Simrania Hifaz

The videos depicting security officers forcibly dragging an elderly United Airlines passenger in Chicago have drawn outrage that is both widespread and entirely justified. Most of the resulting news coverage has focused, correctly, on United’s tone-deaf response and the larger question of how much power airlines wield over our lives. Certain news outlets, however, decided to go in a different direction. Instead of investigating the security officers depicted in the videos—and, perhaps, those officers’ supervisors—these outlets have focused on the passenger.

The victim, a 69-year-old Kentucky doctor named David Dao, was quickly identified thanks to the reporting of a local Louisville paper, The Courier-Journal, whose editors decided to publish sordid details from Dao’s past, based on publicly available court records. Outlets like The Daily Mail, The New York Post, TMZ, and The Wrap later aggregated the paper’s coverage. The editor of the Courier-Journal defended his newsroom in an interview with The New Republic by arguing that Dao was “familiar to people in the local market” and imploring his critics “to make sure they’re commenting on [his paper’s coverage of Dao] with full context and perspective.”

Meanwhile, the identities of Dao’s assailants remain unknown. Their employer, the Chicago Department of Aviation, refused to name any of them in a press release announcing that one of them had been placed on leave. Despite the agency’s evasiveness, and the fact that their employees’ actions were captured on video, a significant number of news outlets decided that it was the victim—not the perpetrators—who deserved the bulk of their coverage.

Google Books was the company’s first moonshot. But 15 years later, the project is stuck in low-Earth orbit.

Books can do anything. As Franz Kafka once said, “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.”

It was Kafka, wasn’t it? Google confirms this. But where did he say it? Google offers links to some quotation websites, but they’re generally unreliable. (They misattribute everything, usually to Mark Twain.)

To answer such questions, you need Google Book Search, the tool that magically scours the texts of millions of digitized volumes. Just find the little “more” tab at the top of the Google results page — it’s right past Images, Videos, and News. Then click on it, find “Books,” and click on that. (That’s if you’re at your desk. On mobile, good luck locating it anywhere.)Google Book Search is amazing that way. When it started almost 15 years ago, it also seemed impossibly ambitious: An upstart tech company that had just tamed and organized the vast informational jungle of the web would now extend the reach of its search box into the offline world. By scanning millions of printed books from the libraries with which it partnered, it would import the entire body of pre-internet writing into its database.“You have thousands of years of human knowledge, and probably the highest-quality knowledge is captured in books,” Google cofounder Sergey Brin told The New Yorker at the time. “So not having that — it’s just too big an omission.”Today, Google is known for its moonshot culture, its willingness to take on gigantic challenges at global scale. Books was, by general agreement of veteran Googlers, the company’s first lunar mission. Scan All The Books!In its youth, Google Books inspired the world with a vision of a “library of utopia” that would extend online convenience to offline wisdom. At the time it seemed like a singularity for the written word: We’d upload all those pages into the ether, and they would somehow produce a phase-shift in human awareness. Instead, Google Books has settled into a quiet middle age of sourcing quotes and serving up snippets of text from the 25 million-plus tomes in its database.Google employees maintain that’s all they ever intended to achieve. Maybe so. But they sure got everyone else’s hopes up.Two things happened to Google Books on the way from moonshot vision to mundane reality. Soon after launch, it quickly fell from the idealistic ether into a legal bog, as authors fought Google’s right to index copyrighted works and publishers maneuvered to protect their industry from being Napsterized. A decade-long legal battle followed — one that finally ended last year, when the US Supreme Court turned down an appeal by the Authors Guild and definitively lifted the legal cloud that had so long hovered over Google’s book-related ambitions.But in that time, another change had come over Google Books, one that’s not all that unusual for institutions and people who get caught up in decade-long legal battles: It lost its drive and ambition.When I started work on this story, I feared at first that Books no longer existed as a discrete part of the Google organization — that Google had actually shut the project down. As with many aspects of Google, there’s always been some secrecy around Google Books, but this time, when I started asking questions, it closed up like a startled turtle. For weeks there didn’t seem to be anyone around or available who could or would speak to the current state of the Books effort.The Google Books “History” page trails off in 2007, and its blog stopped updating in 2012, after which it got folded into the main Google Search blog, where information about Books is nearly impossible to find. As a functioning and useful service, Google Books remained a going concern. But as a living project, with plans and announcements and institutional visibility, it seemed to have pulled a vanishing act. All of which felt weird, given the legal victory it had finally won.When I talked to alumni of the project who’d left Google, several mentioned that they suspected the company had stopped scanning books. Eventually, I learned that there are, indeed, still some Googlers working on Book Search, and they’re still adding new books, though at a significantly slower pacethan at the project’s peak around 2010–11.“We’re not focused on shiny features and things that are very visible to users,” says Stephane Jaskiewicz, a Google engineer who has worked on Books for a decade and now leads its team. “It’s more like behind the scenes work and perfecting the technology — acquiring content, processing it properly so that we can view the entire book online, and adjusting the search algorithm.”One focus of work has been a constant throughout Google Books’ life: improving the scanners that add new books to the “corpus,” as the database is known. At the birth of the project, in 2002, as Larry Page and Marissa Mayer set out to gauge how long it might take to Scan All The Books, they set up a digital camera on a stand and timed themselves with a metronome. Once the company got serious about ramping its scanning up to efficient scale, it started jealously guarding details of the operation.Jaskiewicz does say that the scanning stations keep evolving, with new revisions rolling out every six months. LED lighting, not widely available at the project’s start, has helped. So has studying more efficient techniques for human operators to flip pages. “It’s almost like finger-picking on a guitar,” Jaskiewicz says. “So we find people who have great ways of turning pages — where is the thumb and that kind of stuff.”Still, the bulk of the work at Google Books continues to be on “search quality” — making sure that you find the Kafka passage you need, fast. It’s an unglamorous game of inches — less moonshot and more, say, satellite maintenance.

