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The Ransomware Hunting Team: A Band of Misfits' Improbable Crusade to Save the World From Cybercrime by Renee Dudley, Daniel Golden

2021 United States Capitol attack, Amazon Web Services, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brian Krebs, call centre, centralized clearinghouse, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake it until you make it, Hacker News, heat death of the universe, information security, late fees, lockdown, Menlo Park, Minecraft, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Picturephone, pirate software, publish or perish, ransomware, Richard Feynman, Ross Ulbricht, seminal paper, smart meter, social distancing, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, Timothy McVeigh, union organizing, War on Poverty, Y2K, zero day

Even after being burned by old STOPDjvu, they still pirated software and didn’t save copies of their files. Several people whom he had bailed out were hit by new STOPDjvu or other strains, and they became upset when he explained that he could no longer help them because the ransomware had become more sophisticated. Michael brooded over their ingratitude. “Really peeves me when I’ve saved a victim from ransomware, and a year later they come to me with another one that’s not decryptable,” he said. Ray Orendez was different. He knew he had gotten lucky, and he didn’t want to tempt fate a second time. He stopped pirating software, and he announced on his Facebook page to prospective customers, “Pictures are stored in a flash drive.”

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With a business model based on a high volume of small payments, the group behind it demands a typical ransom of less than $1,000—well below the average ransom demand. Most of the victims are students or workers in Asia, South America, and Eastern Europe who, like Ray, accidentally infected their computers with STOPDjvu when they tried to pirate software. Often, they can’t afford the ransom, and what they lose is crucial to their education or career—perhaps the only draft of a senior thesis or an engineering blueprint. But since they had intended to break the law themselves, they’re unlikely to call the police, leaving law enforcement unaware of STOPDjvu’s ubiquity.

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In the meantime, he explained his plight to Fabian, who offered him a job working remotely for Emsisoft at a higher salary. In the end, Karsten stayed at the German company after it adjusted his hours to accommodate him. Like Michael, Karsten has seen his share of hard times, and he empathizes with STOPDjvu victims. He said they’re unjustly blamed because they were trying to pirate software when they were attacked. “You have a prejudice against those people who do that, so you tend not to help them,” he said. “But which people do that? Those are the poor people who cannot afford the software. Sometimes downloading an illegal program may be your only way out of poverty.” * * * As Karsten identified STOPDjvu variants, Michael set out to reverse engineer them.

Stealth of Nations by Robert Neuwirth

accounting loophole / creative accounting, big-box store, British Empire, call centre, collective bargaining, corporate governance, digital divide, full employment, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Johannes Kepler, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, megacity, microcredit, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Pepto Bismol, pirate software, planned obsolescence, profit motive, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, thinkpad, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, yellow journalism

It didn’t matter that some of the instructions and copyright information were written in Cyrillic, as long as I could figure out how to use it. But once I got a new computer, and the pirated software was no longer compatible with the new operating system, I didn’t go out and buy Quark. Instead, I made do without it. Many computer users work like this. The genuine programs are simply too expensive to be a reasonable option. This means that that figure of $53 billion lost to piracy is unreliable at best. Finally, buried in the fine print of the group’s statistics, there’s this: “Businesses, schools, and government entities tend to use more pirated software on new computers than ordinary consumers do.” This is an extraordinary statement—because it means that the biggest consumers of pirated programs on new computers have nothing to do with System D.

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This is an extraordinary statement—because it means that the biggest consumers of pirated programs on new computers have nothing to do with System D. Instead, they are legal companies, doing legal work. Indeed, as the report suggests, the government—the same entity that the industry is calling upon to police piracy—is actually one of the largest patrons of pirated software. I had a small run-in with this kind of semiofficial piracy in one of my early jobs in journalism. The publication where I worked—a formal, incorporated, taxpaying entity—composed its pages using what was then a popular text layout program. But the owners had ordered the IT staff to save money by purchasing just a single licensed copy of the program.

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., street market in, 8.1–8.2 children, 2.1, 8.1, 12.1–12.2, 12.3 China African smuggling from, 4.1, 10.1–10.2 African trade with, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3–4.4, 4.5, 4.6, 4.7, 5.1, 10.1–10.2, 12.1–12.2 child labor in, 12.1 consumerism in, 4.1, 5.1, 6.1 corporate crime in, 12.1 dominant business model in, 5.1–5.2 economic policy in, 5.1, 5.2 employment in, 2.1 factory work in, 4.1 high-end brand production in, 5.1 language in, 6.1 mobile phone exports from, 5.1 Nigerian trade with, 3.1, 3.2, 4.1–4.2, 4.3, 4.4, 4.5, 4.6–4.7, 4.8, 5.1–5.2, 5.3, 5.4, 10.1–10.2 piracy in, 5.1, 5.2–5.3, 5.4–5.5, 5.6, 5.7, 5.8 public health system in, 4.1 recycling industry in, 12.1 Rua 25 de Março merchants from, 1.1–1.2 smuggling from, 6.1–6.2 smuggling into, 6.1–6.2 System D’s role in, 2.1 tax paying in, 4.1, 4.2–4.3, 4.4, 5.1 technology retailing in, 6.1, 6.2 toxic dumping in, 12.1 2008/2009 financial crisis effects in, 5.1, 5.2 U.S. trade with, 4.1 see also specific cities China Plaza, 5.1, 5.2 China Southern Airlines, 4.1 Chinee Water, 3.1 Chinese University of Hong Kong, 6.1 Chintan, 12.1 cigarettes, smuggling of, 6.1 Ciudad del Este, Paraguay, 6.1–6.2, 6.3–6.4 business formalization in, 11.1, 11.2–11.3, 11.4 computer and electronic trade in, 6.1, 11.1–11.2, 11.3–11.4, 12.1 crime in, 12.1, 12.2, 12.3 currency trading in, 6.1–6.2 economic activity in, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3–6.4, 11.1, 12.1 Lebanese community in, 12.1, 12.2, 12.3, 12.4 money transfers in, 12.1 policing in, 6.1–6.2, 6.3 street market in, 6.1 System D in, 2.1 taxation in, 6.1, 11.1–11.2 terrorism allegations against, 12.1–12.2 Clinton, Hillary, 12.1 Computer and Allied Products Dealers Association of Nigeria, 3.1 computer industry Chinese trade in, 6.1–6.2 falling prices in, 6.1, 11.1 illegal dumping in, 12.1–12.2 Nigerian trade in, 3.1–3.2, 10.1 Paraguayan trade in, 6.1–6.2, 11.1–11.2, 11.3–11.4 poor workmanship in, 4.1 smuggling in, 6.1–6.2, 6.3, 6.4–6.5, 11.1–11.2, 11.3, 11.4, 11.5 see also Ikeja Computer Village computer software, piracy of, 5.1–5.2 conflict resolution, 12.1–12.2 Connecticut Courant, 12.1 construction industry, 8.1 cooperative development, 12.1, 12.2, 12.3–12.4 limits of, 12.1 criticism of, 9.1 Cooper-Glicério, 12.1–12.2 copyrights, 8.1 Correct Technologies, 3.1, 3.2 Cotonou, Republic of Benin, 3.1, 4.1, 5.1, 10.1, 10.2, 11.1 courts, as an institution in street markets, 12.1–12.2 crime, 2.1, 2.2, 12.1, 12.2, 12.3, 12.4, 12.5, 12.6, 12.7, 12.8–12.9 Cross, John, 9.1–9.2 Crusades, 4.1 currency, see exchange rate Dairo, Ogun, 3.1–3.2 danfo, see bus system, Lagos Dattora, Édison Ramos, 1.1–1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 7.1 Davidson, Basil, 3.1–3.2 débrouillards, 2.1 Deleuze, Gilles, 11.1 de Soto, Hernando, 11.1–11.2, 11.3, 11.4, 11.5, 11.6 Deutsche Bank, 2.1 developed world economic inequality in, 9.1 economic model in, 3.1, 7.1, 9.1, 9.2, 9.3, 9.4, 11.1–11.2 developing world business model in, 7.1–7.2, 10.1, 10.2, 11.1 economic growth of, 9.1–9.2, 9.3, 9.4, 11.1, 12.1–12.2 infrastructure in, 9.1, 12.1 System D growth in, 2.1, 2.2 water shortage in, 7.1 wealth gap in, 9.1–9.2, 9.3, 12.1 see also Africa; Asia; Latin America; specific countries Devil’s Dictionary, The (Bierce), 5.1–5.2 Diamond Bank, 7.1 Dias, Sonia Maria, 12.1 Diggers, 9.1 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 8.1 dollar, as global currency, 4.1–4.2 Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights, 12.1–12.2 Donizetti, Gaetano, 12.1 Downy, 7.1–7.2 Drake, Francis, 5.1, 5.2 drugs discount, 6.1–6.2 illegal, 12.1 DVDs, pirated, 1.1–1.2, 1.3–1.4, 1.5, 6.1 eBay, 8.1 Ebeyenoku, John, 12.1, 12.2 economic development, 2.1, 2.2 as a human right, 12.1 redefinition of, 9.1–9.2 economics Aristotle’s definition of, 5.1 efficiency in, 9.1, 9.2 80/20 conundrum in, 5.1 modern definition of, 2.1 wealth gap in, 9.1–9.2, 9.3, 12.1 see also business; free market system Economic Times, 12.1 economists, System D’s assessment by, 1.1, 2.1–2.2, 3.1, 7.1, 9.1, 9.2, 10.1, 11.1, 12.1 education, 10.1, 12.1, 12.2 “Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, The” (Marx), 9.1 Eleazars, Ugochukwu, 3.1 electricity, 4.1, 4.2, 12.1–12.2 electronics industry gray-market, 8.1 Nigerian trade in, 3.1–3.2, 3.3–3.4 smuggling in, 6.1, 11.1–11.2, 11.3, 11.4, 12.1 see also computer industry; mobile phone industry Eleshin, Omotola, 3.1–3.2, 7.1 Emirates, 4.1 employment business tax breaks and, 10.1 System D’s provision of, 2.1, 9.1, 9.2, 9.3, 12.1–12.2, 12.3 21st century, 2.1 Encore Technical Sales, 11.1 Encyclopedia Britannica, 5.1 entrepreneurialism, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 12.1 environmental issues, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 12.1, 12.2–12.3 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus, 5.1 Ethiopian Airlines, 4.1 Europe literacy growth in, 5.1 Nigerian trade with, 3.1 post–World War II economic development in, 11.1–11.2 16th-century economic transition in, 8.1, 8.2–8.3 smuggling into, 6.1 System D in, 2.1, 3.1, 8.1–8.2 2008/2009 financial crisis effects in, 2.1–2.2 see also specific cities and countries EVGA, 11.1 e-waste, 12.1–12.2 exchange rate importance to System D trade, 4.1–4.2, 12.1 Eze, Sunday, 3.1 Ezeagu, Charles, 2.1 Ezeifeoma, James, 4.1, 4.2, 7.1, 9.1–9.2, 9.3, 12.1 Fable of the Bees, The (Mandeville), 5.1, 5.2 Fanon, Frantz, 9.1 fashion industry, 4.1–4.2, 4.3–4.4 labor issues in, 7.1, 12.1–12.2 piracy in, 5.1, 5.2–5.3, 7.1–7.2 Fashola, Babatunde, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4, 10.5, 10.6, 10.7 Feiyang, 5.1–5.2 Festac Town, Lagos, Nigeria, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3 Festac United Okada Riders, 3.1 feudalism, 8.1 financial crisis of 2008/2009 in China, 5.1, 5.2 System D resilience to, 2.1–2.2 in United States, 8.1, 8.2 Financial Mail, 12.1 flea market, 8.1, 12.1 Fontaine, Laurence, 6.1 food industry formalization in, 8.1, 8.2–8.3, 8.4, 8.5, 12.1 street peddling in, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 3.1, 3.2, 8.1–8.2, 8.3–8.4, 12.1 System D producers in, 8.1–8.2, 8.3–8.4 formal businesses, relationship with informal firms, 1.1–1.2, 7.1–7.2, 7.3–7.4 formalization bureaucracy in, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 11.1 in computer industry, 11.1, 11.2–11.3 costs and benefits of, 11.1–11.2, 11.3, 11.4, 11.5 degrees of, 12.1–12.2, 12.3 effects of, 11.1–11.2 in food industry, 8.1, 8.2–8.3, 8.4, 8.5, 12.1 obstacles to, 11.1, 11.2 419 Advance Fee Fraud, 3.1, 10.1 Fox, Paul, 7.1 Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4, 12.1 France, System D in, 8.1 “Fraternity of Vagabonds, The” (Awdeley), 8.1 free market system, 2.1–2.2, 9.1, 9.2, 9.3, 12.1, 12.2 Gafunk Nigeria Limited, 3.1 Gala sausage roll, 7.1 Galatzer, Natalie, 8.1 Galeria Pagé (Ciudad del Este), 12.1–12.2 Galeria Pagé (São Paulo), 1.1, 1.2, 10.1 garage sales, 8.1 garbage recycling, in Brazil, 12.1–12.2 in China, 9.1–9.2 in Nigeria, 3.1, 3.2–3.3 gasoline, smuggling of, 6.1 Gates, Bill, 5.1, 9.1 General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, The (Keynes), 9.1 generators, 4.1 George II, King of England, 9.1 Germany, System D in, 8.1 Gesell, Silvio, 9.1 Glissant, Edouard, 9.1 globalization, 4.1–4.2, 12.1 peddlers as agents of, 4.1–4.2 see also System D, global trade in Gomorrah (Saviano), 5.1 Gonçalves, Reginaldo, 1.1 Goodluck, Akinwale, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4 Gould, Jay, 9.1 government economic regulation by, 2.1 privatization in, 2.1 System D interaction with, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 4.1–4.2, 4.3–4.4, 5.1–5.2, 6.1, 6.2, 10.1–10.2, 11.1, 12.1, 12.2, 12.3, 12.4, 12.5, 12.6, 12.7, 12.8, 12.9–12.10, 12.11–12.12, 12.13–12.14 use of pirated software in, 5.1 Gramsci, Antonio, 2.1 Granta, 5.1 gray market, 2.1 Great Britain historical conflict resolution in, 12.1–12.2 historical wealth gap in, 9.1–9.2 System D criticism in, 8.1–8.2 see also London, England Great Transformation, The (Polanyi), 2.1–2.2 Greece, ancient, conflict resolution in, 12.1 Grimmelshausen, Hans Jakob Christoffel von, 5.1–5.2 growth, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 9.1–9.2, 10.1–10.2 Grumbling Hive, The (Mandeville), 5.1, 5.2 Guangzhou, China, 2.1 African traders in, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3–4.4, 4.5–4.6, 4.7, 4.8, 5.1–5.2, 5.3, 12.1–12.2 business regulations in, 4.1, 4.2 international population in, 4.1 policing of, 5.1, 9.1, 12.1, 12.2 recycling in, 9.1–9.2 smuggled computers in, 6.1 Guangzhou Dashatou Second Hand Trade Center, 5.1, 5.2–5.3 Guarda Municipal, 1.1, 1.2 guarda-roupas, 6.1–6.2 Guattari, Félix, 11.1 Gudeman, Stephen, 9.1–9.2 gun running, 2.1 Guys and Dolls, 8.1 Gypsies, 8.1 Hammoud family, 12.1, 12.2 Hancock, John, 12.1 Harare, Zimbabwe, 12.1 Harlem, N.Y.

