Slashdot Mirror
MIT Blackjack King Takes SMTP Public
An anonymous reader writes "Semyon Dukach is at it again. Thumbing his nose at the establishment, that is. Dukach, a former leader of the MIT blackjack team, has taken his small company, SMTP, public today in the hopes of overturning the field of e-mail delivery and management. SMTP might sound boring, but it's the latest vehicle in Dukach's quest to 'make a couple billion and then try to help the world' (without the aid of venture capitalists or investment bankers). Given his track record, people might not want to bet against him."
See subject.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Yes.
The computers were concealed in their heads. They counted cards, and did the math in their heads. It is fairly easy if you have the discipline.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
for these articles that nothing more than paid publicity.
The public has been using Simple Mail Transfer Protocol a long time already.
Look at their website. It's a company that helps you send mass e-mails while circumventing spam filters. Awesome. I'm so excited about this interesting opportunity to send "e-mail blasts" to everyone who's ever been foolish enough to leave an address with me, I just wish they had an hour and a half long "webcast" I could watch.
Thanks Slashdot! Without you, I never would have guessed that a former casino scammer (not that there's anything wrong with that) would look to make his next fortune in the spam, er, electronic campaign management business!
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
Yeah, well, not to worry. My new company "TCP/IP", is gonna cut off their air supply.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
no need for the computers if you have the discipline and without the computers card counting is 100% perfectly legal.
the house can still kick you out and refuse to let you gamble with the if you win too much though.
You have obviously never tried.
It is extremely difficult to get right, which is why a lot of casinos actually encourage you to do it - provided you aren't good at it. The local casinos even gives you a booklet which explains the perfect game; it's good business since most players (as you write) will tend to bias their play on how much money is at stake and their gut feeling.
A thinly traded OTC stock of a Spam circumvention company from the Ukraine. What could possibly go wrong?
The computers were concealed in their heads. They counted cards, and did the math in their heads. It is fairly easy if you have the discipline.
The MIT card-counting team was the book Bringing Down the House (the one they made the movie of). Semyon Dukach was not in that book, but in the following Ben Mezrich book, Breaking Vegas, which had a more sophisticated (and harder to accomplish) set of techniques.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Wired had a nice bit on it: Hacking Las Vegas (Written by Ben Mezrich, I think it may be an excerpt from his book).
Or if you want a Hollywood Bastardization (Based on the True Story) there's 21
At the time, the casinos made it easy to stay liquid. This was before the era of the CTR — the cash transaction report — which obligates the casinos to report any transaction greater than $10,000. "In the old days," Tay explains, "you'd win a quarter-million dollars, and they'd give it to you in cash. On New Year's 1996, I walked from the Mirage to the MGM Grand with a paper New Year's hat filled with $180,000." Back in Boston, Lewis and his friends kept the money in cash, declaring the winnings in the "other" category on their IRS forms. "You'd find $100 bills all over my apartment. Dig in my laundry, there would be $100,000 under my socks."
Get it? You might not want to bet against him? Because he was a card shark?
The term is "card sharp"
SMTP is more or less a whitehat spam operation. /. says -"yay spam!" ?
HTTP/1.1 400
So you're saying it's the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol Mail Transfer Protocol?
The CB App. What's your 20?
And you don't know jack about Slashdot's moderation system.
j/k
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
From what I have heard of Ben Mezrich's liberal reimaging of reality, I would take any account by him with big error bars.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Just send your business proposal to my new company, "/dev/null".
so i guess i shouldn't teach my (rhetorical) child about what i've learned in life. i mean, since he didn't take the risks i did, it would be unethical.
what a bunch of hooey. what's unethical about freedom of association?
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
My initial reaction was that he clearly didn't care about people being able to Google for his company.
Would it change your opinion to know that they all shared the same pot of money?
The reason they had someone else walk up and bet, was to throw off suspicion of card-counting (which you said you support).
That's why some smart and amoral people go into stuff like investment banking instead:
:).
1) The betting limits are much higher.
2) You generally don't have to deal with "Guido" and his very persuasive friends...
3) You are usually playing with other people's money.
4) When you win big, you win big.
5) When you lose big, you get a bail out, bonus for past performance. Then you go on a nice holiday and come back and do it all over again.
And when you bring the house down, you really bring it down
Yes, but:
They've already been going a decade.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
They have a name cunningly designed to generate exploitable confusion in PHBs.
PHB: Have you heard of SMTP?
Engineer: Yes, of course.
PHB: Should we use it?
Engineer: We already do. Everybody does.
PHB: Ah, I see. Well, I'll get the new sales/support contracts signed and add it to the budget then.
Engineer: ???
lol, I remember thinking the same thing when MS & Sybase named their db product SQL. Brillant markenting!
sr
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain