I was curious how a man in Switzerland gets charged in the US for a placing bets on a site that doesn't allow the US to participate.
The short answer seems to be that he stole private information from a US company and used that information to enrich himself. And then got that charge enhanced with things like wire fraud and transacting on systems involving US currency.
And another commentor suggests that punishing insider traders in a step towards legitimzing and regulating prediction markets in the US.
You can charge anyone in the world with anything, the trouble is getting a judge to agree with you and getting your hands on the person you're charging.
The first problem doesn't seem to be all that hard in the US (unless the inside traders are part of the US government, of course), the second problem can be as simple as having Google organise an all-expenses-paid team activity to bait the subject into jurisdiction.
If the basis for their charges really is just that he traded in dollars, then this is yet another example why nobody should trust Americans and their currency when it comes to trade. I hope they can come up with something better than that.
> the second problem can be as simple as having Google organise an all-expenses-paid team activity to bait the subject into jurisdiction.
This actually happens. I know that the FBI once organized an all-expenses-paid trip to a "conference in Hawaii" for certain Chinese chemists it wanted to nab.
The corollary is that if you have reason to expect you're wanted by American Feds, never travel outside China, Russia, and certain European states that are extraordinarily hesitant to extradite to the US (e.g. Ireland).
I thought I'd heard of this but couldn't find enough examples of this, let alone an FBI induced landing.
It appears REALLY hard to step over jurisdictions.
I did find the PLO terrorist incident from 1985. The terrorists killed an American on a cruiseship, Achille Lauro. Reagan sent a fighter jet to intercept, escort, and force a landing in Italy for the commercial jet the terrorists were later flying on.
There are other examples like forcing downed flights in the hunt for Snowden, but it's super rare and ultimately unlikely.
Oh yeah, it's definitely super rare, especially when we do anything to force the landing. The Snowden example is the only one coming to mind, and that was a decade ago.
There are a number cases where the stop was known ahead of time (like Maher Arar), but those are moderately rare too.
The interesting part is that he got charged with insider trading. A few attorneys on bluesky have pointed out that this is a novel use of this law since previously the trading occurred on regulated markets (e.g. SEC or CFTC regulated markets like stock markets and commodities/futures exchanges).
They are regulated. That's why Connecticut, Arizona, and Illinois are being sued by the government. They tried to regulate these markets and the CFTC says they regulate them, not the states.
The argument goes that because Polymarket (.com) doesn't effectively block US users, it is in practice operating in the US even though it claims not to be. Similar to how the EU claims jurisdiction over foreign sites that process EU citizen data for GDPR.
Transacting on systems involving a currency (USDC) that is pegged to a US currency.
Pretty sure he sold Swiss Francs for USDC and deposited those onto Polymarket (after running them through mixers -- hence the money laundering charges).
In practice it means Steam reviews the key requests you make for third party bundles and sales. If they decide the deal is too generous, they may deny the key requests until you've offered the game for a comparable price on Steam.
> Here is a fun tip: Just transfer or deposited money in small amounts, whenever you feel like it. Avoids the questioning like your some kind of criminal.
Breaking up deposits into smaller amounts is a crime called structuring.
I wouldn't recommend doing this as an alternative to dealing with the reports and scrutiny on larger transactions.
I found it very readable w/ my default Javascript-diasbled configuration. It wasn't until I viewed the page w/o my plugins loaded that I got the message.
To be fair, if you're going to just be a genuinely superior person than other people are, you might as well just brag about that superiority since there's nothing else it's useful for.
Clearly I hit a nerve. I was just trying to make the point that w/o Javascript the example kinda fell flat. I didn't think I was bragging, but apparently I was. (I just prefer to turn on Javascript when I need it-- I find a lot of sites a lot less distracting w/o it.)
I think options are limited from the switch. You can't connect to arbitrary servers from the console version - just some curated public servers or by paying for Realms.
You can hack around this with a DNS server that redirects the curated servers, but starts to get sketchy.
You also need the paid switch online for any sort of network play.
Brickfest is more of a traveling attraction. The local convention was Bricks by the Bay - they had the GBC in 2023, but the convention is on an indefinite hiatus. I wish it were easier to see where upcoming GBC's would be,
The patch system I worked with generated signatures of each build. The signature had the hash of each block of the build. The client has the signature for their version (1.0) and they download the signature of the new version (1.2) and diff the two. Then they download each block that has changed.
I think it was the `electron-updater` for my electron app, but I don't quite remember now.
It was just a couple years ago that I learned that the Unix compression libraries have a flag to make them “rsync friendly”. They do something with compression blocks to make them more stable across changes. Normally a small change in the middle of a file could change the rest of the output, due to bit packing.
The theory I've heard is related to 'crawl budget'. Google is only going to devote a finite amount of time to indexing your site. If the number of articles on your site exceeds that time, some portion of your site won't be indexed. So by 'pruning' undesirable pages, you might boost attention on the articles you want indexed. No clue how this ends up working in practice.