Spam Nation: The Inside Story of Organized Cybercrime-From Global Epidemic to Your Front Door by Brian Krebs

barriers to entry, bitcoin, Brian Krebs, cashless society, defense in depth, Donald Trump, drop ship, employer provided health coverage, independent contractor, information security, John Markoff, mutually assured destruction, offshore financial centre, operational security, payday loans, pirate software, placebo effect, ransomware, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Stuxnet, the payments system, transaction costs, web application

By the middle of 2007, the Russian Business Network (RBN)—a shadowy web hosting conglomerate based in St. Petersburg, Russia—had cemented its reputation among security experts as the epicenter of cybercriminal activity on the Internet. In case after case, when computer crime investigators followed the trail of money and evidence from sites selling child pornography or pirated software, web properties at RBN were somehow always involved. When cyber sleuths sought to shutter sites that were pumping out colonies of computer viruses and “phishing” scams that use email to impersonate banks and lure people into entering account passwords at fake bank sites, more often than not, the offending site was a customer of RBN.

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Also, the new documents explicitly call out examples of illegal transactions including “unlawful sale of prescription drugs” and “sale of counterfeit or trademark-infringing products or services,” among others. Finally, these changes include more aggressive fine schedules for noncompliance. Some of the best evidence of the success of the test-buy strategy comes directly from the folks operating the affiliate programs that reward spammers and miscreants for promoting fake antivirus and pirated software and dodgy pill sites. In June 2012, a leader of one popular pharmacy affiliate program posted a lengthy message to gofuckbiz.com, a Russian language forum that caters to a variety of such affiliate programs. In that discussion thread, which is now more than 250 pages in length, the affiliate program manager explains to a number of mystified forum members why the pharmacy programs have had so much trouble maintaining reliable credit card processing.

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“Much like the Inuit Eskimos made sure to use every piece of the whale, we’re seeing an evolution now where botmasters are carefully mining infected systems and monetizing the data they can find,” Savage said. “The mantra these days seems to be, ‘Why leave any unused resources on the table’?” While some are using ransomware and data harvesting, Savage said, many other former affiliates and managers of failed scareware, pharma, and pirated software partnerkas are casting about for the next big thing. “It’s a period of innovation, and people clearly are looking around for another sweet spot that’s as good as pharma, which made more money more reliably than anything else out there,” he said. “A few affiliate programs are trying to peddle pirated e-books and movies; others are getting into [advertising] payday loans.

Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World by Joseph Menn

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Andy Rubin, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, commoditize, corporate governance, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, Google Chrome, Haight Ashbury, independent contractor, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Naomi Klein, NSO Group, Peter Thiel, pirate software, pre–internet, Ralph Nader, ransomware, Richard Stallman, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, tech worker, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero day

Obscure Images, the handle of artistic Chicagoland teen Paul Leonard, regularly graced Matt’s board, Pure Nihilism, before becoming another mainstay of cDc. “I’m the pretty much standard-issue, sort-of nerd, moody loner outcast kid,” Paul said later. Paul had hung around boards that emphasized trading pirated software, and he was friendly with one of the leading lights of the scene, before the young man became the first person to be tried and convicted under the 1986 hacking law, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. After that, Paul was looking for something more fun and more legal. “The cDc people were, at least for the most part, up until the later 1990s, more interested in writing, music, art, and that sort of thing,” Paul said.

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In addition to the arts wing of the hacking community, represented by the earliest members of the Cult of the Dead Cow, there were plenty of others who operated mild-mannered bulletin boards for commentary, community, and, in some cases, conspiracy. On the darker end of the spectrum, some specialized in pirated software and credit cards as well as tips for breaking into big machines at phone companies, corporations, and government agencies. But Texas is a big place, and hackers there had a harder time getting together than their cohorts in New York, Boston, or San Francisco. That kept them from hanging out as much as their peers elsewhere, which meant less fun, less trust, and less deep collaboration and progress.

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Other times, employees would ask him to avoid a certain area. But most often, no one complained. Given Mudge’s attitude, his skills, and the LoD and MoD members he hung around with, many of his friends believe Mudge did other things that would be harder to defend in the light of day. Officially, he denies having broken the law, even by uploading pirated software to the trading sites he visited. He admits only that he got unwanted attention from the authorities due to his explorations. Others who might know differently could have a tough time proving it was really Mudge they were dealing with. When it came time to fill out forms to apply for a US government security clearance, Mudge’s list of aliases ran for ten pages.

How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy by Stephen Witt

4chan, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, autism spectrum disorder, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, cloud computing, collaborative economy, company town, crowdsourcing, Eben Moglen, game design, hype cycle, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, inventory management, iterative process, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, job automation, late fees, mental accounting, moral panic, operational security, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pirate software, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, security theater, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, software patent, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, Tipper Gore, zero day

Getting a disk in the mail—or, less commonly, in a hand-to-hand transfer—was like Christmas morning, with royalty-free versions of Duke Nukem and Wing Commander under the tree. Now, on IRC, every day was Christmas, with a preprogrammed script known as a “bot” playing the role of automated Santa, instantly filling your wish list of cracked files on demand. With satellite download, you could fill your 1-gigabyte hard drive with pirated software in a matter of hours. The cracked files were known as “warez,” an ironic derivation of “software.” Warez was a singular term; it was also a plural one, and a subculture, and a lifestyle. Soon Glover was spending a lot of time in IRC’s #warez channel—too much time, as he later would admit.

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In addition to the street bikes and the pit bulls and the Quad Squad, there were now the continuing online adventures of ADEG. In later years he wouldn’t quite remember exactly when he’d found it. The Internet had a hypnotic effect that seemed to dilate the flow of time. Probably it was late in 1996, or maybe early in 1997, when Glover first heard the good news: not only was there a brisk trade in pirated software, but there existed a growing channel for pirated music as well. This perplexed Glover, who knew from memory that a compact disc held more than 700 megabytes of data. Doing the mental arithmetic, he figured that it would take nearly an hour to download a CD, and the resulting file would take up more than 70 percent of his computer’s storage.

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But Glover was directed to a new IRC channel: #mp3. There, among thousands upon thousands of users, engaged in complex technical chatter and trading profane, often racially charged insults, he found CD music files that had somehow been shrunk to one-twelfth of their original size. Those warez guys, it turned out, didn’t just pirate software. Music, games, magazines, pictures, pornography, fonts—they pirated anything that could be compressed. They called this subculture “The Warez Scene,” or, more commonly, just “The Scene.” Scene members organized themselves into loosely affiliated digital crews, and those crews raced one another to be the first to release newly pirated material.

The Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling

Apple II, back-to-the-land, Future Shock, game design, ghettoisation, Hacker Conference 1984, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, index card, informal economy, information security, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, machine readable, Mitch Kapor, pirate software, plutocrats, radical decentralization, Silicon Valley, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological determinism, The Hackers Conference, the scientific method, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review

The first police sting-boards were established in 1985: "Underground Tunnel" in Austin, Texas, whose sysop Sgt. Robert Ansley called himself "Pluto"—"The Phone Company" in Phoenix, Arizona, run by Ken MacLeod of the Maricopa County Sheriff's office—and Sgt. Dan Pasquale's board in Fremont, California. Sysops posed as hackers, and swiftly garnered coteries of ardent users, who posted codes and loaded pirate software with abandon, and came to a sticky end. Sting boards, like other boards, are cheap to operate, very cheap by the standards of undercover police operations. Once accepted by the local underground, sysops will likely be invited into other pirate boards, where they can compile more dossiers. And when the sting is announced and the worst offenders arrested, the publicity is generally gratifying.

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Stolen credit card numbers, being riskier and more valuable, were less often publicly posted on boards—but there is no question that some underground boards carried "carding" traffic, generally exchanged through private mail. Underground boards also carried handy programs for "scanning" telephone codes and raiding credit card companies, as well as the usual obnoxious galaxy of pirated software, cracked passwords, blue-box schematics, intrusion manuals, anarchy files, porn files, and so forth. But besides their nuisance potential for the spread of illicit knowledge, bulletin boards have another vitally interesting aspect for the professional investigator. Bulletin boards are cram-full of EVIDENCE.

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The audience listened with close attention, angry mutters rising occasionally: "He's trying to teach us our jobs!" "We've been thinking about this for years! We think about these issues every day!" "If I didn't seize the works, I'd be sued by the guy's victims!" "I'm violating the law if I leave ten thousand disks full of illegal PIRATED SOFTWARE and STOLEN CODES!" "It's our job to make sure people don't trash the Constitution—we're the DEFENDERS of the Constitution!" "We seize stuff when we know it will be forfeited anyway as restitution for the victim!" "If it's forfeitable, then don't get a search warrant, get a forfeiture warrant," Godwin suggested coolly.

Cancel Cable: How Internet Pirates Get Free Stuff by Chris Fehily

Firefox, patent troll, peer-to-peer, pirate software, power law, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, WikiLeaks

Chapter 15 – Applications and Games A sampling of software that you can download: Business and home — accounting, communication, database, flowcharting, networking, personal finance, presentation, project management, reports and forms, schedule and contact management, spreadsheet, tax prep, training, travel, word processing Children — activities, art, early learning, games, interactive books, literature, math, nature, reading, reference, science, socialization, parental controls, problem solving, virtual pets Creative — 3D, animation, clip art, cooking, fashion, hobbies, illustration, music and audio, photo and video editing, publishing Education and reference — arts, culture, dictionaries, encyclopedias, foreign languages, geography, history, literature, mapping, religion, science, script and screen writing, secondary education, sound libraries, test prep, typing, writing Games — all operating systems, mobile devices, and consoles Operating systems and servers Professional — 3D modeling, architecture, drafting/CAD, forensics, IDEs and compilers, engineering, legal, mapping/GIS, mathematics, medical, statistics, virtualization, web development Utility — antimalware, archivers, backup, disk authoring, drive partitioning, file conversion, firewalls, image mounting, privacy, screen capture, security, text editors, voice recognition Pirating software is dicier than pirating media (movies, music, and so on) because the former must be installed and poses a greater threat of malware (Chapter 4). When browsing for software torrents, look for popular releases by reputable piracy groups. Some installations are easy, but you’re usually at the mercy of the torrent’s installation instructions.

Gamers at Work: Stories Behind the Games People Play by Morgan Ramsay, Peter Molyneux

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, book value, collective bargaining, Colossal Cave Adventure, do what you love, financial engineering, game design, Golden age of television, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, index card, Mark Zuckerberg, oil shock, pirate software, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, Steve Jobs, Von Neumann architecture

He asked MicroProse to join him in that effort, and I decided it was not the right thing to do. I missed a real opportunity there to combine with EA. Ramsay: He didn’t mention that in his interview. Stealey: No, he wouldn’t. I tell you, the first few games on the Apple by EA were not giant sellers. There were some real classics, but Apple users were notorious for pirating software rather than buying. The Sega deal was their big breakout effort. Ramsay: You were trying to set up an office for MicroProse in Europe. Weren’t you racing against EA to do that? Stealey: You should have seen us. Trip and I were sitting at a trade show in 1988, trying to convince each other to close down each other’s European operations.

