Faking Murders And Stealing Bitcoin: Why The Silk Road Is The Strangest Crime Story Of The Decade

Illustration of Day 1 of the Ross Ulbricht trial. (Illustration by Susie Cagle)To his family, he was former Eagle Scout Ross Ulbricht. To his housemates, he was “Joshua Terrey.” To the U.S. government, he’s “The Dread Pirate Roberts” – the criminal mastermind who created and operated the billion dollar black market website Silk Road. His…

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Facebook report says it adds more than $200 billion to global economy

Facebook report says the social network adds more than $200 million to the global economy. Photo: Reuters class:cT-imageLandscape/cT-imagePortrait SAN FRANCISCO: With 1.35 billion users of its Internet social network, Facebook Inc would rank as the world’s second-most populous nation if it were a country. While its users may populate only a virtual country, Facebook says…

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The Top 1% Is Close to Owning Most of Everything

‘; if (google_ads[0].bidtype == ‘CPC’) { /* insert this snippet for each ad call */ google_adnum = google_adnum + google_ads.length; } document.write(s); } } google_ad_client = ‘ca-pub-0457527031304647’; google_ad_output = ‘js’; google_max_num_ads = ‘1’; google_ad_type = ‘text’; google_feedback = ‘on’; google_skip = google_adnum; google_ad_channel = ‘1102379497’; If current trends continue—and there is no reason to suspect…

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Google drops more Windows 0-days. Something’s gotta give | Ars Technica

Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock cache hit 822:single/related:68cbab3253debea7f4ee68a0b3ce6874 empty Google’s security researchers have published another pair of Windows security flaws that Microsoft hasn’t got a fix for, continuing the disagreement between the companies about when and how to disclose security bugs. The first bug affects Windows 7 only and results in minor information disclosure. Microsoft says,…

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The Cathedral of Computation – The Atlantic

We’re not living in an algorithmic culture so much as a computational theocracy. Algorithms are everywhere, supposedly. We are living in an “algorithmic culture,” to use the author and communication scholar Ted Striphas’s name for it. Google’s search algorithms determine how we access information. Facebook’s News Feed algorithms determine how we socialize. Netflix’s and Amazon’s…

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Is ‘SimCity’ Homelessness a Bug or a Feature? | Motherboard

​SimCity players have discussed a variety of creative strategies for their virtual homelessness problem. They’ve suggested waiting for natural disasters like tornadoes to blow the vagrants away, bulldozing parks where they congregate, or creating such a woefully insufficient city infrastructure that the homeless would leave on their own. You can read all of these proposed…

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