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From Bloomberg: “Advanced poker software is now widely available for a few hundred dollars. Forums are full of accusations about everyone from anonymous, low-stakes fish to sponsored professionals. All the big platforms promote a zero-tolerance policy, but no one seems to know how many bots are out there or where they come from. “It’s a scourge,” one gambling executive told me. When I started investigating poker bots, I came across an obscure chatroom thread posted by a whistleblower describing an operation so large it resembled an international corporation. It had a board of directors, training programs and an HR department—everything, it seemed, but a water cooler. Allegedly based in Siberia, the group was said to have absorbed all potential rivals in the region, becoming known as Bot Farm Corporation, or BF Corp. I decided to find out the truth about BF Corp., by following a trail of leaked internal emails, and by conducting interviews with players, gambling executives, security consultants and botmakers. When I finally tracked down BF’s Siberian creators, they agreed to an interview.”

Her children were sick and no one knew why. Was it forever chemicals on the farm?

From the New York Times: “Allison Jumper’s family was a picture of healthy living. Active kids. Wholesome meals. A freezer stocked with organic beef from her in-laws’ farm in Maine. Then in late 2020, she got a devastating call from her brother-in-law. High levels of harmful “forever chemicals” had been detected on their farm and in their cows’ milk, and they were getting shut down. At first, Mrs. Jumper worried only about her in-laws’ livelihoods. But soon, her mind went somewhere else: to her own children’s mysterious health issues, including startlingly high cholesterol levels. Unknown to them, her family’s beloved organic farm had been fertilized decades earlier with sewage sludge tainted by a dangerous class of chemicals linked to certain cancers, liver disease and a host of other health problems. Their cattle had grazed on contaminated pastures, making the beef and milk too dangerous to eat. Yet her family had been eating it for several years.”

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 “The Russian bot army that conquered online poker”

From New York: “In 1998, a prematurely silver-haired, baby-faced priest named C. John McCloskey was dispatched by Opus Dei, the secretive right-wing Roman Catholic group, to Washington, D.C., to minister to some of the world’s most powerful men. He arrived at the Catholic Information Center, which the organization runs, on K Street, the lobbying district of the nation’s capital. Father John is gone — removed from his post by a sex-abuse scandal, he died last year — but the CIC is still on K Street. it is focused on marshaling the people who have various forms of authority over the masses (Opus Dei reportedly calls them the “intellectuals”) to its various revanchist causes. The group targets, and attracts, people like Donald Trump’s current running mate, J.D. Vance, a convert to conservative Catholicism by way of Opus Dei–connected clergy and influencers. Opus Dei runs colleges and elite private schools as well as institutions like the CIC, all designed to attract and mold the influential.”

Doctors customize brain surgery so patient doesn’t lose his ability to play chess

From Scientific American: “Last year, when doctors told a patient that the headaches he was experiencing were due to a highly invasive brain tumor called a glioblastoma that could only be removed during a complex surgery, he had one very specific request. He wanted the surgeons to make sure to preserve his ability to play chess. The man, a then-45-year-old computer programmer, was identified only as “AB.” He had been playing the game as a hobby for 25 years and had achieved an Elo rating of 1,950, which is just one level below expert in the chess world. Surgeons performed a craniotomy, removing a piece of skull to expose a portion of AB’s left superior parietal lobe while he was awake. Next they touched a live electrode to different spots on the surface of his cerebral cortex, asking him to answer questions and complete tasks in order to determine whether his cognitive abilities remained intact at the targeted spot.”

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 “How a secretive right-wing Catholic cult took over DC”

When I read news and opinion pieces about TikTok, the video-sharing app owned by China-based ByteDance, it often reminds me of the old parable about the blind men and the elephant: when they touch the animal, each of the men touches a different part, and therefore he thinks it is something different — the one who touches the trunk thinks it is a snake, the one who touches the leg thinks it is a tree, and so on. In TikTok’s case, younger users who enjoy scrolling through the videos probably see it as a harmless distraction; older users who don’t spend any time on it probably think of it as a massive waste of time; and a number of legislators in Congress appear to see it as a dangerous psy-op designed by the Chinese government as a way of gathering data on American users and/or targeting them with misinformation and propaganda.

When I started writing this newsletter, I realized that I’ve been writing about the supposed dangers of TikTok, and the plans to either force ByteDance to sell or make TikTok illegal, for four years now. I first wrote about it for the Columbia Journalism Review in September of 2020, after then-president Donald Trump issued an executive order banning TikTok. Trump said he did it because the app “threatens the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States,” but even at the time it was clear that the ban was driven by a desire to do hurt China, which had become an economic powerhouse. The US had blocked mergers involving Chinese companies and imposed sanctions on of Chinese firms like Huawei, a maker of telecom equipment, and China had retaliated by hacking into US federal databases and the credit agency Equifax.