…

Index 1st Playable Productions, Tobi Saulnier, 261–280 3D gameplay, 302 3D Home Architect, Doug and Gary Carlston, 127, 129 3DO Company, 1, 10–12 989 Studios, 169–170 1830 board game, Avalon Hill, 50 2600 console, 17, 33–34 A Able, Robert, 243 acquisitions of Sierra On-Line, 201–206 by SOE, 191 Activision, 6, 100, 103 Adam, Phil, 96 addiction, to EverQuest game, 177–178 Adventure International, Doug and Gary Carlston, 122–123 advertising, Darkwatch game, 253–254 advisors external, 28, 111 Tobi Saulnier, 266 Age of Empires, Tony Goodman, 67–68, 70–73, 76–77 Air Force Academy, Wild Bill Stealey, 37 Air Warrior, Don Daglow, 157 alarm clock, in EverQuest game, 177 Albanian American Development Foundation, 132 Albanian American Enterprise Fund, 132 algorithms, 40 Alpha Protocol, 87 Altman, Robert, 281, 291 Ampex Corporation, 18, 21 Ancient Art of War, Doug and Gary Carlston, 129 Anderson, Jason, 94–97, 100, 104 Andretti Racing, Don Daglow, 160 anti-indulgence system, 178 Antic Magazine, 41 AOL, Don Daglow, 144, 150 Apple, 258–259 Trip Hawkins' time at, 2, 7–8 users, pirating software, 47 apps, game, 257–259 Appy Entertainment, Chris Ulm, 251–260 arcade games, 13 Arcanum, Tim Cain, 96–100 Archon game, 5 artists, software, 4–5 assets, reusing, 88–89 Atari, 7, 197 acquisition by Warner Communications, 32–35 Bushnell's leaving, 34–35 buying out of Dabney, 32 competition, 31 culture at, 31 Doug and Gary Carlston, 126 growth of, 24–27, 29–30 licensing with Nutting Associates, 22–23 location of, 23 Nolan Bushnell, 17–36 online game business, 31–32 overview, 17 Pong, 27–28 role in market crash, 33 startup of, 18–22 Tim Cain, 100–101 AtariTel, 31–32 Avalon Hill, 50–51 Avellone, Chris, 80, 85, 96 B Baer, Ralph, 28 Bally Manufacturing, 24, 26, 30 Balsam, David, 128 Bank Street Writer, Doug and Gary Carlston, 127, 129 BannerMania, Doug and Gary Carlston, 129 Barnett, Mike, 287 Bayne, Gresham, 316 Becker, Alan, 308 benefits, employee 1st Playable, 264, 280 Naughty Dog, 311 Bennette, David, 154 Bethesda Softworks, 89, 281–295 Bigham, Dane, 129 Billings, Joel, 144 BioWare, 85–86 Black Isle Studios, closure of, 79 Blackley, Seamus, 112 Blair, Gerry, 50 Boog-Scott, John, 61–62, 67 books, written by Ken Williams, 206 The Bourne Conspiracy game, 256 Boyarsky, Leonard, 94–97, 100, 104 brand extension, focus on at Sierra On-Line, 200 Brathwaite, Brenda, 149 Braun, Jeff, 237 Bricklin, Dan, 39 Bröderbund, 6 Don Daglow, 133, 135–137, 144 Doug and Gary Carlston, 122, 132 Brubaker, Lars, 82 Buchignani, Mark, 141 Budge, Bill, 5 budgets, for Sierra On-Line projects, 203–204 building engines, 87 Bunnett, David, 141 Bunten, Dan, 5–6 Burr, Egan, Deleage ' Co, Doug and Gary Carlston, 131 Busch, Kurt, 234 Bushnell, Nolan, 241 business aspects, Verant Interactive, 173–174 business is war philosophy, 196 business planning Atari, 20 Oddworld Inhabitants, 223–225 Verant Interactive, 172 Wild Bill Stealey, 44–45 ByVideo, 17 C CAA (Creative Artists Agency), 109–110 Cabbage Patch Kids, 268–269 Cain, Tim, cofounder of Troika Games, 93–105 Calhoun, John, 62 Call Doctor service, 316 Cameron, James, 216–217, 238 capability, 1st Playable, 277 Capcom, 254 capitalism, Lorne Lanning comments on, 221–222 Carbine Studios, Tim Cain, 105 career path Christopher Weaver, 282–283 Lorne Lanning, 209–218 Ted Price, 316–317 Tobi Saulnier, 261–263 Carlston, Cathy, 125, 130, 133 Carlston, Doug, 132–133, 135–136 Carlston Family Foundation, 132 Carlston, Gary, 132–133 Carmack, John, 149 Carmen Sandiego Don Daglow, 134 Doug and Gary Carlston, 127–128 Case, Steve, 144 cash flow, Don Daglow, 151–153 Catalyst Technologies, 17 CBS Software, 42 Cerny, Mark, 303–304, 306–307, 318–319 Chaimowitz, Ron, 233 Chapman, Thad, 62 The Chicago Coin Speedway, 24 Chicago, manufacturing in, 23 Chopper Rescue, Sid Meier, 42 Christian, Brian, 269 Chuck E.

…

See also EverQuest game Mattel Don Daglow, 136 Doug and Gary Carlston, 132 Maxis, Don Daglow, 134 Maxwell, Robert, 55 McDonagh, Bill, 125 McKenna, Sherry, 209, 220 career, 219 recruitment of, 210 McKinsey ' Company, 38 McNamara, Andy, 308 Media Technology, 282 medical insurance, 82 Meier, Sid, 39 Chopper Rescue, 42 Civilization, 51 cofounder of MicroProse Software, 37 F-15 Strike Eagle, 43 famous software star, 49 financial investments, 45 Floyd of the Jungle, 42 M1 Tank Platoon, 48 one-on-one selling, 43 Railroad Tycoon, 50 Silent Service, 48 Solo Flight, 43 mentoring, Don Daglow, 141–142 mentorship program, 1st Playable, 277 mergers and acquisitions, Doug and Gary Carlston, 130 MicroProse history of company name, 41 self-publishing, 47 Wild Bill Stealey, 37–57 Microsoft Flight Simulator, 44 Tony Goodman, 68–77 microtransactions, at SOE, 183–184, 191 middleware, licensing, 87 military duty, of Wild Bill Stealey, 38 Min, Art, 111 mission statement, Juntion Point Studios, 117 mobile devices, games for, 257–259 mobile games Digital Chocolate, 12–15 overview, 190 Molder, Stuart, 70, 73 Molyneux, Peter, 219 Monahan, Darren, 81 Morby, Jacqui, 197 MoveOn.org, 132 MPS Software, 41 M.U.L.E. game, 5–6 multilevel pinball machine, 27 multiplayer games, Digital Chocolate, 12–13 multiproject studios, 81 Myst, 129, 135 Mystery House game, 193, 195–196 N Nakazawa, Minoru, 123–124, 234 name recognition, Don Daglow, 153–155 Namuonglo, Thonny, 67 NanoStar platform, 13 Napster, 211 NASCAR, Don Daglow, 158–162 Naughty Dog, cofounder Jason Rubin, 297–313 Needham, John, 174 Neverwinter Nights, 144, 151, 154, 157 Neverwinter Nights 2, 87 NGE (New Game Enhancements), Star Wars Galaxies, 181–182 Nintendo, 8, 11 Nolan Bushnell, 17–36 NOVA, 132 Noyce, Bob, 28 Nutting Associates, 20, 22, 24, 30 O Obsidian Entertainment early challenges, 82–83 expansion, 81 Feargus Urquhart, 79–91 funding, 81 future of, 90 hands-on leadership, 83–84 overview, 79 owners of, 80–81 Star Wars, Knights of the Old Republic II, 84 start up of, 80 technology challenges, 86–87 Obsidian, Tim Cain, 105 Oddmob, 249 Oddworld Inhabitants, Lorne Lanning, 209, 250 Ohmert, Steve, 129 Old Time Baseball, Don Daglow, 156 Olds, Steve, 230 On Balance, Doug and Gary Carlston, 129 On-Line Systems, 193–195 One on One game, 5 one-on-one selling, 43 Origin Systems, 50 Orr, Bobby, 287 Outpost game, 200–201 Overstrike, 324 Ozark Softscape, 5 P Paradox, Tony Goodman, 61–62 parents, and violent games, 182 Park Place Productions, 170 Parker, Chris, 80 payrolls, 81 PC Globe, 131 Perry, Dave, 246 personnel, hiring and management Don Daglow, 158 Doug and Gary Carlston, 125–126, 129 Tim Cain, 98–100 Tony Goodman, 64 Peters, Tom, 137 Phantasmagoria game series, 201–203 Piehl, Hudson, 141 Pillow Pets, 273 Pinball Construction Set game, 5 pinball machines, multilevel, 27 Pinkalicious, 273 Pirates!, Sid Meier, 37, 48 pirating software, Apple users, 47 Planescape, Torment, 86 PlanetSide game, 172, 184 platform development, 10–12 Platform Publishing label, 184 platforms, working with different, 186–188 PlayStation, 186–188, 319 playtesters, 50 Ploughshares Fund, 132 Pong, 25, 27–28, 30, 122 Presage, Doug and Gary Carlston, 129 price of 3DO hardware, 11 Price, Ted, founder of Insomniac Games, 315–328 Print Master, 131 Print Shop, 127–128, 131, 133 Program Store, Doug and Gary Carlston, 123 projects selection of at SOE, 179–180 selection of at Verant Interactive, 175 walking away from, 90 public company, Electronic Arts as, 8–9 publisher-developer industry, 24 publishers, Darkwatch game, 253–254 publishing games, Don Daglow, 134–136 publishing process, at Electronic Arts, 4–5, 9 Q quality of life 1st Playable, 278 Bethesda Softworks, 294 Quantum Computer Services, Don Daglow, 144 R Railroad Tycoon, 37, 50 Ratchet ' Clank, Going Commando, 322–323 rating system, 182–183 Raymo, Rick, 234 recruiting development talent Christopher Weaver, 293 Oddworld Inhabitants, 230–231 Tobi Saulnier, 265–266 Red Baron game, 39 Rein, Mark, 248 Reiner, Andy, 308 reinforcement, variable-ratio, 14 Renaissance, Tony Goodman, 63 research, at Verant Interactive, 176 Resistance, Fall of Man, 323–324 rest system, 178 retail distribution of online games, 188 retail experience, Apple, 259 reusable code, Tony Goodman, 61 reusing technology, 88–89 reviews of games, 89, 115 Rhythm and Hues, 210–211 Rings of Power, 299 Rise of Rome, 70 risk, reducing from publishers perspective, 91 Roberts, Chris, 246 Roberts, Ty, 154 Robot Entertainment, Tony Goodman, 77–78 Rolie Polie Olie, 269 Romero, John, 149 royalties Doug and Gary Carlston, 126–129 Tony Goodman, 72 Rubin, Jason, 297–313 S sale, of Sierra On-Line, 197–199 Salzburg Seminar, 132 Sammy Studios, 251–252 SCEA (Sony Computer Entertainment America), 169 Schilling, Curt, 51 Schlichting, Mark, 128 Schmidt, Fred, 50 Schram, Scott, 129 security of game business, 111 Sega, 9–11, 47 self-publishing MicroProse, 47 Tony Goodman, 62–63, 68 Shanks, Russell, 170, 173–174 Shannon, Lorelei, 201 sharing technology, 86 Shelley, Bruce, 67, 71 shopping experience, Apple, 259 Sierra On-Line, 126, 193–207 Sierra, Tim Cain, 98, 100 Silent Service, 37, 48 SimCity, 134, 248 Sirius Software, 126 Ski Stud, 298 skin in the game, 284 Lorne Lanning, 223–224 Tobi Saulnier, 271 Skyrim, 281 Smedley, John, cofounder of Verant Interactive, 169–191 Smith, Jay, 5 Smith, Rob, 177 Smuggers group, 39 social games, 12–14, 189–190, 257 SOE (Sony Online Entertainment), 169–175, 178–191 SoftKey (The Learning Company), Doug and Gary Carlston, 131–132 SoftSel, 7 software artists, at Electronic Arts, 4–5 cost of, 217 legitimate, 81 Software Development Corporation, 2 Software Publishers Association, 49, 53 Solo Flight, 43–44 Meier, Sid, 43 Sony, 11 Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA), 169 Sony Imagesoft, 170 Sony Online Entertainment (SOE), 169–175, 178–191 Sony PlayStation, 302, 319 Sovereign game, 172 Spector, Caroline, 110 Spectrum Holobyte, 37, 54 Spinnaker company, 197–199 sports games, 170 SportsDashboards, 132 Spyro, 320–321 Squad Leader, Avalon Hill, 51 Square, 188 SSI, Don Daglow, 144, 149–150 St.

AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, bike sharing, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Chrome, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, ImageNet competition, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, pattern recognition, pirate software, profit maximization, QR code, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, Solyndra, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

The year was 2010, and Guo was responsible for the influential Zhongguancun (“jong-gwan-soon”) technology zone in northwest Beijing, an area that had long branded itself as China’s answer to Silicon Valley but had not really lived up to the title. Zhongguancun was chock-full of electronics markets selling low-end smartphones and pirated software but offered few innovative startups. Guo wanted to change that. To kick-start that process, he came to see me at the offices of my newly founded company, Sinovation Ventures. After spending a decade representing the most powerful American technology companies in China, in the fall of 2009 I left Google China to establish Sinovation, an early-stage incubator and angel investment fund for Chinese startups.

…

So officials turned the walking street into a “Book City” packed with stores carrying modern science and engineering textbooks for students at nearby Tsinghua and Peking University to pore over. By the year 2010, the rise of the Chinese internet had driven many of the bookstores out of business, replacing them with small storefronts hawking cheap electronics and pirated software—the raw ingredients of China’s copycat era. But Guo wanted to turbocharge an upgrade to a new era of indigenous innovation. His original small-scale experiment in attracting Sinovation Ventures via rent subsidies had succeeded, and so Guo planned to refurbish an entire street for high-tech tenants.

Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers by Andy Greenberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, air gap, Airbnb, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, call centre, Citizen Lab, clean water, data acquisition, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, false flag, global supply chain, Hacker News, hive mind, information security, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, machine readable, Mikhail Gorbachev, no-fly zone, open borders, pirate software, pre–internet, profit motive, ransomware, RFID, speech recognition, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, tech worker, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, zero day

Even then, through that spring, Lee says he found himself combating misinformed or Pollyannaish government officials who had told energy utilities the Ukrainian attacks couldn’t have occurred in the United States. Representatives from the Department of Energy and NERC had comforted grid operators that the Ukrainians had used pirated software, had left their networks unsecured, and hadn’t even run antivirus software. None of that was true, according to Lee and Assante. But above all, Lee argued that the U.S. government had made an even greater, irreparable mistake: not simply being slow to warn the public and potential targets about Sandworm, or downplaying its dangers, but failing to send a message to Sandworm itself—or anyone else who might follow its path.

…

With the news that a security patch was available, a new question arose: How many people had actually installed that patch? Updating software protections around the world has never been a simple fix so much as a complex epidemiological problem. Systems administrators neglect patches, or don’t account for all their computers, or skip patches for fear they’ll break features of software they need, or run pirated software that doesn’t receive patches at all. All of that means getting a security update out to vulnerable machines is often as involved and imperfect a process as getting humans around the world vaccinated, long after a vaccine is discovered. Over the next days, hints of the population of machines still unpatched against EternalBlue began to emerge.

Practical Packet Analysis: Using Wireshark to Solve Real-World Network Problems by Chris Sanders

Debian, OSI model, peer-to-peer, pirate software, RFC: Request For Comment

A quick search for this port number at http://www.iana.org will list the services associated with this port. Summary The Gnutella network is commonly used for the downloading and distribution of various file types. This idea may sound great at first, but unfortunately, it has resulted in a large peer-to-peer network of pornography as well as pirated software, movies, and music. In this scenario, it seems that Tina, or someone using Tina's computer, has installed some form of Gnutella client in order to download pornographic material. Final Thoughts If you look at way each of these scenarios was resolved, you will notice that most of the problems were not actually network related.

The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive by Dean Baker

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, business cycle, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, corporate governance, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Doha Development Round, financial innovation, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, medical residency, patent troll, pets.com, pirate software, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Robert Shiller, Silicon Valley, too big to fail, transaction costs

[97] The “say on pay” provision of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill requires companies to have nonbinding shareholder votes on executive compensation packages. This is a step forward that will at least call greater attention to outlandish pay packages, but by itself is likely to have little effect on CEO pay. [98] This figure is derived from the industry’s claim that the value that it assigns to “pirated” software was $59 billion in 2010 and that this was equal to 42 percent of total software shipments; see Business Software Alliance (2011). [99] Milliot (2010). [100] Newzoo (2011). [101] There is a whole industry of “patent trolls,” individuals or firms that buy up patents with the hope of finding a major innovation that is arguably derivative of the patent in question.

Eastern standard tribe by Cory Doctorow

airport security, call centre, forensic accounting, high net worth, machine readable, moral panic, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, pirate software, Silicon Valley, the payments system

We should do something, you know, Audie?" "Not really my area of expertise," Audie said in clipped tones. "I would if I could, you know that, right Art? We're family, after all." "Oh, sure," I say magnanimously. But now that I'm looking at them, my cousins who got into a thousand times more trouble than I ever did, driving drunk, pirating software, growing naughty smokables in the backyard, and got away from it unscathed, I feel a stirring of desperate hope. "Only..." "Only what?" Alphie said. "Only, maybe, Audie, do you think you could, that is, if you've got the time, do you think you could have a little look around and see if any of your contacts could maybe set me up with a decent lawyer who might be able to get my case reheard?

Computer: A History of the Information Machine by Martin Campbell-Kelly, William Aspray, Nathan L. Ensmenger, Jeffrey R. Yost

Ada Lovelace, air freight, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, Byte Shop, card file, cashless society, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, deskilling, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Jenner, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, garden city movement, Gary Kildall, Grace Hopper, Herman Kahn, hockey-stick growth, Ian Bogost, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, natural language processing, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, optical character recognition, packet switching, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pirate software, popular electronics, prediction markets, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Robert X Cringely, Salesforce, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the market place, Turing machine, Twitter Arab Spring, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, young professional

During the first quarter of 1975, MITS received over $1 million in orders for the Altair 8800 and launched its first “worldwide” conference. Speakers at the conference included Ed Roberts, Gates and Allen as the developers of Altair BASIC, and the computer-liberation guru Ted Nelson. At the meeting Gates launched a personal diatribe against hobbyists who pirated software. This was a dramatic position: he was advocating a shift in culture from the friendly sharing of free software among hobbyists to that of an embryonic branch of the software-products industry. Gates encountered immense hostility—his speech was, after all, the very antithesis of computer liberation.

…

It was around this time that he teamed up with Steve Jobs, five years his junior, and together they went into business making “blue boxes”—gadgets that mimicked dial tones, enabling telephone calls to be made for free. While blue boxes were not illegal to make and sell, using them was illegal, as it defrauded the phone companies of revenues; but many of these hobbyists regarded it as a victimless crime—and in the moral climate of the West Coast computer hobbyist, it was pretty much on a par with pirating software. This in itself is revealing of how far cultural attitudes would shift as the personal computer made the transition from hobby to industry. Despite his lack of formal qualifications, Wozniak’s engineering talent was recognized and he found employment in the calculator division of Hewlett-Packard (HP) in 1973; were it not for what amounted to a late-twentieth-century form of patronage that prevailed in the California electronics industry, Wozniak might have found his career confined to that of a low-grade technician or repairman.

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks by Scott J. Shapiro

3D printing, 4chan, active measures, address space layout randomization, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, availability heuristic, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Brian Krebs, business logic, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Debian, Dennis Ritchie, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, evil maid attack, facts on the ground, false flag, feminist movement, Gabriella Coleman, gig economy, Hacker News, independent contractor, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Linda problem, loss aversion, macro virus, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Minecraft, Morris worm, Multics, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, pirate software, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, SQL injection, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological solutionism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the new new thing, the payments system, Turing machine, Turing test, Unsafe at Any Speed, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero day, éminence grise

Robert Morris was convicted of releasing his worm because he released it on the early internet, thereby ensuring that he would access a government computer. But it was unclear how federal authorities would handle purely DOS viruses. According to Vesselin, the lack of civil or criminal penalties for pirating software was a symptom of a larger problem: “There is no such thing as ownership of computer information in Bulgaria. Therefore, the modification or even the destruction of computer information is not considered a crime since no one’s property is damaged.” Even public opinion was on the virus writer’s side.

…

In this one answer, Dark Avenger listed the most common defenses virus writers use for their activities: (1) no one had computers to infect; (2) only rich people had computers to infect; (3) computers are toys, so damaging their data is not harmful; (4) I had no idea there could be damaging consequences; (5) my viruses were not intended to infect other computers; (6) viruses don’t infect computers, people infect computers when they use pirated software. Sarah had heard these excuses before and decided to drill down on Dark Avenger’s reasons. She began by asking him why he started to write viruses. He responded that he wrote them out of curiosity. Ironically, the motivation for writing his first virus, Eddie, was reading the translated article in Computer for You that Vesselin had helped to correct.

The Network Imperative: How to Survive and Grow in the Age of Digital Business Models by Barry Libert, Megan Beck

active measures, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, asset light, autonomous vehicles, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, business intelligence, call centre, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, disintermediation, diversification, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, future of work, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, independent contractor, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of writing, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, late fees, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Oculus Rift, pirate software, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, software as a service, software patent, Steve Jobs, subscription business, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Wall-E, women in the workforce, Zipcar

Plant, production, and operations Client or customer services Research and development Digital development (cloud, big data analytics, social, and mobile) What risks are of greatest concern to your organization? Damage to PPE, loss of inventory Loss of key employees Inability to protect your IP (pirated software, generic drugs, etc.) Loss or declining loyalty of customers Which of the following activities is most important for the competitive success of your organization? Efficient manufacturing, distribution, and operations Hiring the right talent and keeping utilization up Protecting IP and developing new technologies Creating customer interactions and tapping in to the crowd What KPIs are the most important for leaders to track in your firm?

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth

4chan, active measures, activist lawyer, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boeing 737 MAX, Brexit referendum, Brian Krebs, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Vincenzetti, defense in depth, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, index card, information security, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, lockdown, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral hazard, Morris worm, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, NSO Group, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open borders, operational security, Parler "social media", pirate software, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, Seymour Hersh, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

Some started live-tracking the infections on a map. Within twenty-four hours, 200,000 organizations in 150 countries had been infested. Only Antarctica, Alaska, Siberia, mid-Africa, Canada, New Zealand, North Korea, and a wide swath of the American West were spared. Hardest hit were China and Russia, both known for using pirated software. In China, 40,000 institutions were infected. And though Russian officials at the state’s powerful Interior Ministry initially denied it, over a thousand Ministry computers had been roasted. As analysts started dissecting the ransomware code, they dubbed the attacks WannaCry—not because the word perfectly encapsulated the way so many victims felt—but because of a tiny snippet left in the code: “.wncry.”

…

Now engineers at Microsoft were stuck working around the clock to figure out how to patch these older, vulnerable systems. Once again, Microsoft was working overtime to clean up the government’s mess. In many ways, the United States had dodged a bullet. Unlike Russia and China, U.S. companies were at least cognizant enough to not use pirated software. Save for FedEx and smaller electric utilities and manufacturing facilities around the country, most U.S. networks had been spared the damage. But Smith was already bracing for the next attack. Each new attack had a way of building on the last, and chances were the next attack wouldn’t be so reckless.

Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future by Joi Ito, Jeff Howe

3D printing, air gap, Albert Michelson, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Burning Man, business logic, buy low sell high, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital rights, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, frictionless, game design, Gerolamo Cardano, informal economy, information security, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, move 37, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pirate software, power law, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, Productivity paradox, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Singularitarianism, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Two Sigma, universal basic income, unpaid internship, uranium enrichment, urban planning, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Kalish of the Associated Press described Zero-Knowledge Systems as “a peddler of cyberspace disguises,” and said, “While the service is intended to give Internet users greater privacy to communicate ideas or shop online, critics worry it could also allow the unscrupulous to fearlessly send abusive e-mail and exchange illegal goods such as child pornography and pirated software.”18 While Hill admits that some Freedom users abused the system—threats against the president of the United States were depressingly common—he says, “We saw thousands of more positive uses of our technology than ever negative.” In fact, Freedom was designed from the ground up to discourage abuse, from the monetary cost of the service to its implementation of pseudonymous, not anonymous, identities.

Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software by Nadia Eghbal

Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Big Tech, bitcoin, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, commons-based peer production, context collapse, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, death of newspapers, Debian, disruptive innovation, Dunbar number, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Ethereum, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, Induced demand, informal economy, information security, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kubernetes, leftpad, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, node package manager, Norbert Wiener, pirate software, pull request, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Ruby on Rails, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two-sided market, urban planning, web application, wikimedia commons, Yochai Benkler, Zimmermann PGP

The bundling strategy still works in some instances. Apple still commoditizes software by keeping it tightly coupled with its hardware. Big game companies, like Microsoft Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo, also combine game software with a hardware platform lock-in. But it was always possible to pirate software, or to photocopy a book containing code. And as our lives moved increasingly online, code and physical form began to slide apart even further. Code by itself is not, and has never been, worth anything, and consumers already know this intuitively when they refuse to directly pay for it. These lessons were memorably encapsulated by Bill Gates’s attempts to sell BASIC in the 1970s.

DarkMarket: Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You by Misha Glenny

Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, Brian Krebs, BRICs, call centre, Chelsea Manning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, illegal immigration, James Watt: steam engine, Julian Assange, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, pirate software, Potemkin village, power law, reserve currency, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, SQL injection, Stuxnet, urban sprawl, white flight, WikiLeaks, zero day

He had loved them ever since he had first played with one as a nine-year-old in Sri Lanka. Lack of money had ensured he never had regular access, but he overcame that problem in his early twenties by accepting a place to study computer science at London’s Westminster University. Soon afterwards Renu had discovered warez, pirated software programs whose security systems had been cracked and distributed among devotees known collectively as The Scene. It was a world where he could be with friends and alone, at one and the same time. 10 GAME THEORY Eislingen, Baden-Württemberg, 2001 Just as Renu was exploring The Scene for the first time, 500 miles away in southern Germany another young computer user had stumbled across the same mysterious community.

Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who Are Bringing Down the Internet by Joseph Menn

Brian Krebs, dumpster diving, fault tolerance, Firefox, John Markoff, Menlo Park, offshore financial centre, pirate software, plutocrats, popular electronics, profit motive, RFID, Silicon Valley, zero day

He found 555 addresses that tried to infect visitors’ Web browsers, 47 containing child porn, 15 with conventional porn, 8 providing command-and-control functions that managed botnets, 5 selling scareware (the fake anti-spyware programs that trick users into thinking a download will scan and secure their computers), 4 used in financial fraud, 3 offering to pay outsiders to install malicious programs on PCs, 2 holding masses of pirated software, and 1 recruiting mules to move money around the planet. Until 2007, when the RBN got too much attention and dropped its public website, it had an official responsible for handling abuse complaints. The official generally demanded a Russian court order before cutting anyone off. But that’s not to say the company didn’t take note of such complaints—according to Zenz, it warned customers that if there was too much heat from what they were doing, it would have to charge them more.

Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground by Kevin Poulsen

Apple II, Brian Krebs, Burning Man, corporate governance, dumpster diving, Exxon Valdez, fake news, gentrification, Hacker Ethic, hive mind, index card, Kickstarter, McMansion, Mercator projection, offshore financial centre, packet switching, pirate software, Ponzi scheme, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, SQL injection, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, traffic fines, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zipcar

Chapter 3: The Hungry Programmers 1 Idaho’s Supreme Court ruled: State v. Townsend, 124 Idaho 881, 865 P.2d 972 (1993). 2 Max found an unprotected FTP file server: Cinco Network, Inc. v. Max Butler, 2:96-cv-1146, U.S. District Court, Western District of Washington. Max confirms this account but says he was primarily interested in distributing music files, not pirated software. 3 Chris Beeson, a young agent: The details of Max’s assistance to the FBI come from court filings by the defense attorney in his subsequent criminal case, USA v. Max Ray Butler, 5:00-cr-20096, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California. Details of his recruitment and his relationship with the agents come from interviews with Max and Max’s Internet writings immediately following his guilty plea.

Surprisingly Down to Earth, and Very Funny: My Autobiography by Limmy

imposter syndrome, impulse control, pirate software, placebo effect

Some of them were only doing it for that extra bit of money on their giro, just spending their time on chatrooms. But I really wanted a job, I really wanted that placement. I listened to what these tutor folk were saying, I took it all in, I read up on stuff myself, I went up the Barras and got all the pirate software, and got tuned right into it. I was fucking gasping to get out of my situation. Near the end of my course, which was eight weeks or something, I’d put together a wee portfolio of odds and ends that I’d made. I’d made some basic websites, I did some Photoshop stuff, general all-rounder things.

The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath by Nicco Mele

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, bread and circuses, business climate, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Hacker Ethic, Ian Bogost, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, lolcat, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mother of all demos, Narrative Science, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peer-to-peer, period drama, Peter Thiel, pirate software, public intellectual, publication bias, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, satellite internet, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Ted Nelson, Ted Sorensen, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Zipcar

Some of its more famous members included the Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.14 Gates drew the ire of the Homebrew Computer Club by selling something that had previously been given away free—a terrible development for hobbyists. Microsoft’s first software product, Altair BASIC, was sold at a time that software was generally bundled with a hardware purchase. Homebrew members famously started to circulate illegal copies of the software at the group’s meetings—arguably the first instance of pirating software. The Homebrew members were annoyed by a young Gates trying to sell software—it should be free! An angry Gates published an “Open Letter to Hobbyists” in the Homebrew Computer Club’s newsletter, writing, “As the majority of Hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software.”15 Jobs and Wozniak, born of the Homebrew Computer Club, took a different approach.

Red Roulette: An Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China by Desmond Shum

Asian financial crisis, call centre, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, family office, glass ceiling, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, high-speed rail, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, military-industrial complex, old-boy network, pirate software, plutocrats, race to the bottom, rolodex, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, South China Sea, special economic zone, walking around money, WikiLeaks

And even when companies were interested in the technology, we had competition. We were using proprietary software, but after one of our employees quit, a new company opened up selling the same service at a lower price. Who could we rely on to protect us? Nobody. China was the intellectual property rip-off capital of the world, churning out pirated software and DVDs with abandon; no Chinese law enforcement agency in the year 2000 was interested in taking our case. In the late spring of 2001, eighteen months into the venture, it was obvious we needed a change. We downscaled to a smaller office. We fired our new hires. It was obvious that I, too, was redundant.

Mindwise: Why We Misunderstand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want by Nicholas Epley

affirmative action, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autism spectrum disorder, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, cognitive load, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, drone strike, friendly fire, invisible hand, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, payday loans, Peter Singer: altruism, pirate software, Richard Thaler, school choice, social intelligence, the scientific method, theory of mind

You cover meals for friends while traveling and submit the receipts for reimbursement YES – 86% 72% NO – 14% 60% You pace your work to avoid getting new tasks YES – 23% 55% NO – 77% 68% You call in sick to get a day off YES – 71% 66% NO – 29% 64% You bluff about the money you currently make in a negotiation with a potential employer YES – 53% 61% NO – 47% 71% You agree to perform a task you have no real intention of performing YES – 73% 68% NO – 27% 69% You take office supplies from your office for personal use YES – 66% 62% NO – 43% 65% You pirate software from work and install it on your home computer YES – 94% 72% NO – 6% 56% You withhold information from colleagues who are competing for the same promotion YES – 25% 69% NO – 75% 52% You download copyrighted materials (songs, videos) without paying for them while working YES – 70% 69% NO – 30% 66% I asked my MBA students whether they considered various business practices to be unethical.

NeoAddix by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

8-hour work day, double helix, Kickstarter, pirate software, Silicon Valley, stealth mode startup, stem cell

Hastily ripping a Velcro strap from her hip, the young black refugee dropped a small, burningly hot oblong box onto her untidy bed. Which was where her Walkwear usually lived. One windowless room at the top of a London towerblock didn’t really give her space enough put things in neat piles. As well as the bed with its clutter of dirty clothes, tattered sheets of yesterday’s fax and scattered cards of pirate software, the room had a small carbonfibre and veneer table covered with half-eaten Jamaican take-away and a plastic chair with a cracked back, which was too uncomfortable to use. There was also a shower cubicle, tucked away in a corner, but most of the time the water didn’t work. It was years since the roads outside had been repaired, and the weight of passing trucks had long since fractured the old clay pipes.

The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey Into China's Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future by Geoffrey Cain

airport security, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, anti-communist, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Snowden, European colonialism, fake news, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Kickstarter, land reform, lockdown, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, phenotype, pirate software, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, speech recognition, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, WikiLeaks

It made piracy inevitable.4 As a goodwill gesture, Gates built a research and development laboratory in Beijing, called Microsoft Research China, later renamed Microsoft Research Asia (MRA). The lab was constructed in an emerging stretch of city blocks, Zhongguancun. This was a place where until recently farmers had roamed the area with ox carts and “men in cheap suits hawked power strips and printer ink from street-side kiosks, where pirated software was so common that the street got the name ‘Crook Street,’” wrote the journalist Mara Hvistendahl.5 But Zhongguancun was being turned into a science park that eventually came under the direct supervision of the government. Gates entrusted a rising star named Kai-Fu Lee, a citizen of Taiwan, to set up MRA.6 Lee had made a name for himself in the fields of voice recognition and artificial intelligence.

Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made by Jason Schreier

cloud computing, crowdsourcing, game design, Google Hangouts, gravity well, imposter syndrome, index card, inventory management, iterative process, Kickstarter, pirate software, side project, SimCity, spice trade, trade route

Until 1989, Poland was a Communist country, and even in the early 1990s, as the newly democratic Third Polish Republic began embracing the free market, there was nowhere in Warsaw to buy games legally. There were, however, “computer markets,” open-air bazaars where the city’s geeks would unite to buy, sell, and trade pirated software. Polish copyright laws were essentially nonexistent, so there was nothing illegal about ripping a foreign computer game to a floppy disk, then selling it for cheap at the market. Marcin Iwiński and his high school friend Michał Kiciński would spend all their spare time at the markets, bringing home whatever they could find to play on their old ZX Spectrum computers.

The Zenith Angle by Bruce Sterling

airport security, Burning Man, cuban missile crisis, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, information security, Iridium satellite, Larry Ellison, market bubble, military-industrial complex, new economy, off-the-grid, packet switching, pirate software, profit motive, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, space junk, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, thinkpad, Y2K

Fawn bought most of her clothes there, from tiny New Age retailers who made anti-allergenic clothing. Now Fawn bought herself a set of fake eBay IDs for “security reasons.” Soon she was elbow-deep in a web of electronic transactions that Van had no time or energy to oversee. The 350 used PCs showed up very quickly. Most of their hard disks were crammed with pirate software, viruses, and pornography, but that posed no problems. Van stuck the 350 PC motherboards into hand-welded frames. He installed a completely new operating system that turned them all into small components of a monster system. Grendel was installed in a spare Internet rack in the bowels of the Vault, directly connected to all-powerful servers in the NSA’s Fort Meade.

Confessions of a Microfinance Heretic by Hugh Sinclair

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Bernie Madoff, colonial exploitation, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Gini coefficient, Global Witness, high net worth, illegal immigration, impact investing, inventory management, low interest rates, microcredit, Northern Rock, peer-to-peer lending, pirate software, Ponzi scheme, principal–agent problem, profit motive, Vision Fund

Weng seemed puzzled. “Sixty-three branches? All using M2 software?” “It is as you say.” “But you only bought twenty-eight licenses.” “Oh, sorry. LAPO has twenty-eight branches.” Weng had a sniff through the databases, and saw sixty-three separate files, one per branch as would be expected. This was mainly pirate software. Weng had perhaps sold only 200 or 300 licenses of his software ever, worldwide, and LAPO had apparently stolen 35 already, and according to their aggressive expansion plan were intending to steal one more license a fortnight. Weng was clearly annoyed, but I pleaded with him to continue working on the condition that I would confront the CEOs of LAPO, Grameen Foundation USA, and Triple Jump to ensure that he would be fully reimbursed for all licenses (which did in fact happen some months later), and Weng reluctantly agreed to continue.

The Googlization of Everything: by Siva Vaidhyanathan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AltaVista, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, data acquisition, death of newspapers, digital divide, digital rights, don't be evil, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full text search, global pandemic, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, libertarian paternalism, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pirate software, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, single-payer health, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, urban decay, web application, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

The Internet has thus fomented political and religious hatred and violence. Millions of poor people have been able to access Internet services in recent years, thanks to the proliferation of cafes and hot spots in urban India, and they have generated what Liang calls significant “illegal information cities” by using pirated software, discarded or hacked hardware, and stolen electricity. But the marginal improvements to their lives have been trivial compared with the environmental and civic costs they THE GOOGL IZAT I ON OF T HE WORL D 141 have incurred and the outlandish benefits rendered to the elites. The major effects of the Internet on India thus far have been incivility and inequality, not the makings of a global civil society.62 Linguistic differences are, or course, another barrier to the creation of a genuinely global civil society.

Some Remarks by Neal Stephenson

airport security, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cable laying ship, call centre, cellular automata, edge city, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, Hacker Ethic, high-speed rail, impulse control, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, megaproject, music of the spheres, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, packet switching, pirate software, Richard Feynman, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Snow Crash, social web, Socratic dialogue, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, trade route, Turing machine, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, X Prize

One day, on the outskirts of Shanghai, I stumbled across a brand-new computer store with several large floral arrangements set up in front. A brass plaque identified it, imposingly enough, as the Shanghai Fanxin Computer System Application Technology Research Institute. Walking in, I saw the usual rack full of badly printed manuals for pirated software and a cardboard box brimming with long red skeins of firecrackers. The place was otherwise indistinguishable from any cut-rate consumer electronics outlet in the States, with the usual exception that it was smaller and more tightly packed together. There were a couple of dozen people there, but they weren’t acting like salespeople and customers; they were milling around talking.

Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking by E. Gabriella Coleman

activist lawyer, Benjamin Mako Hill, commoditize, Computer Lib, crowdsourcing, Debian, disinformation, Donald Knuth, dumpster diving, Eben Moglen, en.wikipedia.org, financial independence, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, ghettoisation, GnuPG, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, Jaron Lanier, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, Jean Tirole, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Wall, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, means of production, Multics, Neal Stephenson, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, pirate software, popular electronics, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, software patent, software studies, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Hackers Conference, the scientific method, The Soul of a New Machine, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, web application, web of trust, Yochai Benkler

Thanks to the holy trinity of a computer, modem, and phone line, he began to dabble in a wider networked world where there was a real strange brew of information and software to ingest. He could not resist. He began to drink himself silly with information on UFOs, bomb building, conspiracies, and other oddities, downloading different categories of software, shareware, sometimes warez (pirated software), and eventually free software.2 Initially he spent so much time chatting he would “pass out on his keyboard, multiple times.” The parents, confusing locked doors and nocturnal living with preteen angst and isolation, wondered whether they should send their son to a psychologist. Once he met like-minded peers in high school, college, or online, the boy’s intellectual curiosity ballooned.

Beautiful security by Andy Oram, John Viega

Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, Bletchley Park, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, corporate governance, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, defense in depth, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, Firefox, information security, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, market design, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Leeson, Norbert Wiener, operational security, optical character recognition, packet switching, peer-to-peer, performance metric, pirate software, Robert Bork, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, security theater, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, SQL injection, statistical model, Steven Levy, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Upton Sinclair, web application, web of trust, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

Unrestricted anonymous uploads were possible, as on many classic FTP servers, to a directory named incoming, and it was set up in the most insecure manner possible: anonymous users were able to read any of the files uploaded by other people. Among other things, this presents a risk of an FTP server being used by anonymous outside parties to store and exchanges pirated software. Bringing Data Back from the Dead After network log analysis, it was time for some forensics on the hard drive. We decided to look for fragments of logfiles (originally in /var/log) to confirm the nature of the attack as well as to learn other details. The investigation brought up the following log fragments from the system messages log, the network access log, and the FTP transfer log (fortunately, the FTP server was verbosely logging all transfers): Oct 1 00:08:25 ftp ftpd[27651]: ANONYMOUS FTP LOGIN FROM 10.10.7.196 [10.10.7.196], mozilla@ Oct 1 00:17:19 ftp ftpd[27649]: lost connection to 10.10.7.196 [10.10.7.196] Oct 1 00:17:19 ftp ftpd[27649]: FTP session closed Oct 1 02:21:57 ftp ftpd[27703]: ANONYMOUS FTP LOGIN FROM 10.10.7.196 [10.10.7.196], mozilla@ Oct 1 02:29:45 ftp ftpd[27731]: ANONYMOUS FTP LOGIN FROM 10.10.7.196 [192.168.2.3], x@ Oct 1 02:30:04 ftp ftpd[27731]: Can't connect to a mailserver.

Money Men: A Hot Startup, a Billion Dollar Fraud, a Fight for the Truth by Dan McCrum

air gap, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, Citizen Lab, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, forensic accounting, Internet Archive, Kinder Surprise, lockdown, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, multilevel marketing, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, pirate software, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, price stability, profit motive, reality distortion field, rolodex, Salesforce, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Vision Fund, WeWork

But there was also a personal element. If Marsalek had idolized Red Bull’s Mateschitz, he was completely enamoured with the good cop on the line, Jesse Willms. A business prodigy and fellow high school dropout from the suburbs of Edmonton, Willms had already won and lost one fortune made from pirated software (surrendering his Lamborghinis in a settlement with Microsoft) and at the age of twenty-one was a private jet-flying, race car-driving, Las Vegas-partying, international snake oil phenomenon. Advertising for his company’s interchangeable brands was the background noise of internet life – AcaiBurn, AcaiEdge Max, Ultra AcaiBurn, Detox Acaiburn, Extreme AcaiBurn, AcaiSlim and more.

Common Knowledge?: An Ethnography of Wikipedia by Dariusz Jemielniak

Andrew Keen, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), citation needed, collaborative consumption, collaborative editing, commons-based peer production, conceptual framework, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, Debian, deskilling, digital Maoism, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, Filter Bubble, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, Google Glasses, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hive mind, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Julian Assange, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Menlo Park, moral hazard, online collectivism, pirate software, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social software, Stewart Brand, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Hackers Conference, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, Wikivoyage, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

However, such a process is one of the typical symptoms of organizational bureaucratization (Blau & Scott, 1962), which I address in Chapter 4. The obsession with number of edits may be related with yet another phenomenon. For Alf Rehn (2004) warez (software pirate) communities depend on the gift-economy principle. Uploading pirated software is a symbolic gesture emphasizing participation in the community and influencing the giver’s status. Other researchers point out that open-source communities in general rely on the principle of gift giving to organize the social relations within the community (Raymond, 1999/2004; Bergquist & Ljungberg, 2001; Kelty, 2006).

Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Story of Anonymous by Gabriella Coleman

1960s counterculture, 4chan, Aaron Swartz, Amazon Web Services, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bitcoin, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, Debian, digital rights, disinformation, do-ocracy, East Village, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, false flag, feminist movement, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, George Santayana, Hacker News, hive mind, impulse control, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, lolcat, low cost airline, mandatory minimum, Mohammed Bouazizi, Network effects, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, pirate software, power law, Richard Stallman, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, SQL injection, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, TED Talk, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks, zero day

So terrifying was this troll’s reign that every time I utter or type u4ea to one of his contemporaries, their demeanor blackens and proceedings assume an unmatched seriousness. u4ea is Canadian. More notoriously, this troll was “founder, president, and dictator for life” of hacker group BRoTHeRHooD oF WaReZ. (“BoW” for short. Warez is pirated software. “BoW” is meant to poke fun at Bulletin Board System warez groups.) According to a former member who I chatted with online, the “paramilitary wing” of BoW, called “Hagis” (short for “Hackers Against Geeks in Snowsuits”), went on cruel hacking and pranking campaigns against targets ranging from corporations, “white hat” hackers, infosecurity gurus, and basically anyone else who got in their line of fire.

Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency by Andy Greenberg

2021 United States Capitol attack, Airbnb, augmented reality, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brian Krebs, Cody Wilson, commoditize, computerized markets, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, forensic accounting, Global Witness, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, hive mind, impulse control, index card, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, market design, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pirate software, Ponzi scheme, ransomware, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Skype, slashdot, Social Justice Warrior, the market place, web application, WikiLeaks

Soon the basic selection I had seen on my first visit there had expanded into an array of products that included rare hallucinogens, bespoke marijuana strains, MDMA, and a growing selection of harder drugs like methamphetamine, heroin, and cocaine, as well as other contraband like fake IDs and pirated software. And because the Silk Road functioned as an eBay-style community of third-party vendors signing up to sell their wares on the site rather than a centralized Amazon-style market, the diversity of its illegal inventory was growing as fast as its customer base. As the Silk Road grappled with the challenges of truly anonymous online sales, it began to come up with impressive innovations to solve them: Ratings and reviews allowed customers to trust the purity of the potentially dangerous substances ordered over the internet from faceless sellers.

The Laundromat : Inside the Panama Papers, Illicit Money Networks, and the Global Elite by Jake Bernstein

Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, British Empire, central bank independence, Charlie Hebdo massacre, clean water, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, high net worth, income inequality, independent contractor, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, liberation theology, mega-rich, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, offshore financial centre, optical character recognition, pirate software, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Skype, traveling salesman, WikiLeaks

