WHEN ALEKSANDR ZHUKOV went on trial last year, he stood accused of defrauding US companies, including The New York Times and pet care brand Purina, out of millions of dollars. According to the US Attorney's Office, the then 41-year-old Russian set up a company that promised to show online advertisements to humans and instead placed those ads on an elaborate network of fake websites where they were seen only by bots. But his defense did not center around rejecting those claims or demonstrating remorse. Rather, Zhukov said he was giving the online economy exactly what it wanted: cheap traffic, whatever the source.
"There was nothing to conceal," he said on the stand in May 2021. "We were making business. We are not making scam or fraud."
A federal jury in Brooklyn disagreed, and in November 2021, Zhukov was sentenced to 10 years in prison. By extraditing him from Bulgaria, the US justice system sent a message that this type of crime has consequences. Yet Zhukov's testimony highlights an uncomfortable truth: The online economy is often willing to look the other way while bots distort it and line the pockets of cybercriminals.
Bots are polluting the internet. Fake users make up as much as 40 percent of all web traffic, according to some estimates. Researchers specializing in advertising fraud describe a Kafkaesque system in which businesses pay millions to advertise to humans but end up advertising to bots. Yet the digital advertising industry has grown so accustomed to working with bot-inflated numbers that few are willing to unmask the fake clicks powering much of the online economy.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة December 2022 - January 2023 من WIRED.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك ? تسجيل الدخول
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة December 2022 - January 2023 من WIRED.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
A Full-Term Gig - Hiring someone to carry your baby to term is a booming business.
Hiring someone to carry your baby to term is a booming business. The market for surrogacy is expected to expand to $129 billion by 2032, fueled by older parents, rising infertility, and more same-sex families. Silicon Valley contributes to the growth too: Tech companies like Google, Meta, and Snap pitch in up to $80,000 toward the six-figure cost of the process.
Inside the Uncanny World of TikTok Home Remodeling - Turn a tree into a luxury apartment. Retrofit a bedroom for a million children. The videos are bizarre-and going very viral. Who's behind them?
If you've been on TikTok at any point in the past six months, chances are you've stumbled across them, as I first did during a fairly routine doomscroll one night this summer. For me it started with two videos somewhat incongruously tagged #homeremodeling and #housedesign. One of them featured a CGI man summoning a baby phoenix outside of a tree that he planned to turn into an apartment. Then a robotic AI voice started to narrate how the CGI man, identified as Little John, was going to build it. Over the next 90 seconds, Little John transformed the tree into a maniacally space-efficient luxury unit in an AI-generated ballet of flying galvanized square steel, ecofriendly wood veneer, and expansion screws.
The Hole in the Map of the World - On the surface, there's nothing unusual about it. just a spot of ocean. but beneath the waves lurks something incredible: a massive waterfall. and in its mysterious depths, the fate of the world churns.
Tip of Iceland, you'll find what's often called a marginal body of water. This part of the Atlantic, the Irminger Sea, is one of the stormiest places in the northern hemisphere. On Google Maps it gets three stars: very windy, says one review. It's also where something rather strange is happening. As the rest of the planet has warmed since the 20th century-less in the tropics, more near the poles-temperatures in this patch of ocean have hardly budged. In some years they've even cooled. If you get a thrill from spooky maps, check out one that compares the average temperatures in the late 19th century with those of the 2010s. All of the planet is quilted in pink and red, the familiar colors of climate change. But in the North Atlantic, there's one freak splotch of blue. If global warming were a blanket, the Irminger Sea and its neighboring waters are where the moths ate through. Scientists call it the warming hole.
The Eternal Truth of Markdown -An exegesis of the most ubiquitous piece of code on the web.
Markdown is not just a piece of software. It's also a markup language it's used to format plaintext, which then appears the way you want it to on, say, the internet. Markdown the markup language was designed to be as easy-to-read and easy-to-write as is feasible, according to creator John Gruber's syntax guide. A Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it's been marked up with tags or formatting instructions.
Terminal Velocity - Murphy, a competitive runner since high school, was an avid user of the exercise app Strava, and he frequently checked the app while traveling to see where locals liked to run.
It was 2 am at Denver International Airport, and Jared Murphy was only a few hours into a planned 17-hour layover. His options at this quiet hour, in the expansive halls of the concourse, were pretty much nil. There would be no nibbling on ahi tartare at the Crú Food & Wine Bar for at least another seven hours, and the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory's signature caramel apples had long since been cached for the night.
What's the future for Western 'super apps'?
Super apps create a single interface to unify a broad ecosystem of services such as messaging, e-commerce, and transport. With consumers making all of their purchases within one walled garden, the user engagement and data benefits for the app owner are obvious and substantial. These apps have become a major part of the Chinese technology landscape, so we asked two leading experts: Could the concept successfully break through in Western markets?
THE TELEVISUAL HIJACKING OF ALFONSO CUARON
Gravity, Children of Men, the best Harry Potter film-and now a seven-part miniseries?
THE MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEXES TRAE STEPHENS
The venture capitalist and cofounder of the defense-tech startup Anduril has worked with Donald Trump, Peter Thiel, Palmer Luckey, and Elon Musk.
THE ULTRACOOL CASH GRABS OF BOOBI ALTHOFF
Now the Tik Tokker turned podcaster is out to prove her worth-by being herself.
THE MIDLIFE NOT -A-CRISIS OF MARK CUBAN
Though he's soon to be out at Shark Tank, the billionaire has a massive new \"disruption\" in the works. He's certain it'll save lives.