Even then, security experts said that TikTok was no more of a data or privacy risk than Facebook or Google. “I am the first to yell from the rooftops when there is a glaring privacy issue somewhere. But we just have not found anything we could call a smoking gun in TikTok,” security expert Will Strafach told The Associated Press in 2020. Nevertheless, Trump’s order soon sparked a frenzy of attempts by US companies to acquire TikTok, immediately sparked a race to acquire TikTok’s assets before the September deadline, with Microsoft, Oracle, and Walmart all in the running. But those plans hit a roadblock when the Chinese government issued new restrictions on the sale or export of artificial-intelligence software, which would include TikTok’s recommendation algorithms.

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

Continue reading “The crusade against TikTok is a ridiculous waste of time”

From The Conversation: “The rings of Saturn are some of the most famous and spectacular objects in the Solar System. Earth may once have had something similar. In a paper published last week in Earth & Planetary Science Letters, my colleagues and I present evidence that Earth may have had a ring. Around 466 million years ago, a lot of meteorites started hitting Earth. We know this because many impact craters formed in a geologically brief period. In the same period we also find deposits of limestone across Europe, Russia and China containing very high levels of debris from a certain type of meteorite. The meteorite debris in these sedimentary rocks show signs that they were exposed to space radiation for much less time than we see in meteorites that fall today. Using models of how Earth’s tectonic plates moved in the past, we mapped out where all these craters were when they first formed. We found all of the craters are on continents that were close to the equator in this period.”

He decided to bring his Army friends some beers — when they were in Vietnam

From Now I Know: “In 1968, troops from the United States, South Vietnam, and Laos met the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese in the Battle of Khe Sanh. There were nearly 100,000 combatants involved in the months-long skirmish, including 6,000 American Marines. Almost all of them were there to fight. But one of them, a Marine named Chickie Donohue, wasn’t. In fact, he wasn’t supposed to be there at all. He was just hoping to meet some friends and have a beer. In late 1967, Donohue was back in New York City, his hometown, drinking at a local bar. Antiwar protests had taken hold across the nation and the bartender — a former soldier named George “Colonel” Lynch (who was not, in fact, a colonel) wanted to do something to support the local boys serving in Vietnam. Half-jokingly, most likely, he suggested that someone should go to Vietnam and bring six of the bar’s regulars some beers. Donohue decided to turn the joke into reality.”

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 “Scientists say Earth may once have had a ring like Saturn”

From the New York Times: “Marie Cooper led her life according to her Christian faith. She baked pies for her neighbors in northern West Virginia, and said grace before even a bite of food. She watched Jimmy Swaggart, a televangelist preacher — a little too loudly, in her daughter Sherry Uphold’s opinion. And she always said that at the end of her life, she did not want to be resuscitated. Last winter, doctors found cancer cells in her stomach. She’d had “do not resuscitate” and “do not intubate” orders on file for decades and had just filled out new copies, instructing medical staff to withhold measures to restart her heart if it stopped, and to never give her a breathing tube. In February, Ms. Cooper walked into the hospital for a routine stomach scope to determine the severity of the cancer. After the procedure, Ms. Uphold visited her mother in the recovery room and saw her in a panic. Doctors restrained her and inserted a breathing tube down her throat, violating the wishes outlined in her medical chart.”

Sexually frustrated dolphin blamed for attacks that injured dozens of swimmers in Japan

From The Telegraph: “A lonely dolphin acting out of sexual frustration is believed to be the culprit behind a spate of attacks on swimmers in Japan this summer. Since July this year, 18 people have been hurt in dolphin attacks near the seaside town of Mihama, with some requiring dozens of stitches. Posters warning beachgoers of the menace feature an open-mouthed dolphin baring razor-like teeth. It says that the mammals “are known to be dangerous to humans” and to get out of the water if they are seen nearby. Japan’s problematic mammal is believed to be a solitary male bottlenose dolphin, who may also be responsible for injuring swimmers in 2022 and 2023, and trying to press his genitals against them. Putu Mustika, a lecturer and marine researcher at James Cook University in Australia, told The New York Times that dolphins can inadvertently harm humans by dint of their sheer strength when acting out mating behaviours.”

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 “Doctors saved her life but she didn’t want them to”