., 213–17, 223, 227–30, 234, 237, 239–40 Kushner, Jared, 252 Kuwait, 87 Labour Party (Malta), 276–77 Lamblin, Florence, 138–39, 143 Lanata, Jorge, 192 Landsbanki, 118–23, 129 Lansky, Meyer, 30 Las Vegas, 191–95, 269 Lauber, Michael, 203 Laurin, Fredrik, 151, 189, 225–27 Lava Jato, 270–71, 284 law, 14–16, 20, 145 British Virgin Islands, 22–23, 24, 31 Delaware, 15, 31 feudal England, 28 foundation, 41–42 maritime, 30 Panama corporation, 14–16 secrecy, 145 trust, 28–29 Leigh, David, 148–51, 156, 202, 225 Leviev, Lev, 252 Levin, Carl, 72, 73, 139–40, 143–44 Lewis, Charles, 148–49, 152, 164, 273 Lewis, Joseph Charles, 111 Lhomme, Fabrice, 187 Liberia, 30, 166, 181 Libya, 60 Liechtenstein, 41–42, 93, 94, 178, 206 foundations, 41–42 Lignes Télévision, 282 Lillehammer conference, 224–27 Linkurious, 197, 247 Lions Club, 18 Li Xiaolin, 171, 203 Lockard, Lance, 127–28 London, 4, 21, 24, 50, 82, 237 HSBC in, 50, 54, 138, 202–3 real estate, 4, 32, 67, 156, 272 Shorex conference, 61–62, 70, 77 London School of Economics, 14 Long, Oliver Wesley, 39 Los Angeles, 4, 43 Lui, Frank, 31 Luo Changping, 165, 174 Luxembourg, 4, 66, 68, 75, 80–86, 90, 100, 104, 118–25, 139, 176, 258 Commerzbank raid, 205–10 Lux Leaks, 186, 188–90, 199–202, 209, 211 Mossfon operations, 118–25, 129, 184–90, 199–202, 205–11 tax evasion, 118–25, 184–90, 199–202, 205–10, 281 Lux Leaks, 186, 188–90, 199–202, 209, 211, 249 Macri, Mauricio, 241–42, 269 mafia, 29–30, 60, 257 bootlegging in Bahamas, 29–30 Cuba, 30 Gambino family, 60 Russian, 48, 51, 68, 81, 91–102 Trump and, 253, 257 Magnitsky, Sergei, 155, 252 Makhlouf, Hafez, 142 Makhlouf, Rami, 141–42 Malta, 236–37, 275–84 Malyushin, Ivan, 92 Mammadov, Anar, 261–65 Mammadov, Ziya, 262, 264 MAMSA, 126, 268 Manafort, Paul, 283 Mao Zedong, 171 Marcos, Ferdinand, 154 Marshall Islands, 181 Martinelli, Ricardo, 212, 220 Martínez, Luis, 194–95, 213 Martini, Jean-Patrick, 178–79 Mashkevich, Alexander, 258, 260 Masonic temples, 25, 33 Mastercard, 71, 72 Mathewson, John, 66, 70 Matin Dimanche, Le, 174 Matisse, Henri, 107, 112 McCain, John, 265 McClatchy, 217, 245 McDonald’s, 6, 34 McDougal, John, 73, 74, 131 McGrath, Mark, 13 MEDIS, 53 Medvedev, Dmitry, 90, 99 Mercatrade, 201 Merchant, Tony, 154 Merz, Hans-Rudolf, 131 Mexico, 1, 44–46, 140, 185, 245 M.F. Corporate Services, 193, 194 Miami, 4, 63, 72, 140, 141 Michael Geoghegan Settlement trust, 54 Michiana International, 16 Microsoft, 6, 36–38 pirated software, 36–38, 77 Middle East, 48, 66–67, 137, 139 Midland Bank, 54 Midland Resources Holding Limited, 252 Mikhael, Georgina, 178 Milan, 50, 107 Ming Pao, 165, 174–75, 244 mining, 253, 255, 259 Miss Universe pageant (2013, Moscow), 255 Modigliani, Amedeo, Seated Man with a Cane, 108–10, 240 Monaco, 104, 114 Monde, Le, 55, 153, 181, 217, 234 Swiss Leaks and, 181, 186–87, 195–96 Mondeo Industries, 81–82 Mondex Corporation, 108–10 money laundering, 3, 17–18, 26, 27, 30, 40, 48, 51, 66, 68–74, 78, 85, 252, 258 art trade and, 103–15 bearer shares, 26, 35–36, 115, 132–35, 140, 168, 181, 210 Borodin case, 93 cryptocurrencies and, 284 drug trade and, 27–28, 44–46, 138 Fidentia fraud, 42–44 global banking and, 47–60, 68–74, 79, 130–44 IRS investigations, 61–74, 161 mafia, 30 Malta and, 276–77, 283 Russia and, 88–102, 154–55, 251–61 Trump franchises and, 283 Money Laundering Abatement Act, 72 Mongolia, 154, 159 Montenegro, Sara, 284 Mora, Ramón, 11 Morgan and Morgan, 27 Morocco, 138 Moscow, 92 real estate, 255–56 2013 Miss Universe pageant, 255 Mossack, Erhard, 7–8, 9 Mossack, Jürgen, 6, 8–10, 30, 34, 35, 48, 54, 57, 69, 76, 93, 96, 128, 133, 182, 201, 211, 218, 232, 284 arrest of, 271–72 background of, 8–10 law firm beginnings, 5–7, 10, 17–18 meets Fonseca, 10, 17 Microsoft case and, 35–38 Nazi relatives of, 7–9, 235 as nominee director, 26 Panama Papers and, 235–39, 244–48, 270–72, 274 Mossack Fonseca (Mossfon), 3, 5–18 art trade and, 103–15 backdated loan documents, 85–87 Bahamas operations, 29–30, 35–38, 121, 133 Bank Rossiya network and, 90–102 BCCI and, 66–67 bearer shares, 26–27, 35–36, 132–35, 140, 168, 181, 210 beginnings of, 5–7, 10, 17–19 British Virgin Islands operations, 19–33, 41, 42, 56, 80–87, 121–23, 129, 132–45, 161, 169, 182–84, 268 China and, 163, 166–75 Commerzbank raid and, 205–10 cybersecurity, 236 damage control committee, 238–39 demise of, 268–74 drug trade and, 27–28, 44–46, 138 due diligence, 77–78, 81–83, 120, 128, 182–84, 213, 231, 262, 263 early years, 19–33 Fidentia fraud, 42–44 Franchise, 34–39, 82 FRO Inc. case, 76–78 Gordon partnership, 35–39, 76–78 growing scrutiny of, 181–84, 201–2 growth of, 79, 83, 211, 213 HSBC and, 47–60, 79, 137–44, 199 Iceland and, 116–29, 216, 228–30, 234, 238–40 ICIJ releases database of, 247–49, 267 IRS investigations and, 61–74 Luxembourg operations, 118–25, 129, 184–90, 199–202, 205–11 Malta and, 277, 281 Microsoft case, 36–38, 77 Mossfon Trust and, 39–44 Nevada operation, 191–95, 207, 208, 213, 218, 248, 269, 270 9/11 attacks and, 73 Niue companies, 31–32, 68–69, 79–80, 86 nominee directors, 26–27, 95–96, 120–21 offices raided after Panama Papers release, 244–46 Offshore Leaks and, 161, 166–77 Panama Papers and, 230–49, 268–74, 280–81 PEPs and, 81–83 Prometheus and, 218, 219–33 Russia and, 88–102, 234–35, 251–61 Süddeutsche Zeitung story on, 206–10, 217 transfer of business, 284–86 Trump’s ties to, 250–67 trusts, 28–29, 39–44, 139 2008 financial crisis and, 123–24, 128–29 U.S. market, 35, 126–27, 191–95, 269, 270 UBS and, 130–32, 135–37 video, 5–6 Mossfon Trust, 39–44, 169 Mubarak, Alaa, 182 Mubarak, Hosni, 182, 223 Mueller, Robert, 283 Munich, 220–24 Murphy, Richard, 184–85 Muscat, Joseph, 276–78, 284 Muscat, Michelle, 277 Muscat, Victor, 282 Nabila, 16–17 Nación, La, 180, 224, 242 Nahmad, David, 106, 107, 109, 111, 112, 240 Nahmad, Ezra, 106, 107, 109, 240 Nahmad, Joe, 106–10, 240 Namibia, 57 National Security Agency, 58–59, 66 Nationalist Party (Malta), 276 Nauru, 68–69 Nautilus Trustees Limited, 114–15 Nazarbayev, Nursultan, 258, 260 Nazism, 7–8, 11, 108, 235 Neo4J, 247 Netherlands Antilles, 21 Nevada, 191–95, 254 Mossfon operation, 191–95, 207, 208, 213, 218, 248, 269, 270, 285 Newfoundland, 29 New Jersey, 15, 64–66, 71 New York, 4, 35, 43, 50, 107, 110–12, 245 banking, 49, 68, 69 mafia, 60 9/11 attacks, 73 real estate, 4, 254, 257–60 New York Times, 13, 152–53, 159, 164, 196, 198, 207, 208, 239, 272, 273 Panama Papers and, 272 New Zealand, 31, 69, 79 Nigeria, 32, 54–57 bribery scheme, 54–57 Nike, 281 9/11 attacks, 73 Niue, 31–32, 34, 68, 79, 193 tax haven, 31–32, 68–69, 79–80, 86 Niue International Business Company Act, 31 Nixon, Richard, 63 nominee beneficial owners, 168–69, 183 nominee directors, 26–27, 95–96, 120–21 Nordea Bank, 79 Noriega, Manuel, 13–14, 17–18, 40, 51, 166, 220 Norman Island, 35 Northrup, 17 North Star Overseas Enterprises, 197–98 Norway, 116, 117, 124, 224–27, 245 Nougayrède, Natalie, 186 Nuix, 152 Obama, Barack, 143–44 approach to secrecy world, 254 reaction to Panama Papers, 241, 245–46, 251 Obermaier, Frederik, 207–9, 217, 222, 239 Obermayer, Bastian, 155, 189, 200, 207–9, 217, 222, 228, 231 Odebrecht, 231, 270–71 OECD, 67–69 crusade against tax havens, 67–69, 75–76 Offshore Incorporations, 163 Offshore Leaks, 145–75, 181, 188, 189, 196, 198, 215–16, 221, 231, 237 beginnings of, 145–61 China and, 162–75 database, 160–61, 197, 247 Mossfon and, 161, 166–77 publication of, 160–61, 198 Offshore Magic Circle, 280 offshore shell companies, 1–4, 15, 20 art trade and, 103–15 banking and, 47–60, 68–74, 79, 130–44 Bank Rossiya network, 90–102 British Virgin Islands, 19–33, 41, 42, 56, 72, 80–87, 99, 121–23, 129, 132–45, 161, 169, 182–84, 268 China, 162–75 drug trade and, 27–28, 44–46, 138 HSBC and, 47–60, 79, 137–44, 177–81, 186–90 Iceland, 116–29, 216, 228–30, 234, 238–40, 257–58 IRS investigations, 61–74, 161 Lux Leaks, 186, 188–90, 199–202, 209, 211 Malta and, 276–77 Mossfon and, 285 Mossfon Trust and, 39–44 Nigerian bribery scheme, 54–57 Niue, 31–32, 68–69, 79–80, 86 nominee directors, 26–27, 95–96, 120–21 Offshore Leaks, 145–77 Panama, 15–18, 25, 29, 40, 54, 56, 64, 72, 86, 93, 94, 109, 126, 134, 141, 166–69, 181, 195, 220, 223, 266 Panama Papers and, 230–49, 268–74 Paradise Papers and, 280–81 Prometheus project, 218, 219–33 Russia and, 68–69, 88–102, 146, 154–55, 251–61 signed blank documents, 26–27 Swiss Leaks, 177–81, 186–90, 195–99, 202–4, 216, 224–25 as tax havens, 27–28, 61–74 Trump and, 250–67, 283 trusts, 28–29, 39–44, 139 UBS and, 130–32, 135–37 Wheaton case, 63–66 See also tax evasion and havens oil, 82, 88, 100, 141, 253, 255, 263, 266 Olesen, Alexa, 166 Olszewski, Marianna, 169 Omicron Collections Limited, 115 Operation Tradewinds, 63 Operation Virus, 143 OVE Financial, 99–100 Owens, Ramsés, 39–44, 79, 86, 126–28, 169, 238–39, 284 Fidentia fraud and, 42–44 Mossfon Trust and, 39–44 Oxfam, 125 Ozero, 91, 96, 97 Ozon, 97 Paesa Sánchez, Francisco, 80–81 País, El, 153, 174, 177 Pakistan, 223, 272 Palmer, James, 108–9 Panama, 1–4, 5, 8–18, 51, 75, 79, 82, 211–13, 219, 223 corporation law, 14–16 coup of 1931, 11–12 demise of Mossfon and, 268–76, 284–86 drug trade, 17–18, 19 foreign ships registered in, 10 former Nazis in, 8–9, 11 foundations, 41–44 government corruption, 17–18 Mossfon offices raided, 244–46 1989 invasion, 40 “offshore” jurisdiction, 15 oligarchy, 18 politics, 10–14, 17, 40, 212, 220, 232, 238 real estate, 261 tax havens and offshore system, 15–18, 25, 29, 40, 42, 54, 56, 64, 72, 86, 93, 94, 109, 126, 134, 141, 166–69, 181, 195, 220, 223, 266 trusts, 28–29 Panama Canal Zone, 11, 40 Panama City, 1, 14, 18, 35, 39–40, 76, 268 Panama Papers, 3, 40, 107, 109, 114, 139, 230–74, 280, 284 database posted online, 247–49, 267 Iceland and, 228–30, 234, 237–40 John Doe source, 207–8, 231, 248–49 Malta and, 277–78 naming of, 230 Prometheus and, 219–33 publication of, 230–33, 237–38, 273 Pulitzer Prize for, 274 reaction to, 234–49 revelations, 268–74 Russia and, 234–35, 251 Trump and, 251–52 Pan World Investments Inc., 182 Papua New Guinea, 30–31 Paradise Papers (Athena Project), 275, 280–82, 284 Paris, 50, 107, 198, 138, 153, 179, 180, 197–98, 202 Charlie Hebdo massacre, 202 Patriot Act, 73 Pelosi, Nancy, 265 Pentagon Papers, 230 PEPs, 81–83, 259, 262, 263 PepsiCo, 185 Perrin, Edouard, 184–86, 188, 202, 217, 249 Peru, 195, 245 Peskov, Dmitry, 235 Peters, Richard, 23, 24 Petrobras, 231, 270 Petrol Ofisi, 266 Petrov, Gennady, 91–92 Philippines, 146, 154, 276, 281 Picasso, Pablo, 103, 106, 107, 110, 111, 112 Pilatus bank, 275, 277, 283 Pilet, François, 198 Pinochet, Augusto, 139 Pla Horrit, José Maria, 45–46 Plattner, Titus, 155, 198, 217 Porcell, Kenia, 269, 270 Porritt, Gary, 32 Portcullis TrustNet, 145, 170, 171 Porteous, Kimberley, 150 Prensa, La, 219–20 Panama Papers and, 230–33, 238, 242, 246, 248 Prevezon Holdings, 252 PricewaterhouseCoopers, 170, 184, 200, 202 Prohibition, 29–30 Prometheus, 218, 219–33 Lillehammer conference, 224–27 parallel processing, 222–23 prostitution, 251, 260 Pulitzer Prize, 274 Putin, Vladimir, 88–102, 132, 154–55, 208, 217, 223, 281, 285 background of, 89–90 Bank Rossiya network, 90–102 Mossfon files and, 88–102, 234–35, 251–61 Panama Papers and, 234–35, 251 Trump and, 250–51, 255–56 2016 U.S. election and, 250–51 Qatar, 122 Quirk, James, 184 Quirk, Matthew, 184 Reagan, Ronald, 40, 118 Red Cross, 44 Reeves, Dan, 73, 74 registration fees, 27 René, France-Albert, 60 Ren TV, 99 Republic National Bank of New York, 49, 68, 111 Republican Party, 282–83 Reuters, 188, 261 Reykjavík, 116, 117, 124, 213–14, 239 Reykjavik Media, 237 Rich, Denise, 154 Rich, Marc, 154 Richard, Laurent, 282 Riggs Bank, 59, 139 Ringier, 198, 203 Road Town, 19, 23, 32, 33, 80 Rodríguez, Rolando, 219, 220, 232–33 Roldugin, Sergei, 90, 97–98, 208, 217, 234–35, 285 Romney, Cyril B., 24, 25 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 29 Rosebud Consultants, 92 Rosneft, 98 Ross, SS, 100–102 Ross, Wilbur, 281–82 Rossotti, Charles, 73–74 Rostec, 98 Rotenberg, Arkady, 90, 100 Rotenberg, Boris, 100 Roth, William, 65, 72 Rothberg, Michael, 160 Royal Bank of Scotland, 35–36 Running Commentary (blog), 275–76, 278–79 Russell Properties, 172–73 Russia, 7, 87, 88–102, 185, 211, 221, 224 banking, 88–102, 252, 256 Bank Rossiya network, 90–102 collapse of Soviet Union, 89, 91, 93, 262 corruption, 82, 88–102 economy, 88, 93–94, 100 mafia, 48, 51, 68, 81, 91–102 Magnitsky case, 155, 252 Malta and, 276 Mossfon and, 88–102, 234–35, 251–61 oil, 82, 88, 100 oligarchy, 57, 93, 100, 252, 256, 261, 283 Panama Papers and, 234–35, 251 politics, 82, 88–102, 250–51 real estate, 255–56 sanctions on, 100 spy network, 89 tax havens and offshore system, 68–69, 88–102, 146, 154–55, 251–61 television, 99 Trump and, 107, 250–52, 255–56 2016 U.S. election and, 250–51 World War II, 7, 8 Russian Commercial Bank of Cyprus (RCB), 95–96, 99 Rybolovlev, Dmitry, 261 Ryle, Gerard, 145–61, 176–77, 221, 224–27 Falciani data and, 179–81, 186–90, 196 growth plan for ICIJ, 225–27, 272–74 Lux Leaks, 188–90, 199–202 Offshore Leaks, 145–77, 215–16 Panama Papers, 230–49, 268–74 Süddeutsche Zeitung Mossfon story and, 206–10 Swiss Leaks, 177–81, 186–90, 195–99 Sachs, Gunter, 155 Sadr Hasheminejad, Ali, 277, 283 Safra, Edmond, 48–49, 51, 52, 58 Safra Republic Holdings, 48–54, 138 Saint Moritz, 52 Saint Petersburg, 89–91, 119 Saint Thomas, 19, 22, 23 Saint Ursula, 20, 25, 33 Samoa, 56, 86, 285 Sandalwood Continental, 95–97, 99 Sangajav, Bayartsogt, 159 Santa Fé, 12–13 Sardarov, Rashid, 57 Sargasso Trustees Limited, 114–15 Sater, Felix, 257 Saudi Arabia, 16, 17, 21, 66, 67, 276 Sberbank, 256 Schembri, Keith, 275, 277 Schilis-Gallego, Cécile, 217 Schneider, Jerome, 69 Scott, Vianca, 83–84 Seattle, 1, 3 secrecy world, 3–4, 25–26, 32, 283–84 art trade, 103–15 banking, 47–60, 68–74, 89, 130–44 British Virgin Islands and, 19–33, 80–87 China and, 162–75 decline of, 143 endurance of, 276, 282, 286 Iceland and, 116–29 Offshore Leaks, 145–77 Panama Papers, 230–49, 268–74 Russia and, 88–102 Trump’s role in, 250–67 trusts, 28–29 See also global elite; money laundering; offshore shell companies; specific countries, companies, and investigations; tax evasion and havens Segnini, Giannina, 157–58, 180, 188 Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, 65, 72, 139–44 Sequoia Treuhand Trust, 94–95 sex trafficking, 276 Seychelles, 24, 59–60, 83 tax havens, 24, 42, 56, 59–60, 127, 181, 213 Shallop, Emmanuel, 199 Shamalov, Kirill, 97, 100 Shamalov, Nikolai, 91, 97 Sharif, Nawaz, 223, 272 shelf companies, 25 Shell Oil, 30 Shireburn Limited, 54 Shleynov, Roman, 146, 154–55 Shnaider, Alexander, 251–52 Shorex conference, 61–62, 70, 77 Shvets, Yuri, 91 Shyfrin, Eduard, 251–52 Siemens, 91, 97, 208 Sierra Leone, 199 signed blank documents, 26–27 Simon, Adrian, 48, 52, 136, 142, 143, 269 Simsbury International Corp., 110–11 Singapore, 24, 104, 145, 274, 280–81 Singer, Paul, 191–95, 202, 207, 208, 218 Singh, Subhash, 35–38 60 Minutes, 195, 196, 203 Skuratov, Yury, 93 slavery, 20, 60, 101–2 Snowden, Edward, 58–59, 237, 249 SOCAR, 277–78 soccer, 223–24, 240 Sochi Olympic Games, 90, 211 Société Générale, 134 Sociétés 6, 185, 186, 200 Soir, Le, 188 Solomon, John, 149–50 Sonnette Overseas, 97–98 Soros, George, 282 Sotheby’s 105, 107, 115 Sousa, Carlos, 232, 236 South Africa, 39, 132 Fidentia fraud, 42–44 Southport Management Services Limited, 94 Sovereign Society, 126–28 Soviet Union, collapse of, 89, 91, 93, 262 See also Russia Spain, 9, 80–81, 114–15, 153, 174, 179, 197, 199, 245 Spiegel, Der, 153 Spink and Son, 110–11 Sputnik, 235 Standard Oil, 10 Stanhope Investments, 32 State Department, U.S., 66, 146 Stefánsson, Bardi, 229 Steinmetz, Benjamin, 53, 217, 285 Steinmetz family, 252 Stettiner, Oscar, 108–10 St.

The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone by Brian Merchant

Airbnb, animal electricity, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Black Lives Matter, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cotton gin, deep learning, DeepMind, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, gigafactory, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Higgs boson, Huaqiangbei: the electronics market of Shenzhen, China, information security, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, John Gruber, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Large Hadron Collider, Lyft, M-Pesa, MITM: man-in-the-middle, more computing power than Apollo, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, pattern recognition, peak oil, pirate software, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, special economic zone, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, TSMC, Turing test, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, zero day

A friend convinced him to start a company writing software for the Commodore Amiga, an early PC. “We wrote a program called Marauder, which was a program to make archival backups of copy-protected disks.” He laughs. “That’s kind of the diplomatic way of describing the program.” Basically, they created a tool that allowed users to pirate software. “So we had a little bit of a recurring revenue stream,” he says slyly. In 1985, Steve Jobs’s post-Apple company, NeXT, was still a small operation, and hungry for good engineers. There, Williamson met with two NeXT officers and one Steve Jobs. He showed them the work that he’d done on the Amiga, and they hired him on the spot.

The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, computer age, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Google Earth, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, invention of radio, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, lolcat, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peer-to-peer, pirate software, pre–internet, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Sinatra Doctrine, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, social graph, Steve Jobs, Streisand effect, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wisdom of Crowds, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

Given that historical memory—especially of the Stalin period—is a sensitive issue in Russia, finding fault with Memorial, which happens to be a staunch critic of the Kremlin, wouldn’t be so hard. Russian police are notorious for finding fault with the most innocuous of documents or, worse, software and operating systems. (Quite a few Russian NGOs use illegal software in their offices, often without even realizing it until it is too late; on more than one occasion, the war on pirated software, which the West expects Moscow to fight with all its vigor, has been a good excuse to exert more pressure on dissenting NGOs.) Fortunately, the courts concluded that the search had been conducted in violation of legal due process, and Memorial’s hard drives were returned in May 2009. Nevertheless, the fact that authorities had simply walked in and confiscated twenty years of work posed a lot of questions about how activists might make digital data more secure.

Jihad vs. McWorld: Terrorism's Challenge to Democracy by Benjamin Barber

airport security, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, classic study, computer age, Corn Laws, Corrections Corporation of America, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Gilder, global village, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Joan Didion, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, Live Aid, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Norbert Wiener, North Sea oil, off-the-grid, pirate software, Plato's cave, postnationalism / post nation state, profit motive, race to the bottom, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, undersea cable, vertical integration, young professional, zero-sum game

What just a few years ago Robert Reich called “the coming irrelevance of corporate nationality,” is not coming any more.23 It is here. Thomas Jefferson’s warning that merchants have no country has become a literal truth for the multinational corporations of McWorld. And the markets they ply nowadays are more anonymous still. How are nations to control the market in pirated software or smuggled plutonium? Who can police the world currency exchange? Has it even got an address? In order to confront Jihad, to whom does one write? And in what tone? “Dear nuclear terrorist, perhaps-covertly-supported-by-Iran, perhaps-trained-in-Ireland (or is it Libya?), probably-buying-in-Russia-or-Ukraine, possibly-associated-with-Hamas, but then again maybe not …?

Against Intellectual Monopoly by Michele Boldrin, David K. Levine

accounting loophole / creative accounting, agricultural Revolution, barriers to entry, business cycle, classic study, cognitive bias, cotton gin, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dean Kamen, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, experimental economics, financial innovation, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, independent contractor, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jean Tirole, John Harrison: Longitude, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, linear programming, market bubble, market design, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, new economy, open economy, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, pirate software, placebo effect, price discrimination, profit maximization, rent-seeking, Richard Stallman, Robert Solow, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, software patent, the market place, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Y2K

We could tell of similar wonders in the American automobile industry, the Swiss and German chemical industries, the worldwide oxygen steelmaking industries, the Italian textile and fashion industries, the Swiss watch industry, the wine farms of Europe and California, the Czech and Venetian glass industries, and so on and so forth.8 “Pirating” Software The idea that a software producer – say, Microsoft – could earn a profit without copyright protection always puzzles people. Without copyright protection, wouldn’t “pirates” step in and sell cheaper imitations, putting Microsoft out of business? Although this is an interesting theory of how markets work, it is not one supported by the facts.

Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order by Parag Khanna

Abraham Maslow, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, death from overwork, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Glaeser, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, flex fuel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, Islamic Golden Age, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, land reform, Londongrad, low cost airline, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, open borders, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pax Mongolica, Pearl River Delta, pirate software, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Potemkin village, price stability, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, special economic zone, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, trade route, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

But Western firms can profit when Chinese companies enter the marketplace rather than merely dumping products on it. For example, Lenovo’s purchase of an IBM division required it to legally install Windows operating software, transforming Microsoft from victim to winner in China in spite of all the pirated software circulating in the country. 30. This notion is both implied and supported by the doctrine of “small state, big society.” 31. According to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), China has twelve distinct social strata, not the usual three, which is appropriate for a country of its size. 32.

Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World by Bruce Schneier

Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bletchley Park, business process, butterfly effect, cashless society, Columbine, defense in depth, double entry bookkeeping, drop ship, fault tolerance, game design, IFF: identification friend or foe, information security, John Gilmore, John von Neumann, knapsack problem, macro virus, Mary Meeker, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, Morris worm, Multics, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, PalmPilot, pez dispenser, pirate software, profit motive, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Russell Brand, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, slashdot, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, systems thinking, the payments system, Timothy McVeigh, Y2K, Yogi Berra

These numbers were inflated, since they make the mendacious assumption that everyone who pirates a copy of (for example) Autodesk’s 3D Studio MAX would have otherwise paid $2,995—or $3,495 if you use the retail price rather than the street price—for it. The prevalence of software piracy greatly depends on the country: It is thought that 95 percent of the software in the People’s Republic of China is pirated, while only 50 percent of the software in Canada is pirated. (Vietnam wins, with 98 percent pirated software.) Software companies, rightfully so, are miffed at these losses. Piracy happens on different scales. There are disks shared between friends, downloads from the Internet (search under warez to find out more about this particular activity), and large-scale counterfeiting operations (usually run in the Far East).

We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency by Parmy Olson

4chan, Asperger Syndrome, bitcoin, call centre, Chelsea Manning, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, hive mind, it's over 9,000, Julian Assange, lolcat, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer, pirate software, side project, Skype, speech recognition, SQL injection, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day

In the meantime, Tflow had downloaded Barr’s e-mails onto his server, then waited about fifteen hours for them to compile into a torrent, a tiny file that linked to a larger file on a host computer somewhere else, in this case HBGary’s. It was a process that millions of people across the world used every day to download pirated software, music, or movies, and Tflow planned to put his torrent file on the most popular torrenting site around: The Pirate Bay. This meant that soon, anyone could download and read more than forty thousand of Aaron Barr’s e-mails. That morning, with about thirty hours until kickoff, Barr ran some checks on HBGaryFederal.com and, just as he had expected, saw it was getting more traffic than usual.

The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? by David Brin

affirmative action, airport security, Ayatollah Khomeini, clean water, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, data acquisition, death of newspapers, Extropian, Garrett Hardin, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, Iridium satellite, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, packet switching, pattern recognition, pirate software, placebo effect, plutocrats, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Robert Bork, Saturday Night Live, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, telepresence, The Turner Diaries, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UUNET, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, workplace surveillance , Yogi Berra, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

Professor Trotter Hardy, at the College of William and Mary, says, “Anonymity is power and I think it will be abused on the Net.” The White House computer network has received anonymous death threats against the president. Electronic “mail bombs” (Trojan horse programs and viruses) can now be sent anonymously, and individuals can pirate software without being traced. There is concern that digital cash, a form of electronic money that allows for untraceable financial transactions, will usher in new forms of racketeering and money laundering. An Internet site called Fakemail let people write mail from an imaginary e-mailbox, using an alias.

Underground by Suelette Dreyfus

airport security, Free Software Foundation, invisible hand, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Loma Prieta earthquake, military-industrial complex, packet switching, PalmPilot, pirate software, profit motive, publish or perish, RFC: Request For Comment, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, uranium enrichment, urban decay, WikiLeaks, zero day

Just ring up the system with your modem and type in your details – real name, your chosen handle, phone number and other basic information. Many BBS users gave false information in order to hide their true identities, and many operators didn’t really care. Bowen, however, did. Running a hacker’s board carried some risk, even before the federal computer crime laws came into force. Pirated software was illegal. Storing data copied from hacking adventures in foreign computers might also be considered illegal. In an effort to exclude police and media spies, Bowen tried to verify the personal details of every user on PI by ringing them at home or work. Often he was successful. Sometimes he wasn’t.

Piracy : The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates by Adrian Johns

active measures, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, commoditize, Computer Lib, Corn Laws, demand response, distributed generation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, full employment, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, Mont Pelerin Society, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, pirate software, radical decentralization, Republic of Letters, Richard Stallman, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, software patent, South Sea Bubble, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, Ted Nelson, The Home Computer Revolution, the scientific method, traveling salesman, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog

This provoked the disintegration of the colloquy. Clifford Stoll, the exposer of the espionage ring, asked drily whether there had once been a “vandal’s ethic.” His point was that electronic neighborhoods were “built on trust,” as real ones were. Hackers eroded that foundation. No community could survive their “spreading viruses, pirating software, and destroying people’s work.” A contributor calling himself Homeboy went further still. “Are crackers really working for the free flow of information,” he asked, or were they in effect “unpaid tools of the establishment?” At this point, eight days into the conference, John Barlow (author of the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace) suddenly denied pointblank that a system’s flaws could justify hacking into it.

What Went Wrong: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class . . . And What Other Countries Got Right by George R. Tyler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 8-hour work day, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Black Swan, blood diamond, blue-collar work, Bolshevik threat, bonus culture, British Empire, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lake wobegon effect, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, Money creation, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, pension reform, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, pirate software, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

“We lost a product cycle—no doubt about that,” acknowledged Jon Rubinstein, former Palm CEO and an HP vice president.33 Here is how reporter Quentin Hardy of the New York Times described the final outcome of Hurd’s tactics, commonplace across the American economy: “At one time, HP also had a vaunted reputation for advanced research at its HP Labs division, which underwent such drastic cuts under Mr. Hurd that, according to one insider, scientists were relying on pirated software to run their computers.”34 Hurd’s choices and that of HP’s board resemble too many firms across the nation. Here is how the situation is described by economists and financial advisors Yves Smith and Rob Parenteau in mid-2010: “… public companies have become obsessed with quarterly earnings.

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson

1960s counterculture, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, c2.com, call centre, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, commons-based peer production, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, desegregation, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Gary Kildall, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Leonard Kleinrock, Lewis Mumford, linear model of innovation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, packet switching, PageRank, Paul Terrell, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Yochai Benkler

In February 1978 two members of the Chicago Area Computer Hobbyists’ Exchange, Ward Christensen and Randy Suess, found themselves snowed in by a huge blizzard. They spent the time developing the first computer Bulletin Board System, which allowed hackers and hobbyists and self-appointed “sysops” (system operators) to set up their own online forums and offer files, pirated software, information, and message posting. Anyone who had a way to get online could join in. The following year, students at Duke University and the University of North Carolina, which were not yet connected to the Internet, developed another system, hosted on personal computers, which featured threaded message-and-reply discussion forums.

The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K

Only a few months into Gates and Allen’s MITS adventure, a spool of their Altair BASIC tape got into the hands of a Homebrewer, who, in classic hacker fashion, made fifty copies of it to distribute to other members. Those folks made copies for their friends, and on and on. It became, observed Gates biographers Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews, “the world’s first and most pirated software.”24 The young entrepreneur was furious, and fired off the angry note that would go down in tech history as “The Gates Letter.” In it, Gates drew enduring battle lines in the tech world. On the one side, there were the people who believed information—software—should be proprietary data, protected and paid for.

The Best of 2600: A Hacker Odyssey by Emmanuel Goldstein

affirmative action, Apple II, benefit corporation, call centre, disinformation, don't be evil, Firefox, game design, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, information retrieval, information security, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, late fees, license plate recognition, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Oklahoma City bombing, optical character recognition, OSI model, packet switching, pirate software, place-making, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, RFID, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, Skype, spectrum auction, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, undersea cable, UUNET, Y2K

PayPal does not implement the hard parts of such a system, which require a trusted intermediary (not one who profits from every type of transaction, including illegitimate ones, as PayPal does), and strong cryptographic methods of ensuring identity while maintaining anonymity. PayPal is ubiquitous, but has flaws. Let the buyer, and the seller, beware. Hacking Answers by Gateway (Summer, 2007) By Franz Kafka I used to work as a technical support representative for Answers by Gateway and would serve as a corporate guardian to ensure that people calling in about pirated software or to help crack passwords were not helped. I have parted ways because my colleagues 729 94192c17.qxd 6/4/08 3:47 AM Page 730 730 Chapter 17 have a different mentality about hacking than I do. Most people who work as technicians (with some exceptions) can’t program in any language, not even in Visual Basic.