Author Archives

I'm a runner, reader, writer, and editor.

What Hockey Gives and What Hockey Takes Away

Getty Images

At The New Yorker, Nick Paumgarten recounts what beer-league hockey has given him over the years: occasional bragging rights, countless happy sud-soaked memories, a feeling of camaraderie, and three concussions whose lingering after effects caused him to leave the game.

The third concussion came months later, in another Intangibles game, the clock running out on a late-night midseason loss. A freak accident, a collision with a teammate: we hadn’t seen each other. I got the worst of it. The light dimmed, the ringing kicked up, and the fog rolled in again.

In the following weeks, my skull felt as though someone had draped a towel over it and was pulling down on all four corners, or maybe cinching tight a bank robber’s stocking. I had trouble concentrating. If I tried to exercise, the headache came galloping in. I couldn’t handle crowds or concerts or the ordinary din of New York. The thought of playing hockey, the sight of men playing football on TV: it seemed as reasonable to stroll on foot across the New Jersey Turnpike. After an hour or two in front of a computer screen, a kind of dizzy fatigue washed over me. I began napping a couple of times a day. The Advil stopped working. My moods darkened. My work stalled.

Read the story

Reporter Uncovers Airbnb Scam. Airbnb Shrugs, Pockets Money

(Photo Illustration by Miguel Candela / SOPA Images/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

When reporter Allie Conti got a call from her Airbnb host 10 minutes before she was supposed to check in to her rental in Chicago, “Andrew” claimed the toilet had backed up, making the unit unavailable. The good news, he said was that he had a larger place he managed nearby. Little did Allie know that she stumbled on an Airbnb scam involving nearly 100 property listings in eight cities run by fraudsters manipulating Airbnb’s weak policy standards and enforcement. What’s worse? Airbnb’s pathetic non-response deserves a zero-star review. Read her story at Vice.

The bad news, which went unstated, was that I had unknowingly stumbled into a nationwide web of deception that appeared to span eight cities and nearly 100 property listings—an undetected scam created by some person or organization that had figured out just how easy it is to exploit Airbnb’s poorly written rules in order to collect thousands of dollars through phony listings, fake reviews, and, when necessary, intimidation. Considering Airbnb’s lax enforcement of its own policies, who could blame the scammers for taking advantage of the new world of short-term rental platforms? They had every reason to believe they could do so with impunity.

That was it. No one at the company ever agreed to speak on the record about the specifics of what I uncovered. Nor would anyone answer any of my questions about Airbnb’s verification process. As far as what obligation it has to people who have fallen victim to a scam on Airbnb’s platform, the company only said in an email that it is “here 24/7 to support with rebooking assistance, full refunds and reimbursements” in cases of fraud or misrepresentation by hosts. Maybe Airbnb couldn’t get more detailed about its verification process because it doesn’t have much of one at all. I had asked the company about three accounts—Annie and Chase, Becky and Andrew, and Kris and Becky. Annie and Chase’s account has been deleted, and the two others no longer have any listings posted, which, due to Airbnb’s messaging constraints, means I could not message them for comment. Of the six other accounts I’d connected to the scheme, five are still active weeks later. Only Kelsey and Jean’s has disappeared from the site.

Even if my scammers had been slightly foiled, there was no guarantee that they couldn’t just start fresh with new profiles. The system was still in place. Airbnb has created a web of more than 7 million listings built largely on trust, easily exploitable by those willing to do so. Maybe it’s not so surprising that the company would rather play a half-assed game of whack-a-mole than answer basic questions about their verification process. For every person who doesn’t receive a complete refund, Airbnb makes money.

Read the story

The Misidentification of Raheme Malik Perry

Getty Images

On July 29th, 2018, the family of Frederick Williams said a tearful goodbye as a man was taken off life support following a suspected drug overdose at St. Barnabas, a facility run by Hospice of New York. It wasn’t until the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, as part of routine procedures, ran fingerprint tests and discovered that the body did not belong to Frederick Williams. The man taken off of life support was Raheme Malik Perry.

In this investigation at ProPublica, Joe Sexton and Nate Schweber try to figure out what went wrong and who is accountable.

Williams’ family thought he’d want to be buried with his mother at a cemetery on Long Island. Arrangements were made for that to happen. A printed program was created.

But then Naka’s team discovered the mistake. When the man’s fingerprints were fed into one of the office’s databases that stores records of people with criminal histories, another name popped up: Raheme Malik Perry.

Whatever the reasons were for the error, the way forward for Naka’s team was clear. It had to contact two families and deliver very different news. The call to the family of Williams would carry the surprise that the loved one whose death they were grieving was, in fact, alive. The call to this new family, the Perrys, would be no less strange, but its implications would be far more somber — a loved one of theirs was dead, and his death had come after he was taken off life support by strangers.

