American Kingpin

American Kingpin PDF Author: Nick Bilton
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698405730
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. The unbelievable true story of the man who built a billion-dollar online drug empire from his bedroom—and almost got away with it In 2011, a twenty-six-year-old libertarian programmer named Ross Ulbricht launched the ultimate free market: the Silk Road, a clandestine Web site hosted on the Dark Web where anyone could trade anything—drugs, hacking software, forged passports, counterfeit cash, poisons—free of the government’s watchful eye. It wasn’t long before the media got wind of the new Web site where anyone—not just teenagers and weed dealers but terrorists and black hat hackers—could buy and sell contraband detection-free. Spurred by a public outcry, the federal government launched an epic two-year manhunt for the site’s elusive proprietor, with no leads, no witnesses, and no clear jurisdiction. All the investigators knew was that whoever was running the site called himself the Dread Pirate Roberts. The Silk Road quickly ballooned into $1.2 billion enterprise, and Ross embraced his new role as kingpin. He enlisted a loyal crew of allies in high and low places, all as addicted to the danger and thrill of running an illegal marketplace as their customers were to the heroin they sold. Through his network he got wind of the target on his back and took drastic steps to protect himself—including ordering a hit on a former employee. As Ross made plans to disappear forever, the Feds raced against the clock to catch a man they weren’t sure even existed, searching for a needle in the haystack of the global Internet. Drawing on exclusive access to key players and two billion digital words and images Ross left behind, Vanity Fair correspondent and New York Times bestselling author Nick Bilton offers a tale filled with twists and turns, lucky breaks and unbelievable close calls. It’s a story of the boy next door’s ambition gone criminal, spurred on by the clash between the new world of libertarian-leaning, anonymous, decentralized Web advocates and the old world of government control, order, and the rule of law. Filled with unforgettable characters and capped by an astonishing climax, American Kingpin might be dismissed as too outrageous for fiction. But it’s all too real.

American Kingpin

American Kingpin PDF Author: Nick Bilton
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698405730
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Get Book Here

Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. The unbelievable true story of the man who built a billion-dollar online drug empire from his bedroom—and almost got away with it In 2011, a twenty-six-year-old libertarian programmer named Ross Ulbricht launched the ultimate free market: the Silk Road, a clandestine Web site hosted on the Dark Web where anyone could trade anything—drugs, hacking software, forged passports, counterfeit cash, poisons—free of the government’s watchful eye. It wasn’t long before the media got wind of the new Web site where anyone—not just teenagers and weed dealers but terrorists and black hat hackers—could buy and sell contraband detection-free. Spurred by a public outcry, the federal government launched an epic two-year manhunt for the site’s elusive proprietor, with no leads, no witnesses, and no clear jurisdiction. All the investigators knew was that whoever was running the site called himself the Dread Pirate Roberts. The Silk Road quickly ballooned into $1.2 billion enterprise, and Ross embraced his new role as kingpin. He enlisted a loyal crew of allies in high and low places, all as addicted to the danger and thrill of running an illegal marketplace as their customers were to the heroin they sold. Through his network he got wind of the target on his back and took drastic steps to protect himself—including ordering a hit on a former employee. As Ross made plans to disappear forever, the Feds raced against the clock to catch a man they weren’t sure even existed, searching for a needle in the haystack of the global Internet. Drawing on exclusive access to key players and two billion digital words and images Ross left behind, Vanity Fair correspondent and New York Times bestselling author Nick Bilton offers a tale filled with twists and turns, lucky breaks and unbelievable close calls. It’s a story of the boy next door’s ambition gone criminal, spurred on by the clash between the new world of libertarian-leaning, anonymous, decentralized Web advocates and the old world of government control, order, and the rule of law. Filled with unforgettable characters and capped by an astonishing climax, American Kingpin might be dismissed as too outrageous for fiction. But it’s all too real.