To understand how Google Books arrived at this point, you need to know a few things about copyright law, which essentially divides books into three classes. Some books are in the public domain, which means you can do what you want with their texts — mostly, those published before 1923, as well as more recent books whose authors chose to release them from standard copyright. Plenty of more recent books are still in print and under copyright; if you want to do anything with these texts, you have to come to terms with their authors and publishers.

Then there’s the third category: books that are out of print but still under copyright, known informally as “orphan works.” It turns out there are a whole lot of these — “between 17 percent and 25 percent of published works and as much as 70 percent of specialized collections,” a study by the US Copyright Office suggests.

How many books is that? No one knows for sure because no one can say with any certainty exactly how many total books there are. The statistic depends on how you define “book,” which isn’t as easy as it sounds. In 2010 a Google engineer named Leonid Taycher wrote a blog post that examined Google Books’ metadata and concluded that the number (then) was about 130 million. Others looked at this work and called it “bunk.” The actual number is probably somewhat lower than Taycher’s figure yet considerably higher than Google Books’ current 25 million-plus.

Some large chunk of that large number, then, are “orphan works.” And until recently, they weren’t much of an issue. You could borrow them from a library or find them in a used bookstore, and that was that. But once Google Books proposed to scan them all and make them available to the internet, everyone seemed to want a piece of them.

The legal battle that ensued was, essentially, a custody fight over these orphans, in which Google, publishers, and authors each sought to control the process of ushering them into a new home for the digital age. The three parties eventually agreed on a grand compromise known as the Google Books Settlement, under which Google would go ahead and make the orphan works available in their entirety and set aside money to compensate rights holders who stepped forward. But in 2011, a federal judge rejected the settlement, ruling in favor of advocates who feared it would forever ensconce a private for-profit company as the registrar and toll collector of the universe’s library.

Once the settlement collapsed, Google went back to its scanning, and publishers pursued the burgeoning business of selling e-books, which had leapfrogged Google’s lead in the future-of-books race due to the success of Amazon’s Kindle. But the Authors Guild continued to press its lawsuit, charging that Google’s arrogation of the right to scan and index books without the permission of copyright holders was illegal. Google is wealthy, but not so wealthy that it could ignore the threat of multi-billion dollar copyright infringement penalties (thousands of dollars per book for millions of books). This was the proceeding that dragged on until the Supreme Court put it out of its misery last year — establishing once and for all that Google had a fair-use right to catalogue books and provide brief excerpts (“snippets”) in search results, just as it did with web pages.

