Slashdot Mirror
Mafia Tech Support
Mzilikazi writes "A story from Wired about performing tech support for the mob, mainly focusing on gambling. Some interesting information is presented about P2P applications. Frankly it sounds like fiction to me (you can already imagine the movie being made -- 'I Was a Hacker for The Mob'), but the story is interesting nonetheless and shows that if you're skilled and determined but have a flexible moral compass, there's a lot of job opportunities out there." I started reading it for the mob references, but kept on reading for the details of how to run an illegal gambling organization.
Isn't the first rule, don't talk? This coder is going to get whacked! I would have kept my mouth shut if made a proggie for the mob. If I had a ham sandwich with Tony Soprano, I wouldn't talk about it for chrissakes.
The author Simson Garfinkel could also get whacked because he knows the guy who talked.
Maybe it's too Hollywood, but would you even risk it? Would you? So maybe they didn't pay the guy enough? He says he makes 1/3 of $150k, but he likes living under the radar. That makes sense for about two seconds. I'd rather make $150k and keep it in my shoebox.
They aren't paying the guy enough, so he bragged about it to Wired, who published it.
The chain of stupidity doesn't stop there. Now the IRS is after this guy for tax evasion, and they can connect him to the writer of the story and the mob itself, meaning some mob boss at the top is shitting his pants right now -- if this is isn't total BS.
"But in the fog of all those poker games, I had neglected to take the humanities classes required for graduation. So I left without a degree and moved to New York City. My plan was to become a professional card player."
And now the FBI knows you by name.
I dunno. If it didn't have Simson Garfinkle's byline, I'd think the whole thing was pure bullshit made up by a Bushie purely as propoganda to prove the need to use their patriot muscle to crack down on "regular" crime. It reads like a "what's what" list of things that probably kill the boner Ashcroft gets every time he thinks about how great it is to track people with their OnStar systems.
To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target
You'd figure the average geek would make one too many Simpson's reference about "Fat Tony" and get his ass whacked before he could do anything useful.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Wasn't that what the baddie from Sneakers did?
But do they walk around in jackets with MAFIA written on their back in neon-green electropigment?
"Mafia, you've got a friend in the family."
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
(you can already imagine the movie being made -- 'I Was a Hacker for The Mob')
I prefer the title "Sneakers".
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
Mafia Don Announces New Anti-Spam Venture
As the NSA and FBI fear, traditional crime organizations have been incorporating high-tech communication into their organizations. Although Janet Reno was quoted stating "This is law enforcement's worst nightmare.", techies around the world are sure to be pleased with one New York Syndicate's new venture.
It all started when Don Dominiqi signed onto his AOL account last Monday morning. His inbox was filled with "Make Money Fast", "Viagra On-Line", and "Teenybopper Web Sex" ads. Lost amidst the drivel was an important note detailing a non-taxed shipment of Marlboros, which were later confiscated by the BATF. Little did he know, as he shouted "Bring me the left hand of this f*cking gutterslime!" what would become of it all.
Later that same day, Billy "Run!" Brutekowski and Larry "My Eyes!" Plucker cornered the pasty-faced offender of the Family in a small cyber cafe in Greenwich Village. "This was by far the creepiest place the Boss has ever sent us." stated Billy, who only spoke on condition of anonymity. "Everyone in this place looked pale and sickly, like they had already been 'spoken to'. We asked for this punk, and several people quickly pointed him out. Most of the scum we find in gin joints aren't so quick to finger one of their own," Billy continued.
"He must not watch much TV, because this sh*t didn't even flinch when we came to the corner he was hiding in," Larry proceeded to relate. "We dropped this sheet of paper the Boss had given us on his table and he says 'So you guys want to make money fast, eh?' He puts out his and says to give him $20. This scrawny little dirtball tells me to give him $20!" Larry was quite agitated at this part in his story, and his description of how Sammy Spammer's hand fell off was quite garbled.
Billy continued, "Up till now, this was a routine visit. We was just being playful. The weird sh*t began when we tried to leave." "This pimply faced kid blocks the door as we try to leave, and I'm thinking to myself 'Great, a f*cking Karate Kid hero. He just stand there, and then he hands me a $5 bill." Billy pulls out the $5, and holds it like it is his first quarter from his favorite grandmother. "They lined up after that, and we had $175 in 'tips' when we left the joint."
Later that day the Don himself visited the caf, unwilling to believe the story. Although the details are unclear, sources at the caf indicate that the Don has hired them to build and host a new Anti-Spam site. Through a SSL transaction system, the site will accept spam complaints and credit card donations towards 'solutions to problems'. Multiple complaints against the same spammer are added to the total until an acceptable solution has been found.
Larry tells us that a typical $250 solution is a broken hand, and for $2000 all anyone ever sees again of 'the problem' are his shoes.
