Jerome Jacobson and his network of mobsters, psychics, strip-club owners, and drug traffickers won almost every prize for 12 years, until the FBI launched Operation ‘Final Answer.’
Johnny Harris — How billionares stole America's elections
American elections are for sale. It wasn’t always this way.
He Leaked the Secrets of a Southeast Asian Scam Compound. Then He Had to Get Out Alive
A source trapped inside an industrial-scale scamming operation contacted me, determined to expose his captors’ crimes—and then escape. This is his story.
The Game of Oligarchy | Brewster Kahle's Blog
I just invented and played a game today with my family, and it worked great– it was fun and we learned an important lesson. Similar to the game “Monopoly” which shows that one person ends up monopolizing even though you think the rules are “fair,” the game of Oligarchy shows that the “free market” leads inexorably to one person getting all the money and everyone else going broke. And fast.
A Microsoft exec called AI scraping ‘theft of unprecedented proportions.’
In court documents unredacted Thursday, lawyers for the NYT in its copyright infringement case against Microsoft and OpenAI cited Microsoft’s Director of Applied Science, Brent Hecht, saying that “millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions… almost no one intended for content they created to be used in this fashion, nor are they compensated for its use.” The Orlando Sentinel, which is also part of the suit, reports a Microsoft filing “framed Hecht as someone on the payroll to play a contrarian.”
How A Massive Ad Fraud Scheme Exploited Android Phones To Steal Millions Of Dollars
A BuzzFeed News investigation uncovered a sophisticated ad fraud scheme involving more than 125 Android apps and websites, some of which were targeted at kids.
Under the Trump crypto playbook, the family always wins. Investors don’t
Risking little of their own money, the US president and his sons have added at least $2.3 billion to the family fortune from their main crypto ventures, while the investors they've wooed have taken a $2.3 billion hit, a Reuters examination found.
Super pumped: the battle for Uber
"A New York Times technology correspondent presents the dramatic rise and fall of Uber, set against the rapid upheaval in Silicon Valley during the mobile era. In June 2017, Travis Kalanick, the hard-charging CEO of Uber, was ousted in a boardroom coup that capped a brutal year for the transportation giant. Uber had catapulted to the top of the tech world yet for many came to symbolize everything wrong with Silicon Valley. In the tradition of Brad Stone's Everything Store and John Carreyrou's Bad Blood, award-winning investigative reporter Mike Isaac's Super Pumped delivers a gripping account of Uber's rapid rise, its pitched battles with taxi unions and drivers, the company's toxic internal culture and the bare-knuckle tactics it devised to overcome obstacles in its quest for dominance. Based on hundreds of interviews with current and former Uber employees, along with previously unpublished documents, Super Pumped is a page-turning story of ambition and deception, obscene wealth and bad behavior, that explores how blistering technological and financial innovation culminated in one of the most catastrophic twelve-month periods in American corporate history"--
Bitcoin, Snapchat, Drugs, And Death: How A Young Woman Followed Two Hackers' Lies To Her Tragic Killing
Tomi Masters was a 23-year-old from Indiana who moved to California with dreams of making it big in the cannabis business. Then she met a hacker who introduced her to a dark new world of digital manipulation, suspicion, paranoia, and fear — one that swallowed her alive and left her floating in a river in the Philippines.
Selling Out and the Death of Hacker Culture
Selling Out and the Death of Hacker Culture We’ve sold each other for profit and lost what makes us happy. Part I. The very first hackathon I attended was back in high school. It consisted of me, a …
Feds Seize Record-Breaking $15 Billion in Bitcoin From Alleged Scam Empire
Officials in the US and UK have taken sweeping action against “one of the largest investment fraud operations in history,” confiscating a historic amount of funds in the process.
Jeffrey Epstein, Blackmail and a Lucrative ‘Hot List’ (Published 2019)
A shadowy hacker claimed to have the financier’s sex tapes. Two top lawyers wondered: What would the men in those videos pay to keep them secret?
The Beast
No one would have believed, in the increasingly stupid years of the 21st century, that I would open my daily scroll of doom to learn that James Patterson—the literary equivalent of a haunted fax machine plugged directly into the overflow tank at a Red Bull factory—was ‘co-writing’ a thriller with MrBeast, a man-child YouTube trolligarch who gamifies human desperation for likes, filming acts of weaponised charity to unlock a giant personal loot box in the winner-takes-all game of late-stage capitalism.
How Not to Play the Game
Magic beans, Bahamian penthouses, old-fashioned fraud and other important SBF-inspired insights. A postscript to Bloomberg Businessweek’s The Crypto Story.
AI Exec: We May Have Pulled Off “The Largest Theft of Labor in Human History”
Documents from our lawsuit reveal how tech leaders talk when they think no one is listening.
GM. We are going to win. An internet where 4 corporations wall us all into their surveillance state and make us pay rent forever is just incompatible with human flourishing. The only question is how long it takes everyone propping up history's worst billionaires to figure this out.