That ruling represents a foundational achievement for the future of online research—Google’s and everyone else’s. “It’s now established precedent — everyone benefits,” says Erin Simon, Google Books’ product counsel today. “This is going to be in textbooks. It’s supremely important for understanding what fair use means.” (Simon also notes with a chuckle that when the suit was originally filed, she hadn’t yet started law school.)

The Authors Guild may have lost in court, but it believes the fight was worth it. Google “did it wrong from the beginning,” says James Gleick, president of the Guild’s board. “They plowed ahead without involving the creative community on whose backs they were building this new thing. The big companies have a droit du seigneur attitude toward creative work. They think, ‘We are the masters of the universe now.’ They should have just licensed the books instead.”

You’d think a Supreme Court victory would have meant a renewal of energy for Google Books: Rev up the scanners — full speed ahead! By all the evidence, that has not been the case. Partly that’s because the database is so huge already. “We have a fixed budget that we’re spending,” says Jaskiewicz. “At the beginning, we were scanning everything on every shelf. At some point we started getting a lot of duplicates.” Today Google gives its partner libraries “pick lists” instead.

There are plenty of other explanations for the dampening of Google’s ardor: The bad taste left from the lawsuits. The rise of shiny and exciting new ventures with more immediate payoffs. And also: the dawning realization that Scanning All The Books, however useful, might not change the world in any fundamental way.

To many bibliophiles, Google’s self-appointment as universal librarian never made sense: That role properly belonged to some public institution. Once Google popularized the notion that Scanning All The Books was a feasible undertaking, others lined up to tackle it. Brewster Kahle’s Internet Archive, which stores historical snapshots of the whole web, already had its own scanning operation. The Digital Public Library of America grew out of meetings at Harvard’s Berkman Center beginning in 2010 and now serves as a clearinghouse and consortium for the digital collections of many libraries and institutions.

When Google partnered with university libraries to scan their collections, it had agreed to give them each a copy of the scanning data, and in 2011 the HathiTrust began organizing and sharing those files. (It had to fend off the Authors Guild in court, too.) HathiTrust has 125 member organizations and institutions who “believe that we can better steward research and cultural heritage by working together than alone or by leaving it to an organization like Google,” says Mike Furlough, the trust’s director. And of course there’s the Library of Congress itself, whose new leader, Carla Hayden, has committed to opening up public access to its collections through digitization.

In a sense each of these outfits is a competitor to Google Books. But in reality, Google is so far ahead that none of them is likely to catch up. The consensus among observers is that it cost Google several hundred million dollars to build Google Books, and nobody else is going to spend that kind of money to perform the feat a second time.

Still, the nonprofits have a strength Google lacks: They’re not subject to the changing priorities of a gigantic technology corporation. They have a focused commitment around books, unencumbered by distractions like running one of the largest advertising businesses in the world or managing a smartphone ecosystem. Unlike Google, they’re not going to lose interest in seeking new ways to connect readers with books that might, a la Kafka, melt a frozen mind.

In popular mythology, interminable lawsuits turn into hungry maelstroms that drown the participants. (The archetype is Dickens’ Jarndyce v. Jarndyce from Bleak House, the generations-spanning estate fight whose legal fees eat up all the assets at stake.) In the tech business, court battles like the celebrated antitrust suit that plagued IBM for years tend to pinion giant corporations and provide new competitors with an opening to lap an incumbent. Google itself rose to dominate search while Microsoft was busy defending itself from the Justice Department.

Yet the Books fight was never as central to Google’s corporate being as that kind of all-consuming conflict. And it wasn’t all a waste, either. It taught Google something valuable.

As the Authors Guild’s Gleick points out, Google started Books with a “better ask forgiveness than permission” attitude that’s common today in the world of startups. In a sense, the company behaved like the Uber of intellectual property — a kind of read-sharing service — while expecting to be seen the way it saw itself, as a beneficent pantheon of wizards serving the entire human species. It was naive, and the stubborn opposition it aroused came as a shock.

But Google took away a lesson that helped it immeasurably as it grew and gained power: Engineering is great, but it’s not the answer to all problems. Sometimes you have to play politics, too — consult stakeholders, line up allies, compromise with rivals. As a result, Google assembled a crew of lobbyists and lawyers and approached other similar challenges — like navigating YouTube’s rights maze — with greater care and better results. It grew up. It came to understand that it could shoot for the moon, but it wouldn’t always get there.

It’s possible that Google might someday take another run at solving the orphan works problem. But it looks like it’s going to wait for others to take the lead. “I don’t know that there’s anything that we could do without a different legal framework,” says Jaskiewicz.

As I worked on this piece, I kept thinking back to a book I’d read a few years ago called Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, a whimsical, nerdy novel by Robin Sloan. It’s about a secret society dedicated to solving a centuries-old Name of the Rose-style mystery that’s rooted in bookmaking and typography. Google plays a critical supporting role in Penumbra, as the protagonist attempts to unravel the riddle at the story’s heart. As it turns out, even the company’s unrivaled informational prowess isn’t enough to do the trick. That takes a chance encounter between the protagonist and a particular book that provides an illuminating insight. It takes, in the phrase with which Sloan closes his tale, “exactly the right book, at exactly the right time.”

Penumbra reminds us that Google’s engineering mindset isn’t omnipotent. Breaking a challenge into approachable pieces, turning it into data, and applying efficient routines is a powerful way to work. It can carry you a good distance toward a “library of utopia,” but it won’t get you there.

And even if you get there, it isn’t utopia, anyway. The hard labor is still ahead. That’s because when you turn a book into data, you make it easy to find quotes and search snippets, but you don’t make it fundamentally easier to do the work of reading the book — that irreplaceable experience of allowing one’s own mind to be temporarily inhabited by the voice of another person.

To date, the full experience of reading a book requires human beings at both ends. An index like Google Books helps us find and analyze texts but, so far, making use of them is still our job. Maybe the quest to digitize all books was bound to end in disappointment, with no grand epiphany.

Like many tech-friendly bibliophiles, Sloan says he uses Google Books a lot, but is sad that it isn’t continuing to evolve and amaze us. “I wish it was a big glittering beautiful useful thing that was growing and getting more interesting all the time,” he says. He also wonders: We know Google can’t legally make its millions of books available for anyone to read in full — but what if it made them available for machines to read?

Machine-learning tools that analyze texts in new ways are advancing quickly today, Sloan notes, and “the culture around it has a real Homebrew Computer Club or early web feel to it right now.” But to progress, researchers need big troves of data to feed their programs.

“If Google could find a way to take that corpus, sliced and diced by genre, topic, time period, all the ways you can divide it, and make that available to machine-learning researchers and hobbyists at universities and out in the wild, I’ll bet there’s some really interesting work that could come out of that. Nobody knows what,” Sloan says. He assumes Google is already doing this internally. Jaskiewicz and others at Google would not say.

The debut trailer for EA’s Battlefront II has leaked out a little early, showing that not only will the next game feature units and heroes from the prequel trilogy, but from Force Awakens as well.

Here’s a recap in case the clip disappears:

As expected, looks like there’s a singleplayer campaign in here (centred around a post-Endor Empire), but of interest to most will be the expansion of the game’s multiplayer roster to include another four Star Wars movies.

The character above appears to be the protagonist of the game’s singleplayer, an Imperial officer who will fight in the days following the Empire’s defeat at Endor.

The call came the day before Thanksgiving 2015.

In between prepping the turkey and picking up last-minute necessities for the annual family feast—the first without her husband of 47 years—a widow in Kingston, N.Y., picked up the phone. On the other end was a fraud analyst for TD Bank.

A wire transfer the widow had made—$203,000, sent earlier that month to a new friend she had met through Match.com—had been flagged as a fraudulent transaction. (The woman, who spoke with MONEY and shared legal documents related to her case, asked that her name be withheld to preserve her privacy.) At first, the 75-year-old tried to explain that the call was an error, but it soon became apparent that this was no mistake.

It felt like a physical punch to the gut, she says. And yet, as everyone sat down onto the table on Thanksgiving, she kept the news, and her rising panic, to herself. What she didn’t yet comprehend was that the situation was not merely a theft of $200,000. Her total losses, at that point, actually exceeded $1 million.

The worst part? She had allowed the swindle to happen. Like a number of seniors, she had been targeted—in her case, successfully—by an unscrupulous fraudster who posed as a friend in order to steal her life savings.

Unfortunately, such situations are more common than you think. Losses from elder financial fraud and abuse have been estimated to be more than $36 billion a year, according to a 2015 report by True Link Financial. In Virginia alone—where the state’s Department for Aging and Rehabilitative Services has conducted the most recent comprehensive study looking at the trend—financial exploitation robs victims of an estimated $1.2 billion a year.

Yet many of these crimes go unreported, or under-reported—largely for the same reason that the widow in this case didn’t want to divulge her name. Unlike so many other crimes, financial exploitation often stems from personal relationships, and many victims feel embarrassed and guilty at having been taken in. Indeed, only one in 44 cases of financial abuse is ever reported, according to an estimate by the National Adult Protective Services Association.

The widow’s case started shortly after she joined the dating site Match.com. Her late husband, an electrical engineer who worked for 42 years with IBM, had died in December 2014 after a six-month medical ordeal, in which torn tendons in his leg kicked off a series of complications that kept him in the hospital until the very end. And the widow—a retired nurse—soon found herself in a health battle of her own. The month after the funeral, doctors diagnosed her with breast cancer. A course of radiation and constant appointments left her exhausted, and a bit defeated.

So by summer, when a friend suggested the dating site as a way to take her mind off the tumult of the preceding year, she was more than ready for some entertainment. While she was not at all ready for anything “hot and heavy,” the widow says, she wanted to rejoin the world—to see what was out there.

What she found in September was a man who called himself Edward Duffey, who entered her life after he “liked” her photo on Match.com. Conversations started small, sharing basic information. He told her that he was younger, and a widower—that his wife had died of cancer two years prior. He was a retired accountant who was raised in England, living now in Texas, he said. She revealed that she had three kids and was trying to learn how to handle home repairs.

They hit it off, and the relationship moved quickly from Match.com messages to daily calls and texts. While they never met in person, she says, Duffey’s missives were sweet, and filled with poetry. And while she’s not a big poetry fan, she enjoyed the attention. Soon he told her that he loved her. Flattered, she took it as a compliment that a man 10 years her junior would be interested in her.

There was one early sign that something was amiss. After he had claimed that he worked with a Christian youth group in Texas, she called the church he referenced—but neither the receptionist nor the local priest had heard of him. When she confronted Duffey about it, however, he turned it back on her, saying she didn’t trust him and that it was a big church.

At the same time, Duffey was offering a sympathetic ear. The widow was still learning to live on her own and sifting through all the paperwork and financial documents—a daunting task for her.

As was (and still is) true for many couples of their age, her husband had taken care of all the financial aspects of their life together. She knew they had some IRAs and some IBM stock from her husband; there was also a financial advisor through Schwab—but she had never met the man. Every once in a while, she says, her husband would say she should learn some of it, but then something would come up and they’d put if off. When her husband got sick, he showed her how to access their bank account online—but that was all they managed before he died.

So, later in October, when Duffey told her that he might be able to help her with her finances, she jumped at the chance. She told Duffey that she knew her husband had valuable IBM stock, but wasn’t sure the extent of it. He told her that he managed finances for friends, and assured her that he could make her more money.

While she was comfortably situated, the idea of getting better investment returns piqued her interest—it sounded like something nice she could do for her kids and grandchildren. On Duffey’s advice, she began liquidating her assets, with the intent to pool all of her savings under his care.

When she went to make the initial wire transfer—the first one she’d ever sent—into the TD Bank account specified by Duffey, she followed his instructions to the letter. When she went into her local Bank of America, the teller questioned her reasons for processing the transfer. But she stuck to what Duffey told her to say: that it was for a family matter.

She then set about liquidating the funds from her Charles Schwab account. She called her advisor, who said selling the IBM stock that was in the account wasn’t a good idea. He suggested they meet to discuss the decision, but they were never able to get together.

In the meantime, Duffey—never a big phone talker—texted to say he was heading to London to visit his daughter and his grandson, who was ill. He suggested she wire the rest of the funds to his London-based HSBC account, she says. So she called Schwab’s 1-800-number and had a call center employee based in Colorado initiate the transfer of almost $873,000—which she wired to Duffey in two installments.

About three weeks later, the alarm bells at TD went off, prompting the phone call from the fraud department—but by then, she had sent Duffey about $1.1 million to invest. She didn’t really believe she’d been victimized, she says, until the analyst told her that a woman had picked up the transfer. As she looked back at their whirlwind relationship, however, she remembered that call to the church in Texas—and realized she’d long been ignoring a niggling suspicion in the pit of her stomach.

By the time she hung up with the fraud analyst, she knew there was a good chance she’d been swindled. And her immediate reaction was anger. She texted Duffey, asking how he could “do this.” Duffey called her back right away—and, as usual, had an answer for everything. He denied that there was anything untoward going on, saying her money was safe in England, and scolded her for doubting him.

Duffey’s adamant denials made her question whether TD was right, and calmed her down enough to get through the Thanksgiving weekend without immediately going to the police. But she had begun to question her own judgment. When she confided the situation to a friend who was visiting for the weekend, the friend strongly recommended speaking to her bank and filing a police report.

After she filed a report, she found she wasn’t alone. Duffey was actually an alias for Ken Ejimofor Ezeah, a 33-year-old living in Houston—and dozens of women all over the country had contacted authorities throughout 2015, relating similar stories. A man posing as Duffey had apparently been working across several dating sites, including Match.com, ChristianMingle.com, TalkMatch.com and others, according to court documents. FBI agents in Oklahoma investigated the claims and arrested Ezeah and an accomplice in January 2016.

Following the arrests, the U.S. Attorney’s office in Oklahoma indicted Ezeah and reached a plea agreement with him in February of this year. While he hasn’t yet been sentenced, the charge he pled guilty to, wire fraud, carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in jail and a $250,000 fine.

But while authorities have caught up to Ezeah, it isn’t clear whether the widow will ever see a penny of her money. The incident cut her monthly income in half and drastically increased her tax bill last year, because of the capital gains she incurred. She’s also hesitant to invest what remains, fearing that additional bad financial advice will decimate what is left of her savings.

Just as important are the lingering emotional scars. She spent six months seeing a therapist, trying to come to terms with her sense of betrayal and blame. The fraud has also cut her off from many of her friends, who have no idea what she’s been through—primarily because she wants to keep it that way.

Most days, she says, she’s able to push past what’s happened. But then that feeling in the pit of her stomach will creep back in when she thinks how much money she’s lost. The financial security she once had is less certain now. The worries hit at random moments, but they’re never far from her mind.

Unlike many silent victims, though, she’s now fighting back. She has retained an attorney, New York-based Kevin Galbraith, and is going through arbitration with Schwab over the fund transfer. (Galbraith claims the transfer ran afoul of a senior protection statute in Colorado, where the call center employee works; Schwab declined to comment on the matter.) She had even planned to testify at Ezeah’s hearing until he pled out. She’s still cooperating with prosecutors on the case.

And she wants to warn others, to keep them from going through a similar ordeal. By sharing her story, she says, she hopes to shine a light on some of the tactics these scammers use to bilk their victims. Experts actually say the best way to avoid this kind of trap is to limit the amount of personal information you share online with strangers—although this can be a hard line to draw once an emotional bond has formed. The AARP even has a Fraud Watch Network that informs people about scams in their area.

NOT SO LONG ago, enterprising thieves who wanted to steal the entire contents of an ATM had to blow it up. Today, a more discreet sort of cash-machine burglar can walk away with an ATM’s stash and leave behind only a tell-tale three-inch hole in its front panel.

Researchers from the Russian security firm Kaspersky on Monday detailed a new ATM-emptying attack, one that mixes digital savvy with a very precise form of physical penetration. Kaspersky’s team has even reverse engineered and demonstrated the attack, using only a portable power drill and a $15 homemade gadget that injects malicious commands to trigger the machine’s cash dispenser. And though they won’t name the ATM manufacturer or the banks affected, they warn that thieves have already used the drill attack across Russia and Europe, and that the technique could still leave ATMs around the world vulnerable to having their cash safes disemboweled in a matter of minutes.

“We wanted to know: To what extent can you control the internals of the ATM with one drilled hole and one connected wire? It turns out we can do anything with it,” says Kaspersky researcher Igor Soumenkov, who presented the research at the company’s annual Kaspersky Analyst Summit. “The dispenser will obey and dispense money, and it can all be done with a very simple microcomputer.”

Drill, Baby, Drill

For Kaspersky, the mystery of the drilled ATMs began last fall, when a bank client showed them an emptied cash machine whose only evidence of tampering was a golf-ball sized hole next to its PIN pad. To hide their tidy surgery, the thieves had even covered the entry point with a sticker. Eventually, the researchers learned of close to a dozen similar ATM heists. And when police arrested a suspect in one of the cases, they found a laptop, along with a cable he’d apparently snaked into the PIN pad hole. “Just a laptop, some wiring, and a hole in the ATM, that’s it,” says Soumenkov.

Kaspersky’s researchers already had the same model of ATM in their test lab, one that’s been in wide use since the 1990s. They removed its front panel to find a serial port that would have been accessible from the thieves’ hole. It connected to a wire that ran through the ATM’s entire internal bus of components, from the computer that controlled its user interface to the cash dispenser. Then the researchers spent five solid weeks with an oscilloscope and logic analyzer, decoding the protocol of the ATM’s internal communications from raw electric signals. They found that the machine’s only encryption was a weak XOR cipher they were able to easily break, and that there was no real authentication between the machine’s modules.

In practical terms, that means any part of the ATM could essentially send commands to any other part, allowing an attacker to spoof commands to the dispenser, giving them the appearance of coming from the ATM’s own trusted computer.

Eventually, the researchers were able to build their own device capable of sending cash-ejecting commands through just that exposed port. Their compact gadget, far smaller than even the arrested suspect’s laptop, consisted of only a breadboard, an Atmega microcontroller of the kind commonly found in Arduino microcomputers, some capacitors, an adapter, and a 9 volt battery. All told, it took less than $15 worth of equipment.

In their tests, the researchers found their finished tool could trigger the cash dispenser within seconds of connecting, and then spew as many bills as they wanted. The only limit to the attack’s speed came when the ATM’s computer “noticed” the dispenser acting independently and rebooted. But the researchers say that they could extract thousands of dollars before the reboot kicked in, and afterward they could simply repeat their attack, pulling more cash out of the machine until it was empty.

Easy Marks

Kaspersky says it’s alerted the vulnerable ATM manufacturer to the technique, but there’s no easy patch for the problem: The units’ software can’t be updated remotely. A fix, Kaspersky researchers say, will require replacing hardware in the ATMs to add more authentication measures—or failing that, adding physical security measures, like access controls and surveillance cameras, that might prevent thieves from daring an in-person raid on the machines. WIRED reached out to the ATM Industry Association for comment, but the trade group didn’t respond by the time of publication.

ATMs are a frequent hacker target. Lately, attacks from Thailand and Taiwan to Russia have infected banks’ own networks with malware that’s been used to trigger ATM cashouts. In tightly coordinated operations, money-mules retrieve the stacks of bills in person from the victim bank’s cash machines. In their conference talk Monday, Kaspersky researchers also revealed a new form of ATM malware they’ve found, which they say had been planted through stealthy fileless infections of banks in Russia and Kazakhstan. And other physical access attacks have planted malware on machines by opening their cases—either picking or breaking the panels’ locks—or used that physical access to a machine’s internals to connect a hacking tool directly to the cash dispenser.

But the Kaspersky researchers say the drill technique represents a simpler and stealthier path to an ATM’s innards. Breaching a bank’s back-end network requires far more sophisticated network intrusion skills, while opening the machine’s panel to plant malware or to connect a tool directly to the cash dispenser triggers an alarm. Drilling a gaping hole in the front of the machine, in this case, doesn’t set off that same warning.

Linus Pauling won two Nobel Prizes, helped uncover the nature of chemical bonds, identified sickle cell anemia as a molecular disease, elucidated some of the most common protein structures, revolutionized our understanding of primate evolution, and is widely hailed as one of the fathers—if not the father—of molecular biology.

Oh, and he almost single-handedly spread one of the biggest medical misconceptions of all time: that vitamin C prevents colds.

