English readings — Technology
300 original readings written by the FitForm team, graded B1 → C2 and sorted by topic. Reading is free and needs no account; exercises, vocabulary review and essay marking need a FitForm login.
How a camera counts a repetition
Counting looks simple to a human and is surprisingly hard for a computer. FitForm uses a pose model from an…
Privacy by design
Any product that points a camera at children invites a hard question: where does the video go? FitForm…
The photo that proves nothing
A photograph used to be a kind of evidence. If you had a picture of an event, the event happened. That…
Open source and the commons
Much of the software running the modern world is written by people who are not paid for it and given away to…
The interview with the machine
A growing number of employers use software to sift applications before any person reads them. The attraction…
The backup that did not exist
A small company lost eleven years of records in an afternoon. They had backups. The backups had been running…
The machine that could not say no
Ask a language model a factual question it has no basis for answering, and the older ones would answer…
The app that asked too much
A free torch app once requested access to a user's contacts, location and microphone. A torch needs one…
The warehouse that walks
In an older warehouse, a worker walks to the shelf. In a newer one, the shelf walks to the worker. Small…
The paper that nobody read
An idea published in 1945 described a machine that stored documents and let a reader follow links between…
The model that memorised
A system trained to spot a disease in chest images reached 97 per cent accuracy in testing and failed in the…
The search that knew too much
Two people searched for the same four words on the same morning and received different first results. Neither…
The update that broke the printer
A school's printers stopped working after an automatic security update. The update was correct, necessary and…
The password that was too strong
An office required passwords of twelve characters with upper case, lower case, digits and symbols, changed…
The dashboard nobody read
A team built a dashboard with forty-two charts. Six months later, logs showed that eleven people had opened…
The backup that was never restored
An organisation ran nightly backups for four years without a failure and discovered, on the day it needed…
A camera is not a recorder
When students hear that an app uses the camera, the first question is always the same: where do the pictures…
How a pose model sees you
Every second that the camera is on, the browser receives about thirty pictures. To a computer, each picture…