{"id":263654,"date":"2024-09-23T08:22:11","date_gmt":"2024-09-23T13:22:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=263654"},"modified":"2024-09-23T08:22:20","modified_gmt":"2024-09-23T13:22:20","slug":"the-russian-bot-army-that-conquered-online-poker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2024\/09\/23\/the-russian-bot-army-that-conquered-online-poker\/","title":{"rendered":"The Russian bot army that conquered online poker"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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From Bloomberg<\/a>: “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. \u201cIt\u2019s a scourge,\u201d 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\u2014everything, 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\u2019s Siberian creators, they agreed to an interview.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her children were sick and no one knew why. Was it forever chemicals on the farm?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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From the New York Times<\/a>: “Allison Jumper\u2019s family was a picture of healthy living. Active kids. Wholesome meals. A freezer stocked with organic beef from her in-laws\u2019 farm in Maine. Then in late 2020, she got a devastating call from her brother-in-law. High levels of harmful \u201cforever chemicals\u201d had been detected on their farm and in their cows\u2019 milk, and they were getting shut down. At first, Mrs. Jumper worried only about her in-laws\u2019 livelihoods. But soon, her mind went somewhere else: to her own children\u2019s mysterious health issues, including startlingly high cholesterol levels. Unknown to them, her family\u2019s 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.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Note<\/strong>: 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\u00a0see other issues\u00a0and sign up here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

The term scientist was first used in the 1800s to describe Mary Somerville<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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From The Marginalian<\/a>: “Victorian polymath Mary Somerville tutored pioneering computer programmer Ada Lovelace and later introduced her to Charles Babbage, thus sparking their legendary collaboration on the world\u2019s first computer. Somerville\u2019s 1834 treatise On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences<\/em> so impressed her peers, readers, and reviewers that \u201cman of science\u201d \u2014 the term used to refer to a person who had advanced the progress of knowledge \u2014 seemed suddenly inappropriate and obsolete. In 1834, the Cambridge don William Whewell wrote a complimentary article about Somerville, whose erudite books brought together previously disparate fields of mathematics, astronomy, geology, chemistry, and physics. He called her a scientist, in part because her work was interdisciplinary. She was no mere astronomer, physicist, or chemist, but a thinker who articulated the connections among the various branches of inquiry.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He was a renowned Harvard psychiatrist but then he said he believed in alien abductions<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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From the LARB<\/a>: “John Mack had been serving as the head of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School since 1977. A remarkable polymath with a long and distinguished career, Mack won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1977 for his brilliant A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T. E. Lawrence<\/em>. Yet by 2004, Mack\u2019s reputation among his colleagues at Harvard, and in the wider psychoanalytic community of the United States, had suffered significant damage. Over the previous several years, Mack had dedicated much effort to investigating an idiosyncratic and seemingly unserious scholarly pursuit: the reality of alien abduction. Mack\u2019s studies of UFOs and encounters with extraterrestrial life, and his public statements, popular books, TV appearances, and conference speeches, had incited scandal\u2014and even scorn\u2014among his learned colleagues.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The quaint bearskin caps worn by the Kings’ Guard cost $2,500 each<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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From the BBC<\/a>: “The bearskin caps worn by soldiers outside Buckingham Palace now cost more than \u00a32,000 each, figures from the Ministry of Defence show. The cost of the ceremonial caps, made from the fur of black bears, soared by 30% in a year, according to figures revealed in response to a Freedom of Information request from animal welfare campaigners. The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals group are against using real fur in principle, but they say it is also now a financial as well as an ethical issue, with \u00a31m spent on fur caps in recent years. A ministry spokesman said a fake fur version would have to satisfy “safety and durability considerations” and that “no alternative has met all those criteria”. The increase in price is the result of a change in the “contractual arrangements” for the caps, which are made from the fur of bears killed in Canada.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eighteen-year-old guitar phenomenon Grace Bowers plays Telluride<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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18-year-old guitar phenom Grace Bowers at the Telluride Blues Fest #guitar<\/a> #guitarist<\/a> pic.twitter.com\/3UEGN1NoeO<\/a><\/p>— Darrell Craig Harris Pro Bassist (@DarrellCBassist) September 20, 2024<\/a><\/blockquote>