Williams acknowledges the remarkable series of events and coincidences that had to happen to produce the error at St. Barnabas. He had to lose an ID he’d had for years. It had to wind up in the pocket of a man close to him in age and appearance. That man had to have fallen in the street close to a hospital that had once treated Williams and had his information on file. The discovery of the misidentification happened only because both men had criminal records and fingerprints in a database.

Read the story

As Impossible and Imperfect as Translation

Getty Images

In this beautiful and poignant essay at Guernica, the writer Crystal Hana Kim considers how translating her grandmother’s poems from Korean to English helped her appreciate the imprecision of language not as barrier to be transversed, but as an opportunity for new connection between herself, her mother, and her grandmother.

Last month, my mother recited Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese” to me on the phone. I stopped in the middle of Washington Avenue in Brooklyn as she stumbled over the word prairie. I imagined her tongue working to shape those foreign sounds. My mother immigrated to the United States more than thirty years ago, but she has always felt self-conscious about her second language, with its hard r’s and supple l’s. “My friend suggested reading poetry in English to improve my vocabulary, since I write poetry too,” she explained in Korean.

She asked me how to pronounce words she didn’t know—despair, prairie, unrelenting. I repeated them after her, slow and then fast, with definitions and without. We talked about rhythm, image, the deceptive simplicity of Mary Oliver’s lines.

I wanted to weep. My mother and I primarily communicate in Korean, and we rarely talk about literature. We have a complicated relationship, but in that moment, I felt a new closeness—rooted not in the inextricable tie of family, but in choice. I have an immediate affinity for others who have committed to the impossible act of writing.

The more I tried to translate the poems, the more intimidated I became. I wanted to be exact and precise, but inherent in translation is interpretation, the translator’s own agency. I worried. Should I adhere to the words or the rhythms, to the sound or the meaning? Should the poem feel smooth in the translated language, or retain some of the syntactical markers of its original?

Read the story

Meet Michael Gillespie, the Ransomeware Superhero of Normal, Illinois

Getty Images

By day cancer survivor Michael Gillespie — an unassuming man who lives in Normal, Illinois, along with eight cats and his wife — works at a little computer repair shop called Nerds on Call. By night he’s a ransomeware-busting superhero to scores of people whose computers have been taken over by bad guys trying to exploit their precious documents, data, and photos for money.

As Renee Dudley reports at ProPublica, Gillespie — who has faced mounting financial difficulties — doesn’t charge for his work. His payment is the satisfaction of scoring one for the good guys.

To make ends meet, Gillespie supplemented his Nerds on Call salary with a 2 a.m. paper route, delivering the local newspaper on his bike. While he had enjoyed having a paper route in junior high, the job now depressed him. But the family bills were mounting, especially for health care. Morgan Gillespie struggled with diabetes and other medical issues. Over the years, Michael Gillespie noticed blood in his urine, and in the fall of 2017, his wife finally made him see a doctor. The physician removed a tumor and diagnosed bladder cancer, which rarely affects young adults. Gillespie took one day off for surgery and one to recover before returning to work. He underwent immunotherapy treatment weekly for two months, and the cancer has been in remission since. Although he was insured through Nerds on Call, the costs for his care still added up.

The couple reached a financial breaking point. They racked up credit card debt and fell behind on payments on Morgan Gillespie’s Nissan. They rotated which utility bills they would pay; one month their electricity would be turned off, and the next month it would be gas. They surrendered the car to the bank, which sold it at a loss at auction and forced them to make up the difference. Last year, around the time his wife lost her job as a nanny, they missed four mortgage payments on their house and began to receive foreclosure notices, Michael Gillespie said.

Gillespie said he’s considering charging other security researchers for the statistics he gathers on the site, but he will always keep the tools free for victims. Friends and family members nagged Gillespie to collect fees from ID Ransomware users. Even his wife’s grandmother, whom Gillespie calls “grammy,” brought it up. “I try to not interfere in that area,” Rita Blanch said. “Unless, being silly at times, when I would say to him, ‘Babe, you need to charge, you could, like, be rich.’”

Other relatives “have been like: ‘Why isn’t he charging? Why isn’t he making money off of this?’” said his wife, who recently found a part-time job as a babysitter. “They think it’s almost dumb, the fact that he does what he does. But that was just never what the deal was for us. He just doesn’t want to take advantage of people who are already being taken advantage of.”

Instead, his fellow ransomware hunters stepped in. Abrams covered the $400 cost of obtaining a certificate that lets users know they’re downloading from a trustworthy site. Wosar began donating to ID Ransomware, and his employer, Emsisoft, hired Gillespie part-time this year to create Emsisoft-branded decryptors. The money enabled the Gillespies to catch up on mortgage payments.

Read the story

Alaska’s Law Enforcement Crisis

Photo By Encyclopaedia Britannica/UIG Via Getty Images

In 2005, the only public safety officer in Russian Mission, a village of 340 people in Alaska, committed suicide. Russian Mission hasn’t had a “permanent, certified police officer” since Simeon Askoak died. As Kyle Hopkins reports at Anchorage Daily News in a joint report effort with ProPublica, residents have been left to fend for themselves in a region with the highest accidental death and homicide rate in Alaska.

He was the only law enforcement officer in Russian Mission, a village of 340 people where he was born and raised. He’d worked as a village public safety officer for the previous 13 years, and while the state of Alaska covered his salary, he lacked equipment, resources and respect.

“It’s degrading me,” Askoak said of the constant search for money to pay for the basic necessities of his job. He described how his city government couldn’t afford utilities for the police station, so he dug into his own pocket to buy heating oil to warm the jailhouse. When his family of seven could no longer afford the bills, the pipes at the jail froze. Soon the water and sewer would be shut off too, he warned.

“We are the first responders,” Askoak said, describing the unique role VPSOs play in the state. They bust drunken drivers, bootleggers and drug dealers. They listen to children tell of being molested, stand between abusers and domestic violence victims, and pull bodies from the rivers. Always unarmed and usually without backup.

Having told his story, Askoak left the meeting and flew home in a rattling bush plane above a tangle of streams and spongy tundra. Two days later, he followed a trail to a lagoon 100 yards from his front door and shot himself in the chest.

He was 50 years old. A boy found his body shrouded in newly fallen snow.

Read the story

The Link Between Hurricane Katrina, Emmett Till, Racism, and Climate Change

This is a photo taken of one of the many homes damaged by hurricane Katrina in the lower 9th ward. (Getty Images)

As Mary Heglar remembers the chaos, human suffering, and racist radio coverage in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina — which hit the day after the 50th anniversary of the murder of Emmett Till — she considers how racism, discrimination, and climate change are inextricably linked. Read her beautiful essay at Guernica.

The other thing often forgotten, but which I can never forget, was that Katrina descended the day after the 50th anniversary of the murder of Emmett Till. If you are black, and especially if you grew up in the South, the name “Emmett Till” brought immediate, arresting, gruesome images to mind. The name sank to the bottom of your stomach like a bag of rocks—or like the cotton gin fan that weighed down his barely pubescent body to make it surrender to the Tallahatchie River.

I remembered the meteorologists explaining how hurricanes start off the coast of Africa and gather strength as they cross the Atlantic, following almost exactly the route of slave ships.

I wondered if Katrina was really a 14-year old boy named Emmett.

I never thought that I’d see the Mississippi my grandfather had known when he was my age, or even the one my mother saw. The Mississippi that brutally murdered a 14-year old boy for a wolf whistle that we now know never happened. But Katrina revealed things that I could never unsee.

I didn’t know it then, but that vision formed the lens I would bring to the climate movement a decade or so later. I can’t help but see the layers of injustice that led to our current situation. The climate crisis is covered in the fingerprints of slavery and Jim Crow and colonialism and genocide and patriarchy. It’s what happens when large swaths of people are not only systematically “left out,” but forced to be their own gravediggers and pallbearers. I can’t help but see how those same layers complicate and exacerbate the crisis. Who is saved and who is abandoned. Whose bodies litter the road to the “greater good.”

Like my grandfather, New Orleans became more fragile, more tenuous. I saw the things that made them both—the pressure that made the pearl—in a way that I never had before. They became more beautiful, more precious. And I couldn’t unsee it.

Read the story

Encrypted Phones, By Criminals, For Criminals

Getty Images

Murder in broad daylight. Torture. Attempted car bombings. It seems Scottish crime lords James and Barrie Gillespie, known as “the Brothers,” will stop at nothing to preserve their drug trafficking enterprise. At Motherboard, Joseph Cox reports on MPC, the telephone company they built to make their own encrypted phones for the ultimate in untraceable, impenetrable criminal communication.

Martin Kok had already dodged death once that day. As the 49-year-old Dutch convict turned successful crime blogger left a late lunch at an Amsterdam hotel in December 2016, a hooded man ran up to him, aimed a handgun at point blank range at the back of his head, and prepared to pull the trigger.

But either the assassin lost his nerve or the weapon jammed. CCTV footage later revealed the man ran off across the street, nearly getting hit by two cyclists, and disappeared into the city. Kok continued walking, oblivious.

After leaving the hotel, Kok met with an associate named Christopher Hughes, known as “Scotty” for his heavy Scottish accent. Hughes worked for MPC, a company that made special, encrypted phones. MPC marketed these devices to the privacy-conscious, even using black and white portraits of Edward Snowden in advertisements. MPC was sponsoring Butterfly Crime, posting ads and flaunting MPC-branded hats and other memorabilia on the site and its social media. For Kok, it was easy money.

“MPC phone delivers multiple levels of encryption over a closed secure network,” one tweeted advert from the company reads.

Hughes and Kok spent the evening in Boccacio, a sex club on the outskirts of Amsterdam. After their session, and as the puffer-jacket wearing Kok stepped into a Volkswagen Polo, a hooded figure jumped from the dense shrubbery around the parking lot and fired into the Polo, killing Kok. Hughes walked away from the scene, according to CCTV footage previously published by the Dutch police.

Read the story

Olympic Destroyer: The Cyberattack on the 2018 Winter Games

Getty Images

As the opening ceremonies of the 2018 Winter Olympics began, a cyberattack crippled the games’ digital infrastructure, jeopardizing WIFI connections, event tickets, and even the Olympics app, packed full of information on event schedules, maps, and hotel reservations. At Wired, in this excerpt from his book, Sandworm, Andy Greenberg unravels this digital whodunnit. Who was bent on creating chaos at the Olympics to publicly embarrass South Korea? Was it China? North Korea? Or was it Russia?

Over the next two hours, as they attempted to rebuild the domain controllers to re-create a more long-term, secure network, the engineers would find again and again that the servers had been crippled. Some malicious presence in their systems remained, disrupting the machines faster than they could be rebuilt.

A few minutes before midnight, Oh and his administrators reluctantly decided on a desperate measure: They would cut off their entire network from the internet in an attempt to isolate it from the saboteurs who they figured must still have maintained a presence inside. That meant taking down every service—even the Olympics’ public website—while they worked to root out whatever malware infection was tearing apart their machines from within.

For the rest of the night, Oh and his staff worked frantically to rebuild the Olympics’ digital nervous system. By 5 am, a Korean security contractor, AhnLab, had managed to create an antivirus signature that could help Oh’s staff vaccinate the network’s thousands of PCs and servers against the mysterious malware that had infected them, a malicious file that Oh says was named simply winlogon.exe.

At 6:30 am, the Olympics’ administrators reset staffers’ passwords in hopes of locking out whatever means of access the hackers might have stolen. Just before 8 that morning, almost exactly 12 hours after the cyberattack on the Olympics had begun, Oh and his sleepless staffers finished reconstructing their servers from backups and began restarting every service.

Amazingly, it worked. The day’s skating and ski jumping events went off with little more than a few Wi-Fi hiccups. R2-D2-style robots puttered around Olympic venues, vacuuming floors, delivering water bottles, and projecting weather reports. A Boston Globe reporter later called the games “impeccably organized.” One USA Today columnist wrote that “it’s possible no Olympic Games have ever had so many moving pieces all run on time.” Thousands of athletes and millions of spectators remained blissfully unaware that the Olympics’ staff had spent its first night fighting off an invisible enemy that threatened to throw the entire event into chaos.

Read the story

The Great Fiber-Optic Fraudster of Alaska

Getty Images

Why secure actual signatures from partners on multi-million dollar contracts to install fiber-optic cable at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean when you can just forge them? At Bloomberg Businessweek, Austin Carr reports on scam-artist extraordinaire Elizabeth Pierce, the former CEO of Quintillion Subsea Holdings LLC. Pierce created fictitious contracts to fund an Anchorage telecom startup, fleecing investors for a billion dollars before getting caught.

Arctic fiber has been an entrepreneurial fantasy for decades. Soaring demand for broadband helped drive companies, including Google, Facebook, and Amazon.com, to spend tons on high-speed underwater cables that keep customers watching Netflix and YouTube with minimal delay. But many of those lines run in parallel in the Atlantic and Pacific along well-established ocean routes, leaving the world’s internet vulnerable to earthquakes, sabotage, and other disasters both natural and human-made. A trans-Arctic route would help protect against that while offering a more direct path, potentially making internet speeds much faster.

Pierce scribbled her first forged signatures on contracts with the Matanuska Telephone Association, which services south-central Alaskan towns such as Wasilla, in May and June 2015. Although Matanuska CEO Greg Berberich had been reluctant to strike a deal, Pierce assured her investors in New York in an email that Berberich was “nervous but very committed.” The next day she uploaded a contract, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, with what looked like Berberich’s signature to a personal Google Drive account she shared with Murphy, the CIP managing director. Pierce also said she was close to locking in another gigantic sale with the nonprofit Arctic Slope Telephone Association Cooperative, whose customers include residents of remote Inupiat communities and the city of Utqiagvik. Soon she sent Murphy a contract with a phony version of the Arctic Slope CEO’s signature, too.

Pierce executed similar deceptions at least eight times, and the fraudulent contracts totaled more than $1 billion, according to court filings. Sometimes she completely fabricated deals; other times she negotiated real contracts, then changed key pages with more favorable terms.

Read the story