Link Salad, the Eastern Promises Edition

May 17, 2016 13:03

-- How Rival Gardens of Eden in Iraq Survived ISIS, Dwindling Tourists, And Each Other - Jennifer Percy, Atlas Obscura, May 2016

"On the way we came upon a small city, drowning in sunlight, and next to it, the silhouette of a Ferris wheel. “That means there are Christians nearby,” Salar said. Salar, a Sunni Muslim, had his ideas about Christians. You knew you were approaching Christians, he said, if the road turned from dry and cracked to pristine and well tended. You knew you were approaching Christians if the meridians emptied of garbage. You knew you were approaching Christians if you saw well-dressed people who smelled nice."

-- The gangsters on England's doorstep - Felicity Lawrence, The Guardian, May 11, 2016

"Some workers who were recruited in Latvia on the promise of regular work were already in debt for their air fares when they arrived, carrying suitcases of cigarettes they had been given to smuggle. Others were recruited locally, including three Latvian alcoholics who had previously been sleeping rough next to the Wisbech Tesco carpark, and using the supermarket’s toilets to wash. An acquaintance had sent them to Mezals at the BP garage. Mezals and Valujevs took them to one of their crowded gang houses and provided them with food, toiletries and work - just helping people, they said, from their own tight-knit community."

-- The day we discovered our parents were Russian spies - Shaun Walker, The Guardian, May 7, 2016

"Alex presumed there had been some mistake - the wrong house, or a mix-up over his father’s consultancy work. Donald travelled frequently for his job; perhaps this had been confused with espionage. At worst, perhaps he had been tricked by an international client. Even when the brothers heard on the radio a few days later that 10 Russian spies had been rounded up across the US, in an FBI operation dubbed Ghost Stories, they remained sure there had been a terrible mistake."

-- The inside story of Facebook’s biggest setback - Rahul Bhatia, The Guardian, May 12, 2016

"From Zuckerberg’s vantage point, high above the connected world he had helped create, India was a largely blank map. Many of its citizens - hundreds of millions of people - were clueless about the internet’s powers. If only they could see how easily they could form a community, how quickly they could turn into buyers and sellers of anything, how effortlessly they could find anything they needed - and so much more that they didn’t. Zuckerberg was convinced that Facebook could win them over, and even more convinced that this would change their lives for the better. He would bring India’s rural poor online quickly, and in great numbers, with an irresistible proposition: users would pay nothing at all to access a version of the internet curated by Facebook."

-- Double Cross: The Ukrainian Hacker Who Became the FBI’s Best Weapon-And Worst Nightmare - Kevin Poulsen, Wired, May 2016

"ONE THURSDAY IN January 2001, Maksym Igor Popov, a 20-year-old Ukrainian man, walked nervously through the doors of the United States embassy in London. While Popov could have been mistaken for an exchange student applying for a visa, in truth he was a hacker, part of an Eastern European gang that had been raiding US companies and carrying out extortion and fraud. A wave of such attacks was portending a new kind of cold war, between the US and organized criminals in the former Soviet bloc, and Popov, baby-faced and pudgy, with glasses and a crew cut, was about to become the conflict’s first defector."

non-fiction, longform, link salad

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