The URL is to be announced next week, and the cyber caf's phones have been jammed with requests for more information.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
...then he has a pretty overinflated opinion of himself. He's like, "oh, I took a bunch of math and physics courses, but I forgot to my humanities!" He tries to romanticize "the life of a mob hacker," but he fails it.
Look at it carefully, and it won't look like some stealthy hacker but some dropout loser nerd.
I had but a simple dream, to destroy all humans.
This article is as fake as a letter to Miss Manners or a WWW match...
The fact remains that I could be pulling in $150,000 as a programmer on the open market. But I make a third of that. So why am I risking a prison sentence or the potential of a lifetime in witness protection for a job that doesn't make me all that rich? Simple: When you start making a lot of money, you get noticed by the biggest bullies on the block - the cops and the IRS - and I don't want that. I like living below the radar.
Ah if you are working in the "open market" than you do not have to worry about "living below the radar".
The next juicy part
I don't fork over any taxes. When you get right down to it, I'm an idealist. I don't condone the actions of the US government. By refusing to pay taxes, I withhold my financial support. And, truth be told, I like mobsters. They're more willing to accept you at face value.
There you have it a moral mobster. Someone who does not condone the actions of the US government but overlooks the actions of the mob.
Essentially, the system acts as a market maker, matching up people who want to take different sides of a sports bet.
He's got his terminology wrong. That's not a market maker, that's a *market*. A market maker is just someone who's required to offer a particular price on both sides of the book in return for some preferential treatment by the exchange.
From one of the BSD Games fortune cookies:
A gangster assembled an engineer, a chemist, and a physicist. He explained that he was entering a horse in a race the following week and the three assembled guys had the job of assuring that the gangster's horse would win. They were to reconvene the day before the race to tell the gangster how they each propose to ensure a win. When they reconvened the gangster started with the engineer:
Gangster: OK, Mr. engineer, what have you got?
Engineer: Well, I've invented a way to weave metallic threads into the saddle blanket so that they will act as the plates of a battery and provide electrical shock to the horse.
G: That's very good! But let's hear from the chemist.
Chemist: I've synthesized a powerful stimulant that dissolves into simple blood sugars after ten minutes and therefore cannot be detected in post-race tests.
G: Excellent, excellent! But I want to hear from the physicist before I decide what to do. Physicist?
Physicist: Well, first consider a spherical horse in simple harmonic motion...
I wonder what a computer scientist would be up to? ;)
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase googlewhack.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
If you have a wayward moral compass, work for the mob. But for the trully evil there is the RIAA.
I started reading it for the mob references, but kept on reading for the details of how to run an illegal gambling organization."
you'll never be incognito
sorry....
;)
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
`The fact remains that I could be pulling in $150,000 as a programmer on the open market.' Yeah. Right. He must be a much better coder than he sounds if he could be making that right now with no college degree and no formal training. Maybe during the dotcoms, but now? And even if he could, I find it hard to imagine he'd give that all up because he `like[s] living below the radar.' Kudos to the poster for seeing through this self-aggrandizing fabrication.
The story is fiction. The author, Simson Garfinkel is a grad student at MIT. Do a search in slashdot's archives and you'll see him mentioned in the past on all sorts of stories. He's also written a bunch of O'Reilly books.
I realize Wired has always run a fine line between journalism and fiction in the past, but in recent yeas the magazine has gotten so bad that I'm seriously thinking of not renewing my subscription. Also, I enjoy seeing the mac covered, which many other publications ignore, but Wired has gone insane with the mac-centric stories. Sorry but just because Apple is somehow involved does not make a story newsworthy.
I heard of 2 applications "for the mob". The most common code for the mafia is the usual "double book accounting" application. At midnight or from a hidden menu half the sales are erased, the tax to be sent adjusted and a number is shown to be removed, in cash of course. It never removes more than the cash in the register a lot easier in case of an audit.
The other application is the other way around. At 6AM, the application creates "fake sales" for the previous day; I heard this specifically for video stores (own by the Hells Angels). A bunch of tapes that really spent the night in the store, indicated as returned during the night, and compiled for the 6AM opening. Why you ask? Money laundering. These "fake sales" produces clean money at the cost of the tax. The stores accepted cash only, and the owner simply adds the indicated amount in the register.
I am always suspicious of stores that accept cash only! Or like that not too bright fellow who made 250K$ that year, with 4 peanuts distribution machines that takes only quarter, without ever bringing a single quarter to the bank, Only bills!
The IRS had a good case!
There have been many of these stories in the past few years. Mostly out of Vegas, yes. Seems there is a rather 'quiet' tech revolution going on, driven by tons of money and 'out of the box' needs.
:)
As an example, the taxi companies monitor each other's phones and poach clients needing a cab. Sounds simple, but the timing involved would put a shuttle launch to shame
Don't get me wrong....there's nothing glam about it. The crime/drug/prostitution/money laundering that masks the real victimization has zero redeeming status.
