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Internet Niceness and Nastiness

Internet sociology, programmer poetry, Elon Musk Elon Musking, and a whole lot of the internet being hacked and/or crappy.

Niceness

esociology [meminsf.silverstringmedia.com]

Community and consent: property rights in online roleplay

This is a really fascinating read into the dynamics of how roleplayers (people who pretend to be fantasy characters) work around the limitations of MMO virtual real estate and negotiate "ownership" in a world where they technically own nothing. Also, before you make fun of them weird roleplayers, I used to do this and it's a ton of fun. I ran a "trade" guild that was actually a cloak-and-dagger spy organization that paid its roleplaying members in real gold. It was pretty sweet.

programmer poetry [motherboard.vice.com]

Can Poems About Network Optimization Get Poetry a New Audience?

This is really cute. Poetry for programmers. I'm a programmer and I like poetry that's not for programmers (AKA like almost all of it), but it's nice that someone is catering to me.

elon musk, elon musking [businessinsider.com]

Elon Musk just founded a new company to make sure artificial intelligence doesn't destroy the world

$1B to make sure that artificial intelligence doesn't destroy the world while expecting no profits? That sounds like a compsci academic's dream job. Overall, it's very cool that people are taking this seriously.

Nastiness

dark ages of the internet [motherboard.vice.com]

Pirate Bay Founder: 'I Have Given Up'

Pirate Bay founder Peter Sunde bemoans the state of the internet, highlights core insecurities, suggests blowing it up. This is a fairly depressing (and important) read, but there's an upside: people do still care about it.

what if the criminals know how to use machine learning???? [krebsonsecurity.com]

When Undercover Credit Card Buys Go Bad

Criminal credit card marketplace Rescator is using sophisticated tech to detect when cops are trying to purchase credit card packs to find patterns in the thefts. Interesting exposition on past breaches and hacks, as well.

internet insecurity [sijmen.ruwhof.net]

Epic failure of Phone House & Dutch telecom providers to protect personal data: How I could access 12+ million records

A social engineer/penetration tester's account of an embarrassingly insecure company. Worth a read just in terms of its jaw-dropping failure. #phonehousegate

i wear hoodies to hack [ibtimes.co.uk]

Mysterious hackers attempting to bring down entire internet by DDoS-ing critical servers

Hackers were able to hit important servers with five million queries a second for 48 hours. That's a lot of firepower. Also, that image. Spooky!