Internet sociology, programmer poetry, Elon Musk Elon Musking, and a whole lot of the internet being hacked and/or crappy.
Niceness
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.
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.
Love and kindness, one tweet at a time.
$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
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.
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.
A social engineer/penetration tester's account of an embarrassingly insecure company. Worth a read just in terms of its jaw-dropping failure. #phonehousegate
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!