This should be AC but WTF ....
Here is what I would like to get published in the next issue of Wired ...
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
CICILY, NEW WORK - A press release from the Recording Industry Artists of America indicates they have merged with the Mafia in a move to focus entirely on their core business, strong arm tactics and racketteering.
Well known inside man Simson Garfinkel wasn't availble for at the time of the interview. It is believe he is on vacation fishing with the swimmers in the East River. However, his musical partner Paul Art was available and made the comment "... with everybody downloading our music our careers were starting to suck even more, we needed protection. I mean, we couldn't have grandmothers downloading our music off KaZoom Light Extreme so contacting The Mob was the obvious choice. Plus now we have the inside track on our new musical winning a Fat Tony.".
In a related story it was revealted today the Mafia has connections to news site Slashdot and network provider Akamai. By threatening to submitting to story to Slashdot containing the phrases "Linus, hot grits, Natalie Portman, and homemade p0rn" with a link to the company website victims had little choice but to subscribe to Akamai services. It is rumoured the RIAA is attempting to partner with the mob to use this technique to boost diminishing traffic to the N' Sync web site.
Wired is famous for posting wildy exagerated fictional stories. It started with MicroSerfs in 1994(-5). They published this whole account of 8 Microsoft employees and their wild lives, and a few months later announced it was all a fictional story. Ever since then, I take everything they say with about 12 grains of salt.
Not to say that there *arent* computer geeks working for the mob, but this particular is probably pure fiction and completely exagerated.
I'm not going to nag you about morals; I'd just like to point out that stealing calculators isn't all that geeky. It's merely illegal. But anyone can steal stuff from someone's backpack. In fact, students make better targets than most.
No, a *genuinely* illegal geeky thing to do would be to make peoples' calculators appear broken, and offer to buy the "broken" calcs from them. Then take the calcs to another school to sell them. Maybe find a combination of buttons, or a weakness in the design that was easy to break and easy to repair.
despite the fact that this was written with such a fictionnal (and thus amusing) tone, and point of view (don't you think that it could have been a good introduction to a Casino-like movie ?), I have another concern about that kind of press release.
Such statements as "I'm a hacker for the mob and I'm proud of it" mix two differents things, that, even if they are well distinguished by the average geek population, might seem confusing, and maybe upseting, for the average non-geek population.
In a nutshell, this article will probably provide some more exposure for the 'bad, immoral, nasty hacker' character that is already wide-spread worldwide. If I'm not a /. reader and a willing-to-learn guy/girl (which is the case of many, many, many people around the globe), my first reaction will be to say : 'damn, those motherfuckers already put some viruses on my computer, now they're getting with the mob, ; kill'em'all, buddy, kill that fucking hacker'
By writing this, this guy wants to sail away from the hacker community ('yep guys, I fuck you deep, I earn 50000$ with my hacking skills'), AND from the whole mob, the true one. And this kind of behaviour had never resulted in something else that despise, anger, and fear from the uninformed people. Many people remain well uninformed about hackers at this time ; in my opinion, the hacker community shouldn't be labelled that way.
Because maybe at some point hackers will be hanged by the mob...
Regards,
Jdif
Let's overcome our weakness.
God I hope they read my monster.com resume soon. I'll make sure to amend my resume with 'low moral compass'.
members are seeing something, your seeing an ad
!!! Nobster !!!
Shake downs were never this easy!!!
Collect those handy creditcard numbers
Share fake ID's at the push of a button.
All that and more for a mere C$20.000,- kickback Just plugin and watch the cash roll-in
Ironically enough, just a day or two ago, a trailer for the Movie This Thing Of Ours came out, and it's about a bunch of mobsters who move into computer crime.
Small world
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one " -Albert Einstein
The fact remains that I could be pulling in $150,000 as a programmer on the open market. But I make a third of that. So why am I risking a prison sentence or the potential of a lifetime in witness protection for a job that doesn't make me all that rich? Simple: When you start making a lot of money, you get noticed by the biggest bullies on the block - the cops and the IRS - and I don't want that. I like living below the radar. I sublet a friend's apartment and pay his utility bills with money orders that I purchase at the post office or at one of those check-cashing storefronts. Because I get paid entirely in cash, I don't fork over any taxes. When you get right down to it, I'm an idealist. I don't condone the actions of the US government. By refusing to pay taxes, I withhold my financial support. And, truth be told, I like mobsters. They're more willing to accept you at face value. They aren't hung up on college degrees, or where you live, or how many criminal convictions you have.
/. bit.
So if we buy the subtext, he's your typical, semi-educated loser (precisely the profile of mob eggheads and enemy moles throughout history), who wouldn't be making $50k/year in a legit job, much less $50K take-home, justifying his criminal activity (and his inability to make any money at it) by saying he doesn't approve of the people who would--gladly and by all that is legally and morally right--put him in orange jumpsuits for the rest of his life.
