Author: Mathew Ingram

Hi there. My name is Mathew Ingram, and until recently I was the chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review in New York. I live in Canada. I post things I've written for work here, but also a daily newsletter called When The Going Gets Weird, which you can find here, and one about technology and culture called The Torment Nexus.
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What it’s like growing up with a dad who smuggles cocaine

Back in 1984, when Erin was 13, her life seemed perfect. Her father, John H. McCann III, was successful, charming, and funny. Erin and her younger sister, Meredith, who was ten, lived in a Tudor-style mansion in a wealthy suburb of Pittsburgh. There was a swimming pool in their backyard, along with a zip line, a tree house, and a playhouse from FAO Schwarz that looked like a log cabin. Then, one September morning, the doorbell rang. When Meredith opened the front door, two men in suits asked if her parents were home. Leah came downstairs and told the men that she would be right back to speak with them after dropping Meredith at school. By the time Erin and Meredith got home that afternoon, their mother had left town. Leah told her daughters that they wouldn’t be going back to Fox Chapel—not after the weekend, not ever. They would all disappear and start a new life elsewhere, under new names. (via The Atavist)

A Brazilian court has ordered the restoration of Henry Ford’s ghost town in the Amazon

A court in the northern Brazilian state of Pará has ruled that both federal and local officials must act to restore and preserve Fordlandia, a city established nearly a century ago by U.S. industrialist Henry Ford deep in the Amazon rainforest. Fordlandia, now a ghost town and a district of the city of Aveiro, was built in 1927 in Pará by the Ford Motor Co. as a rubber-tapping metropolis intended to secure a steady supply of natural rubber for tires. Designed to resemble an idyllic American suburb, it was once the third-largest settlement in the Amazon region. However, disease ravaged the rubber tree plantations, leading to the city’s abandonment. In 1945, the Brazilian government acquired the site. In 2015, Brazil’s federal prosecutors’ office in Pará sued the country’s Iphan architectural heritage agency and the city of Aveiro for failing to preserve Fordlandia. They also demanded that authorities grant the city protected status. (via AP News)

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

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Broke and unemployed man got $1.5 million for a family heirloom

Loren Krytzer walked into the California auction room broke and unemployed. Seventy-seven seconds later, he walked out a millionaire — all thanks to a blanket. His life changed forever when he discovered that a forgotten old family heirloom, a Navajo blanket from the 1800s that had been sitting in his closet for seven years, was actually worth $1.5 million. And just in time, too. He had been scraping by, living in a shack on the edge of California’s Liona Valley, and had lost a leg after a near-fatal car accident. He inherited the blanket initially because no one in his family realized its value, either. When his grandmother died, he had gone to her house to collect the books she had promised him. The last bag in the house held two blankets passed down from his great-grandmother: a softer Hudson’s Bay blanket and the Navajo blanket his grandmother once laid out on the porch when her cat was having kittens. (via CNBC)

The US military has been sending cryptographic keys via the GPS satellite system

The U.S. military has likely been quietly broadcasting codes for its global encryption network using public GPS for nearly 20 years, turning each satellite into a hidden “numbers station,” according to Steven Murdoch, an information security expert, who detailed his findings in a new published article in a security journal. That means every device that uses GPS has been receiving hidden government information for years, and nobody outside the military knew it until now. Murdoch, a professor of security engineering and head of the Information Security Research Group at University College London, presented evidence that a 176-bit GPS sequence labelled “Subframe 4, Page 17” is encrypted material from the Pentagon’s Over-the-Air Distribution (OTAD) network, which delivers cryptographic keys to military personnel. (via 404 Media)

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “Broke and unemployed man got $1.5 million for a family heirloom”