IT’S A DAY of rest, and you may be in the mood for a quiet corner and a comfy chair.
We’ve hand-picked the week’s best reads for you to savour.
A deep dive into the massively sprawling world of cryptocurrency enthusiasts and the communities they have built online.
(The Guardian, reading time approximately 16 minutes)
In reports on the crypto markets, these stories generally feature people during a bull run getting rich through dumb luck or getting rich and then losing it all. Lurking in these groups provides a third angle. Here are people with complex lives and distinct needs and desires, battling their emotions – their greed and, just as important, their fear – through buying and selling. These are not, for the most part, wealthy people intent on obtaining more wealth. They are people trying to teach themselves how to get ahead in ways they believe were previously foreclosed to them.
As Western leaders struggle to understand Russia President Vladimir Putin’s mindset as he comes under increasing pressure in Ukraine, the BBC dive deep into how Putin works as a leader.
(BBC, reading time approximately 10 minutes)
The circle of those Mr Putin talks to has never been large but when it came to the decision to invade Ukraine, it had narrowed to just a handful of people, Western intelligence officials believe, all of those “true believers” who share Mr Putin’s mindset and obsessions.
3. Inside Russia’s biggest tech company
An in-depth examination of Yandex, Russia’s biggest tech company and colloquially known as the ‘Russian Google’ following Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
(WIRED, reading time approximately 26 minutes)
It had taken Volozh 20 plus years to demonstrate to the world that world-class technology, as good as anything created in the West, could come out of Russia. Indeed, he stood out as a refutation of the common Western trope, given voice last year by US president Joe Biden, that Russia “has nuclear weapons and oil wells and nothing else. Nothing else.” I had cited that quote on my call with Volozh, stressing the importance of hearing his story directly from him. But now, as Russia laid siege to its neighbor, his life’s work and aspirations seemed to be crumbling with each passing hour.
4. The UK’s top forensic investigator
A profile that examines one of the UK’s top forensic investigators, Angela Gallop, who has cracked some of the UK’s most notorious murder cases and why she fears for the future of the justice system.
(The Guardian, reading time approximately 21 minutes)
The key to her work, Gallop believes, is imagination. “People always hate when scientists use the word ‘imaginative’. They think you’ve been inventing your results,” she told me not long ago. “But it is critical.”
5. How a hacker took down North Korea’s internet
WIRED speak with a US security researcher, who was targeted by state-backed hackers from North Korea trying to steal data on the current security protocols and who struck back at North Korea and took down the country’s internet.
(WIRED, reading time approximately 8 minutes)
P4x says he’s found numerous known but unpatched vulnerabilities in North Korean systems that have allowed him to singlehandedly launch “denial-of-service” attacks on the servers and routers the country’s few internet-connected networks depend on. For the most part, he declined to publicly reveal those vulnerabilities, which he argues would help the North Korean government defend against his attacks. But he named, as an example, a known bug in the web server software NginX that mishandles certain HTTP headers, allowing the servers that run the software to be overwhelmed and knocked offline.
A team of Associated Press reporters at the frontline of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine detail their harrowing experience in Mariupol, a city that has been transformed into a battlezone and humanitarian catastrophe.
(The Journal, reading time approximately 10 minutes)
We had been documenting the siege of the Ukrainian city by Russian troops for more than two weeks and were the only international journalists left in the city. We were reporting inside the hospital when gunmen began stalking the corridors. Surgeons gave us white scrubs to wear as camouflage.Suddenly at dawn, a dozen soldiers burst in: “Where are the journalists, for f***’s sake?”I looked at their armbands, blue for Ukraine, and tried to calculate the odds that they were Russians in disguise. I stepped forward to identify myself. “We’re here to get you out,” they said.
… AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…
A detailed account from 2019 of what happened to the Malaysia Airlines 370 plane, which disappeared when flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in 2014.
(The Atlantic, reading time approximately 40 minutes)
Eleven minutes later, as the airplane closed in on a waypoint near the start of Vietnamese air-traffic jurisdiction, the controller at Kuala Lumpur Center radioed, “Malaysian three-seven-zero, contact Ho Chi Minh one-two-zero-decimal-nine. Good night.” Zaharie answered, “Good night. Malaysian three-seven-zero.” He did not read back the frequency, as he should have, but otherwise the transmission sounded normal. It was the last the world heard from MH370. The pilots never checked in with Ho Chi Minh or answered any of the subsequent attempts to raise them.
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