Quotes from Misha Glenny

Our guys were just playing at being gangsters—the Yugoslavs had been thieving and killing in Europe for real over decades. They were seriously tough, and to this day, if you want to kill somebody in Bulgaria and you want the job done reliably and cheaply, then you hire a Serb. They are the best assassins.

One may denounce corruption in the developing world and the developed world alike, but in the age when billionaires stalk a globe on which 50 percent of its people live on less than two dollars a day, can one really be surprised that customs officers, policemen, judges, politicians, and bureaucrats are often tempted?

A little of this caviar finds its way to the fish restaurants around Istanbul's Taksim Square, but the bulk is sent on to the United Arab Emirates to be enjoyed by wealthy Westerners and Arabs in the preposterous hotels that have set new standards in unnecessary opulence.

In 1979, Dubai had learned a valuable lesson from the Iranian Revolution and Soviet invasion of Afghanistan: trouble has its bright side.

Matrix passò il Rubicone in uno stato di trance psicologica, incapace di percepire le acque che gli mulinavano intorno. Era un ragazzino e stava scivolando in maniera lenta e inesorabile nella delinquenza. In qualche recesso della sua mente era consapevole che forse qualcosa non andava, ma nel cyberspazio le linee di demarcazione sono molto confuse, sempre che siano visibili.

Capital itself is neither dirty nor clean - it is human activity and human values that determine the colour of money

In humanity's relentless drive for convenience and economic growth, we have developed a dangerous level of dependency on networked systems in a very short space of time: in less than two decades, huge parts of the so-called 'critical national infrastructure' (CNI in geekish) in most countries have come under the control of ever more complex computer systems.

they had encountered the enemy, and in the first two days several thousand

Nonetheless, the gamers had taken up with gusto the challenge laid down by software manufacturers, and before long a significant subculture of cracker groups had flowered. Its members' sole aim was to crack games and other software the minute they came onto the market and then parade their cracking skills to their peers. The cyber underworld was born, although it would quickly start fracturing into very different communities – some good, some bad.

Je?li chcesz pozna? czyj? prawdziwy charakter, daj mu w?adz? i pieni?dze. Wtedy poka?e ci swoj? w?a?ciw? twarz.

Germany belonged, with Italy, to the so-called verspätete Nationen (late-coming nations), which sought to compensate for their delayed arrival in the game of imperialism.

Force people to live on top of one another like that," says Al Lovejoy as he describes the townships he knows intimately, "and you are bound to pick up social stress that expresses itself in violence. What I could never understand is why there wasn't more violence.

Would a Catholic turn down the chance to visit Lourdes? Or a Muslim an opportunity to see Mecca? Well, no self-respecting criminal would pass up the offer of a week in Odessa.

Perhaps the most terrifying statistic of all that Soares uncovered was that in Albany County (minority population 13 percent) more than 95 percent of imprisoned drug law offenders were black or Hispanic. Whichever way you look at the figure, it can mean only one thing—something is rotten in the state.

Despite habitual protests by civil servants and politicians that no such process is under way, the tortured and slow death of Internet privacy in the West, especially in the United Kingdom and the United States, is a sad – albeit visible – reality and is probably inevitable.

The Internet has fashioned a new and complicated environment for an age-old dilemma that pits the demands of security against the desire for freedom.