Or, as I suspect, he's an invention of some half-inventive writer who's looking to run a nice Internet troll, maybe get a little play in the major news media.
I'm sure he's thrilled that
I did a Lotus Notes job for a group of Italian Citizens, a club really.... encrypton seems to have been a HUGE concern. First ever PGP server. Do you know what 18,000USD looks like in paperbags?
This
I think that's the guy. He has mafia/card shark/donnie brasco admirer written all over him. In think he should be a writer. Make a "Catch me if you can" style movie with a Donnie Brasco type hacker. "..He started out doing mob steak outs..then he got cosy..eventually, he provided a multi-source secure voip and database solution for them, then he got a taste for all things Mafia.." Mandrake though good choice, I'm using Mndrk. 92 at the mo and I love it so far. However, for this kind of job I think I would use even more paranoid security, OpenBSD aughta do!! Anyways, the story is clearly false. No codenames, and too many clues - way too many. If it were true there would be some guy in the FBI raiding their joint right now.. ..Oh, maybe thats his plan: If he makes it seem unrealistic, the Feds would ignore the operation!!!
In any case it would be sloppy work, I don't believe it. Intersting read though. Thanks Wired!!
but the story is interesting nonetheless and shows that if you're skilled and determined but have a flexible moral compass, there's a lot of job opportunities out there.
"Flexible moral compass"? Sounds like just about every Slashdot geek.
"I started reading it for the mob references, but kept on reading for the details of how to run an illegal gambling organization."
The submitter and mr. Columbine could join forces and see if tldp.org would accept an Illegal-gambling-admin HOWTO seeing there already is a Linux consultancy HOWTO and similar bits.
I'm sorry if I haven't offended anyone
"He's been formatted."
"I clocked him all the way back to a C prompt.""I gave him a dll error he'll never forget."
Sorry, I just had to get those off my chest.......we are from the government - we are here to help...
My personal pet peeve: Why can't banks get these coin counters? Are they reluctant to invest in "them thar newfangled coin counter thingies"? Why do I have to spend an hour rolling 33.75 in coins? Why Every casino I've been in has at least a dozen [which I belive actually count each coin, rather than relying on the weight].
ACHTUNG! Das computermachine ist nicht fuer gefingerpoken und mittengrabben. Ist nicht fuer gewerken bei das dumpkopfen.
"...if you're skilled and determined but have a flexible moral compass, there's a lot of job opportunities out there."
/. should be vanishingly close to zero.
So unemployment on
Any technology distinguishable from magic is not suficiently advanced.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
If I had a flexible moral compass then I'd be a manager ... or maybe even a CEO by now.
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." --Napoleon Bonaparte
It depends on what you mean by 'talk'. If he simply claims to work for the mafia legally, they couldn't care less. For instance, my step-father worked as one of the IT department managers directly below an exec who was a member of a mafia family (over at Waste Management, a fortune 500 company). These people don't exactly hide the fact that they are in the mafia (that, by itself, isn't illegal)--the local police already know who's in the mafia as do the FBI, so it isn't like you're spilling the beans (unless you describe some illegal activities, which I would HIGHLY recommend not doing).
At least that's the theory.
Various news reports regularly pop up about these machines beng used for full-blown casino-like gambling in bars. A common scheme works like that: Legal no-pay machines are bought wholesale from factories. Then the ROMs are changed. When the machine is installed in a bar, it is also wired to a switch located behind the counter.
Customers "in the know" can ask the barkeeper to flip the switch. This changes the operation of the machine to a different game. The customer is credited a certain amount (e.g. $50). When he leaves, he pays or gets the game's balance at the counter.
This is such a profitable business that a full-fledge gang war was raging last year in Southern France and Italy. At least one programmer was shot because he worked for the wrong people.
Friendly betting my ass.
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
Way back when, when most /.'er were still in short pants, I went to a programming conference. Up in the lobby of the conference hotel was an ad for "Programmers wanted", come to room XXXX. I went up, and it was two guys in very nice suits, a lot of gold, discussing the plans they had for a computer system - in fact, it was the first time I had heard of the idea of off shore betting. Mind you, this is pre internet boom. They were planning on modem pools and dial up at that time.
It was fairly obvious from the job description, the fact that only first names were used, and the questions that were asked that the folks were the mob. I gave it a thought, and said, "Sir, it's an interesting concept, but I really have no interest in traveling off shore as the job would require. I wish you luck." Shook hands, and left. That was the last I heard of it, except to see what looked like one of the guys in the room doing the perp walk about 15 years later - Something about stolen cars
These guys were a bit higher tech than the folks in the wired article - they were talking N tier distributed architectues in the VERY early 80s
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso