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Monday Links from the Bench vol. CCCCI

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    Monday Links from the Bench vol. CCCCI

    OK, let's see if this thing can get up to five hundred
    • Not Fuzz - "They were partners in fighting crime. The only problem: Neither was a cop. But when one friend turned on the other, things got real." A bizarre tale from California where, for Steve Farzam and Christopher Dancel, impersonating a police officer grew from a weird hobby into a way of life

    • The Phenomenon of ‘Bud Sex’ Between Straight Rural Men - "A lot of men have sex with other men but don’t identify as gay or bisexual… [sociologist Tony Silva] recruited 19 from men-for-men casual-encounters boards on Craigslist and interviewed them, for about an hour and a half each, about their sexual habits, lives, and senses of identity. All were from rural areas of Missouri, Illinois, Oregon, Washington, or Idaho, places known for their ‘social conservatism and predominant white populations.’” It seems that it’s not gay if neither of you acts gay

    • List Of High Profile Cryptocurrency Hacks So Far (August 24th 2017) - A handy reference of the various times cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin have gone tits up: ”There’s been quite a few large, high profile cryptocurrency hacks over the past few years. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been stolen. Although blockchain technology is fundamentally more secure than centralized database systems, the ecosystem is still incredibly young and poor programming practices create many security vulnerabilities, especially with systems built around blockchains.”

    • The secret origin story of the iPhone - Long excerpt from Brian Merchant’s new book The One Device about Apple’s development of the iPhone, which started as a project in the iPod group: ”It was the first time Steve Jobs had seen the internet running on an iPod. ‘And he was like, “This is bulltulip.” He called it right away… “I don’t want this. I know it works, I got it, great, thanks, but this is a tulipty experience.”’”

    • Nobody Knows What Lies Beneath New York City - Possibly a giant octopus, possibly more mundane stuff: ”New York is on the verge of completing the world’s most complex underground map—and therefore the most detailed realistic picture of the interlocking systems that make a city work.”

    • House flippers triggered the US housing market crash, not poor subprime borrowers - As usual, the poor have been getting the blame for the irresponsible actions of the bourgeoisie: ”Mounting evidence suggests that the notion that the 2007 crash happened because people with shoddy credit borrowed to buy houses they couldn’t afford is just plain wrong. The latest comes in a new NBER working paper arguing that it was wealthy or middle-class house-flipping speculators who blew up the bubble to cataclysmic proportions, and then wrecked local housing markets when they defaulted en masse.”

    • The Hotel Room Hacker - ”A global vulnerability in hotel keycard locks was a security disaster - and the opportunity of a lifetime for one burglar.“ Aaron Cashatt used a homemade electronic device to burgle at least 78 hotel rooms before finally being caught - and the vulnerable locks can still be found in use today.

    • Present-Day Devices as Props - in the many manifestations of Star Trek, that is: ”There are custom prop designs for standard phasers, tricorders or communicators. But in most cases there is a need for additional props that either serve a specific purpose in the story or are used as generic futuristic decoration. Several of the props that could be seen are actually slightly modified devices of the 20th/21st century. In particular, game consoles have been used repeatedly for handheld scanners.”

    • Macedonian ‘Moby-Dick’ Translator Ognen Čemerski, 42, Was a Meticulous Linguist and Engaged Educator - Čemerski, who died two weeks ago, solved a particular problem in translating Moby Dick into Macedonian: ”The Macedonian language lacked maritime terminology. Most of the ethnic Macedonian population had been landlocked during the last centuries, having little contact with the sea in general and sailing in particular. In order to overcome this, Čemerski had to re-construct the vocabulary by first discovering the origins of the English terms, and then trace their equivalents in Macedonian or other Slavic languages.”

    • The Psychedelic Pollution Floating in the Gowanus Canal - "Steven Hirsch’s photographs capture unexpected beauty in one of America’s most polluted waterways."



    Happy invoicing!

    #2
    You'll never make 500 if you keep posting pictures of a polluted anus canal....

    Edit - Gowanus gets a mention in the Hotel key article too, clearly a worrying new trend.
    Last edited by barrydidit; 4 September 2017, 12:02.

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