Like the much more malicious myth that vaccines cause autism, it began with quackery. Pauling first heard about the wonder that is (or really, isn’t) vitamin C from a man named “Dr.” Stone, who was a doctor in much the same way that a koala bear is a bear—and had about as much expertise on human health as your average marsupial. But gosh darnit if that was going to keep Pauling from believing that 3000 milligrams of vitamin C would solve just about every ailment he could think of.

He and Stone even conducted a shoddy clinical trial that claimed to prove their point, which other researchers noted was fundamentally flawed. The people treated with vitamin C were healthier to begin with, so of course they had better outcomes. That didn’t stop Pauling, though. When he published a book on the matter in 1970, cleverly titled “Vitamin C and the Common Cold,” the American public went crazy for it. After all, here was a man so brilliant that he was (and still is) the only person ever to win two totally unshared Nobel Prizes and one of only two people to win Nobels in different fields—chemistry and peace. Surely he knows what he’s talking about.

Pauling went on to claim that high doses of the supplement could cure everything from heart disease to leprosy, and even cancer (in a sad ironic twist, he died of prostate cancer in 1994, while his wife died years earlier of stomach cancer). And the public bought it. Never mind that every professional medical organization in the world rejected the idea as baseless—here was a Very Smart Man telling the good people of Earth that if only they took vitamin supplements they could solve all their health problems.

Here’s the snag: vitamin C doesn’t prevent colds and it doesn’t prevent cancer, nor does it cure either ailment. Some studies have found evidence that regular usage might shorten the duration of your cold, but not when taken after the onset of the cold. Others have found associations with daily dosage and lower risk of cardiovascular diseases, though still more have shown no relationship whatsoever. The same goes for cataracts, pneumonia, tetanus, asthma, and liver disease.

As for cancer, the best-quality data show that vitamin C supplements have no effect on your likelihood of getting cancer, nor on the outcome of cancer once you have it. It’s possible that it can help certain therapies to work better, but equally likely that it inhibits other types of treatments. And while some small studies have found that extremely high doses do kill cancer cells, that’s only when the vitamin is given intravenously. Doses direct to your bloodstream can drastically increase the amount of vitamin C in your plasma—oral supplements can’t.

The basic upshot is this: taking vitamin C supplements will, in all likelihood, have no effect on your health. Since it’s a water-soluble vitamin, any excess you take in will simply be excreted out in your pee. The greatest risk is that you’ll get diarrhea or some other vague gastrointestinal problems (assuming that you don’t have hereditary hemochromatosis, or iron overload, in which case it can actually cause long-term damage to your internal tissues). Taking vitamin C every day probably won’t hurt you, but you almost certainly don’t need it. It’s not difficult to get enough in your diet without popping pills. You can find it in oranges, garlic, strawberries, chili peppers, kiwi, beef liver, oysters, guava, broccoli, parsley, onion, peach, apples, pears, carrots, bananas, avocados, plums, and a whole host of other foods that you never realized had vitamin C in them or possibly have never heard of (see: camu camu, seabuckthorn, and cloudberries).

All this being said, if you have a vitamin C deficiency you should absolutely take supplements. As any 18th century sailor will tell you, scurvy is no joke. And even if it doesn’t get that far, you need vitamin C to make collagen, heal wounds, produce some neurotransmitters, and support your immune system. Most people get plenty of it from their diet, but deficiencies persist in developed countries in people who eat junk food almost exclusively. Otherwise the problem has largely disappeared as the general population has gained regular access to a variety of fruit and vegetables.

Like almost all vitamins, there’s really no need to take vitamin C unless you have a genuine deficiency. Which you probably don’t. Consider this your license to stop buying those cold remedies containing megadoses of vitamin C and artificial orange flavor to try to trick you into thinking they’re appetizing. Just eat a regular orange and be done with it.

Here’s all of Google’s April Fools’ Day pranks so far

As the internet gets flooded with April Fools’ Day jokes — good or lame — it can be hard to keep track of the ones that are worthy of your attention. Google, in particular, is known for rolling out a ton of different pranks. Most of them are actually pretty fun since they are localized to each Google product or regional team. Here’s a look at what we’ve found out there this year. PAC-MAPS The…

My friend John Edgar Park made a huge Arduino for demo purposes. He brought it to Maker Faire a few years ago and it was a big hit. He finally got around to writing a tutorial for building your own.