coordinated universal time.

While most of us will never feel the effect of a day shortened by fractions of a second, the science behind it is a powerful reminder of Earth’s dynamic nature. Our planet is constantly shifting, rotating, and responding to both internal and external forces, sometimes in ways that subtly but significantly reshape how we measure time itself.

Social media and video networks have become the main source of news in the US, overtaking traditional TV channels and news websites, research suggests.

More than half (54%) of people get news from networks like Facebook, X and YouTube – overtaking TV (50%) and news sites and apps (48%), according to the Reuters Institute.

“The rise of social media and personality-based news is not unique to the United States, but changes seem to be happening faster – and with more impact – than in other countries,” a report found.

Podcaster Joe Rogan was the most widely seen personality, with almost a quarter (22%) of the population saying they had come across news or commentary from him in the previous week.

The report’s author, Nic Newman, said the rise of social video and personality-driven news “represents another significant challenge for traditional publishers”.

The institute also highlighted a trend for some politicians to give their time to sympathetic online hosts rather than mainstream interviewers.

It said populist politicians around the world are “increasingly able to bypass traditional journalism in favour of friendly partisan media, ‘personalities’, and ‘influencers’ who often get special access but rarely ask difficult questions, with many implicated in spreading false narratives or worse”.

Despite their popularity, online influencers and personalities were named as a major source of false or misleading information by almost half of the people worldwide (47%) – putting them level with politicians.

The report also stated that usage of X for news is “stable or increasing across many markets”, with the biggest uplift in the US.

It added that since Elon Musk took over the network in 2022, “many more right-leaning people, notably young men, have flocked to the network, while some progressive audiences have left or are using it less frequently”.

In the US, the proportion that self-identified as being on the right tripled after Musk’s takeover.

In the UK, right-wing X audiences have almost doubled.

Rival networks like Threads, Bluesky and Mastodon are “making little impact globally, with reach of 2% or less for news”, it stated.

Other key findings about news sources:

• TikTok is the fastest-growing social and video network, used for news by 17% of people around the world, up four percentage points since last year.
• The use of AI chatbots to get the news is on the rise, and is twice as popular among under-25s than the population as a whole.
• But most people think AI will make news less transparent, accurate and trustworthy.
• All generations still prize trusted brands with a track record for accuracy, even if they don’t use them as often as they once did

The report is in its 14th year and surveyed almost 100,000 people in 48 countries.

myjoyonline.com