Google's suggestion isn't to delete pages, but maybe mark some pages with a no index header.
Google crawls the entire page, not just the subset of text that you, a human, recognize as the unchanged article.
It’s easy to change millions of pages once a week with on-load CMS features like content recommendations. Visit an old article and look at the related articles, most read, read this next, etc widgets around the page. They’ll be showing current content, which changes frequently even if the old article text itself does not.
I'm pretty sure Google is smart enough to recognize the main content of a page, and ignore things like widgets and navigation. That's Search Engine 101.
It’s possible they examined the server logs for requests from GoogleBot and found it wasting time on old content (this was not mentioned in the article but would be a very telling data point beyond just “engagement metrics”).
There’s some methodology to trying to direct Google crawls to certain sections of the site first - but typically Google already has a lot of your URLs indexed and it’s just refreshing from that list.
It doesn't have to fetch every article (statical sampling can give confidence intervals), and it doesn't have to fetch the full article: doing a "HEAD /" instead of a "GET /" will save on bandwidth, and throwing in ETag / If-Modified-Since / whatever headers can get the status of an article (200 versus 304 response) without bother with the full fetch.
If the content is literally the same, the crawler should be able to use If-Modified-Since, right? It still has to make a HTTP request, but not parse or index anything.
This is not correct. It’s up to the server, controlled by the application to send that or other headers. Similar to sending a <title> tag. The headers take priority and similar to what another person said they will do a HEAD request first and not bother with a GET request for the content.
> The theory I've heard is related to 'crawl budget'. Google is only going to devote a finite amount of time to indexing your site.
Once a site has been indexed once, should it really be crawled again? Perhaps Google should search for RSS/Atom feeds on sites and poll those regularly for updates: that way they don't waste time doing to a site scrape multiple times.
Old(er) articles, once crawled, don't really have to be babysat. If Google wants to double-check that an already-crawled site hasn't changed too much, they can do a statistical sampling of random links on it using ETag / If-Modified-Since / whatever.
The SiteMap, which was invented by Google and designed to give information to crawlers, already includes last-updated info.
No need to invent a new system based on RSS/Atom, there is already an actually existing and in-use system based on SiteMap.
So, what you suggest is already happening -- or at least, the system is already there for it to happen. It's possible Google does not trust the last modified info given by site owners enough, or for other reasons does not use your suggested approach, I can't say.
I can imagine a malicious actor changing an SEO-friendly page to something spammy and not SEO-friendly. Since E-Tag and If-Modified-Since are returned by the server, they can be manipulated.
Even if that rule were true, why wouldn’t everything in the say, top NNN internet sites get an exemption? It is the Internet’s most hit content, why would it not be exhaustively indexed?
Alternatively, other than ads, what is changing on a CNN article from 10 years ago? Why would that still be getting daily scans?
Probably bad technology detecting a change. Things like current news showing up beneath the article, which changes whenever a new article is added. I've seen this happen on quite a few large websites. It might be technologically easier to drop old articles than the amount of time to fix whatever they use to determine if a page has changed. You would think a site like CNET wouldn't have to deal with something like that, but sometimes these sites that have been around for a long time have some serious outdated tech.
That's a good point about the static nature of some pages. Is there any way to tell a crawler to crawl this page, but after this date don't crawl again, but keep anything you previously crawled.
Google is paying Wikipedia through "Wikimedia Enterprise." If Wikipedia weren't able to sucker people into thinking that they're poverty-stricken, Google would probably prop it up like they do Firefox.
If I were establishing a "crawl budget", it would be adjusted by value. If you're consistently serving up hits as I crawl, I'll keep crawling. If it's a hundred pages that will basically never be a first page result, maybe not.
Wikipedia had a long tail of low-value content, but even the low-value content tends to be among the highest value for its given focus. e.g., I don't know how many people search "Danish trade monopoly in Iceland", and the Wikipedia article on it isn't fantastic, but it's a pretty good start[0]. Good enough to serve up as the main snippet on Google.
Purely speculating, Wikipedia has a huge number of inbound links (likely many more than CNet or even than more popular sites) which crawler allocation might be proportionate to. Even if it only crawled pages that had a specific link from an external site, that would be enough for Google to get pretty good coverage of Wikipedia.
It could be better to opt those articles out of the crawler. Unless that's more effort. If articles included the year and month in the URL prefix, I would disallow /201* instead.
I'm not so sure that's true. They might have come to the Google Play store as part of their plan to sue Google. Their Google lawsuit has complaints about Google interfering with their third party deals with phone manufacturers.
The short answer seems to be that he stole private information from a US company and used that information to enrich himself. And then got that charge enhanced with things like wire fraud and transacting on systems involving US currency.
And another commentor suggests that punishing insider traders in a step towards legitimzing and regulating prediction markets in the US.
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