If you had an Internet connection at any point in the aughts, you’ll likely remember a series of pop-up and banner advertisements designed to prey on the lonely and insecure, the gullible, and the vulnerable. These advertisements might have been annoying, but they appeared to be innocuous. In fact, they were at the center of one of the largest cybercrime rings ever assembled, and its story has been largely untold until now because one of the last perpetrators was only just sentenced after years of testifying against his co-conspirators. The crime: sneaking hard-to-cancel, recurring monthly payments onto cellphone bills, sometimes those of people who never even subscribed. The perpetrators: mostly college-age kids. The implications for the telecom industry, federal regulators, and your phone bill: incalculable. The idea was pioneered by a Chinese immigrant named Lin Miao.
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In his deposition, the head honcho admitted the network's employees "endorsed" the stolen election crap on air. Here's why that matters. |
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As long as you're not snifting in someone else's face, these selections add just the right amount of sophistication. |
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It's all anachronism, Gravity’s Rainbow. First of all, it’s 50 years old. It’s also a historical novel, set during World War II. It’s a dense, difficult challenge, the kind of book posers carry around to look smart. It is unabashedly, rambunctiously, arrogantly smart, and deeply, confoundingly experimental. It seems to resist total intelligibility, preferring rather to suggest, evoke, gesture toward, wink at. It’s got all the flavors of meaning, but few of its calories. It wants to feed you in other ways. It wants its words to do more than mean. To sit and read a long, complex novel from a half century ago, set in a period three additional decades earlier than that, written by a straight white dude with an abrasive intellectual flare, all of it strewn with arcane technical nomenclature and uber-hipster bonafides… well, to do all that is to do something deeply un-2023.
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Whether you prefer a musky or floral scent, or anything in between. |
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Since bursting onto the screen with 1962’s Dr. No, six actors have officially inhabited the role of James Bond. And each of them have put their own signature stamps on Ian Fleming’s beloved license-to-kill creation with varying degrees of success. Sean Connery and Daniel Craig would best personify the cold, calculating “blunt instrument” side of 007, Roger Moore would goose the character with a cocked-eyebrow air of Me Decade playfulness, the one-and-done George Lazenby would come and go before we could really get a bead on him, and Timothy Dalton would feel a bit like a sexless-cipher placeholder during the franchise’s most forgettable and transitional period. But what about Pierce Brosnan?
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