Rants and Raves

An interesting read:

Russia has been a hotbed of slots-related malfeasance since 2009, when the country outlawed virtually all gambling. (Vladimir Putin, who was prime minister at the time, reportedly believed the move would reduce the power of Georgian organized crime.) The ban forced thousands of casinos to sell their slot machines at steep discounts to whatever customers they could find. Some of those cut-rate slots wound up in the hands of counterfeiters eager to learn how to load new games onto old circuit boards. Others apparently went to Murat Bliev’s bosses in St. Petersburg, who were keen to probe the machines’ source code for vulnerabilities.

Via Wired

Who killed the great British curry house?

VeloNews Podcast on race weight.

Interesting research findings on the background and players in the DDoS attack. Who knew there was a Minecraft Protection Racket?

A large, successful Minecraft server with more than a thousand players logging on each day can easily earn the server’s owners upwards of $50,000 per month, mainly from players renting space on the server to build their Minecraft worlds, and purchasing in-game items and special abilities.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the top-earning Minecraft servers eventually attracted the attention of ne’er-do-wells and extortionists like the lelddos gang. Lelddos would launch a huge DDoS attack against a Minecraft server, knowing that the targeted Minecraft server owner was likely losing thousands of dollars for each day his gaming channel remained offline.

Comportamiento de un ciclista cuando te caes!!
Primero: Estoy bien
Segundo: Como está mi bici??
Tercero: Poner bien la maneta y continuar!👌🏼 pic.twitter.com/rtWJn28w4C

— Joaquim Rodríguez (@PuritoRodriguez) January 16, 2017

I’m too depressed to post the long list of links about new #facts I was reading.

Some links and things from the week:

• Gregory Han’s Leftovers (as a replacement for the now-ended Inner Vision from The Wirecutter)
• The Crimes of Seal Team 6
• How kompromat really works – read to the end- interesting point about keeping material for years before they become useful.
• Checking in on Bloomberg’s Cafe Con Leche Index (Venezuela Currency Crisis).
• Website Obesity (I’ve been on a rant about this before since seeing a tech talk at Dropbox by Steve Souders)
• What Happens When Big-City Chefs Open Small-Town Restaurants

I need to think of a better way to share what I’m reading. Not everything I save to Pocket is worth a share, nor are my random bookmarks. For example, I went off the deep-end reading about DACs and amps and DAPs when I went to look up something about a pair of headphones. Hoo-boy that was a deep dive into something…