The Silk Road

The Silk Road PDF Author: Kathryn Davis
Publisher: Graywolf Press
ISBN: 1555978290
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 145

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Book Description
A spellbinding novel about transience and mortality, by one of the most original voices in American literature The Silk Road begins on a mat in yoga class, deep within a labyrinth on a settlement somewhere in the icy north, under the canny guidance of Jee Moon. When someone fails to arise from corpse pose, the Astronomer, the Archivist, the Botanist, the Keeper, the Topologist, the Geographer, the Iceman, and the Cook remember the paths that brought them there—paths on which they still seem to be traveling. The Silk Road also begins in rivalrous skirmishing for favor, in the protected Eden of childhood, and it ends in the harrowing democracy of mortality, in sickness and loss and death. Kathryn Davis’s sleight of hand brings the past, present, and future forward into brilliant coexistence; in an endlessly shifting landscape, her characters make their way through ruptures, grief, and apocalypse, from existence to nonexistence, from embodiment to pure spirit. Since the beginning of her extraordinary career, Davis has been fascinated by journeys. Her books have been shaped around road trips, walking tours, hegiras, exiles: and now, in this triumphant novel, a pilgrimage. The Silk Road is her most explicitly allegorical novel and also her most profound vehicle; supple and mesmerizing, the journey here is not undertaken by a single protagonist but by a community of separate souls—a family, a yoga class, a generation. Its revelations are ravishing and desolating.

Silk Road Takedown

Silk Road Takedown PDF Author: David Farland
Publisher: Independently Published
ISBN: 9781729436882
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
This is the incredible true story as told in Wired, Vogue, Forbes, and USA Today.In development to be a major Motion Picture!In 2011, the Silk Road website was set up on the Dark Web in the hopes of becoming the Amazon.com of the drug world. A charismatic young entrepreneur known only as the Dread Pirate Roberts quickly built a client base of more than a million customers and created a billion-dollar company that supplied drugs, weapons, false IDs and anonymous bank accounts to the underworld.This is the true story of how a disabled Mormon grandfather found himself in the middle of it all. Arrested by a crooked DEA agent, framed for stealing from drug lords, he quickly found himself trapped in a dark web of lies, theft, and murder.

Restless Valley

Restless Valley PDF Author: Philip Shishkin
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300185987
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
This award-winning foreign correspondent’s vivid account of Central Asia’s recent history “reads like a novel but is the stuff of hard-won journalism” (Gary Shteyngart, author of Absurdistan). Here are the stories of two revolutions, a massacre of unarmed civilians, a civil war, a drug-smuggling highway, brazen corruption schemes, contract hits, and larger-than-life characters who may be villains, heroes, or possibly both. Restless Valley is a gripping, contemporary chronicle of Central Asia from a veteran journalist with extensive experience in the region. Both Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan have struggled with the challenges of post-Soviet, independent statehood, and both became entangled in America’s Afghan campaign when the United States built military bases within their borders. Meanwhile, the region was becoming a key smuggling hub for Afghanistan’s booming heroin trade. Through the eyes of local participants—the powerful and the powerless—Shishkin reconstructs how Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan have ricocheted between extreme repression and democratic strivings; how alliances with the United States and Russia have brought mixed blessings; and how Stalin’s legacy of ethnic gerrymandering continues to incite conflict today. “The weird, the strange, the corrupt, and the grand are all evident . . . [Shishkin] relentlessly pursues and then tells the stories of the most corrupt and powerful and also the most sincere and admirable characters who inhabit these mountains.” —Ahmed Rashid, The New York Review of Books

Shadow of the Silk Road

Shadow of the Silk Road PDF Author: Colin Thubron
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061809624
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
Shadow of the Silk Road records a journey along the greatest land route on earth. Out of the heart of China into the mountains of Central Asia, across northern Afghanistan and the plains of Iran and into Kurdish Turkey, Colin Thubron covers some seven thousand miles in eight months. Making his way by local bus, truck, car, donkey cart and camel, he travels from the tomb of the Yellow Emperor, the mythic progenitor of the Chinese people, to the ancient port of Antioch—in perhaps the most difficult and ambitious journey he has undertaken in forty years of travel. The Silk Road is a huge network of arteries splitting and converging across the breadth of Asia. To travel it is to trace the passage not only of trade and armies but also of ideas, religions and inventions. But alongside this rich and astonishing past, Shadow of the Silk Road is also about Asia today: a continent of upheaval. One of the trademarks of Colin Thubron's travel writing is the beauty of his prose; another is his gift for talking to people and getting them to talk to him. Shadow of the Silk Road encounters Islamic countries in many forms. It is about changes in China, transformed since the Cultural Revolution. It is about false nationalisms and the world's discontented margins, where the true boundaries are not political borders but the frontiers of tribe, ethnicity, language and religion. It is a magnificent and important account of an ancient world in modern ferment.

Empires of the Silk Road

Empires of the Silk Road PDF Author: Christopher I. Beckwith
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400829941
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 506

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Book Description
An epic account of the rise and fall of the Silk Road empires The first complete history of Central Eurasia from ancient times to the present day, Empires of the Silk Road represents a fundamental rethinking of the origins, history, and significance of this major world region. Christopher Beckwith describes the rise and fall of the great Central Eurasian empires, including those of the Scythians, Attila the Hun, the Turks and Tibetans, and Genghis Khan and the Mongols. In addition, he explains why the heartland of Central Eurasia led the world economically, scientifically, and artistically for many centuries despite invasions by Persians, Greeks, Arabs, Chinese, and others. In retelling the story of the Old World from the perspective of Central Eurasia, Beckwith provides a new understanding of the internal and external dynamics of the Central Eurasian states and shows how their people repeatedly revolutionized Eurasian civilization. Beckwith recounts the Indo-Europeans' migration out of Central Eurasia, their mixture with local peoples, and the resulting development of the Graeco-Roman, Persian, Indian, and Chinese civilizations; he details the basis for the thriving economy of premodern Central Eurasia, the economy's disintegration following the region's partition by the Chinese and Russians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the damaging of Central Eurasian culture by Modernism; and he discusses the significance for world history of the partial reemergence of Central Eurasian nations after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Empires of the Silk Road places Central Eurasia within a world historical framework and demonstrates why the region is central to understanding the history of civilization.

Murder on the Dark Web

Murder on the Dark Web PDF Author: Eileen Ormsby
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780648882718
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
TRUE CRIMEA Minnesota dog trainer is found dead of an apparent suicide after detectives find her details on a dark web murder-for-hire site. But who paid $13,000 in Bitcoin to kill this devout Christian and beloved wife and mother? An extraordinary tale of infidelity, betrayal and a shadowy hitman who may not be all he seems.?A Page-3 glamour model is drugged, kidnapped and listed for sale on a dark web human trafficking site. A secret society called Black Death demands a ransom for her safe return, or else she will be sold to sadistic millionaires to use before feeding to the tigers. ?True tales from the dark side of the internet

The Digital Silk Road

The Digital Silk Road PDF Author: Jonathan E. Hillman
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0063046296
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
An expert on China’s global infrastructure expansion provides an urgent look at the battle to connect and control tomorrow’s networks. From the ocean floor to outer space, China’s Digital Silk Road aims to wire the world and rewrite the global order. Taking readers on a journey inside China’s surveillance state, rural America, and Africa’s megacities, Jonathan Hillman reveals what China’s expanding digital footprint looks like on the ground and explores the economic and strategic consequences of a future in which all routers lead to Beijing. If China becomes the world’s chief network operator, it could reap a commercial and strategic windfall, including many advantages currently enjoyed by the United States. It could reshape global flows of data, finance, and communications to reflect its interests. It could possess an unrivaled understanding of market movements, the deliberations of foreign competitors, and the lives of countless individuals enmeshed in its networks. However, China’s digital dominance is not yet assured. Beijing remains vulnerable in several key dimensions, the United States and its allies have an opportunity to offer better alternatives, and the rest of the world has a voice. But winning the battle for tomorrow’s networks will require the United States to innovate and take greater risks in emerging markets. Networks create large winners, and this is a contest America cannot afford to lose.

The Pet Hawk of the House of Abbas

The Pet Hawk of the House of Abbas PDF Author: Dmitry Chen
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781940585000
Category : FICTION
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The first book in Russia's acclaimed Silk Road Trilogy, available in English for the first time, is full of mystery, memorable characters, and nonstop adventure. In the heart of the world, where empires collide, Nanidat Maniakh, a dashing trader, is enjoying the good life as head of a powerful silk dynasty. Yet Fate has other plans: Nanidat's world is suddenly torn asunder by murder and revolution, and the fate of his homeland hangs in the balance. Overnight, this able merchant must become a cunning warrior and spy, while eluding assassins, negotiating with kings, and pursuing a long-lost love. This thrilling and rich historical thriller, set in 749 CE—in the part of the world we now know as Iran, Iraq, and Central Asia—vividly re-creates a lost world, yet its passions and conflicts are entirely relevant to the present day.

The Silk Code

The Silk Code PDF Author: Paul Levinson
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780812567755
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Levinson, acclaimed short fiction writer and president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, has penned his first novel--about a forensic detective who is caught in a struggle that dates all the way back to the dawn of humanity on Earth. Unless he can unravel the genetic puzzle of the Silk Code, he'll die.