Vox article on trolling the IRS scammers, you know, the ones that call you up and tell you that you owe the IRS money and pay it now or they’ll send the police after you.

That’s how I ended up talking to “Steve Smith” for 30 minutes. He was a senior investigations officer — the actual person who walks you through how to send them money. I learned that his secret is maintaining an aura of authority. That’s how he optimizes fear. That’s how he gets people to suspend logic, drive to Walgreens, and buy iTunes gift cards to pay the IRS. The scam takes advantage of the most vulnerable people.

Great read.

KDE Project releases KDE 1… yes, you read that right, and no, this is 2016, not 1996…

The KDE Restoration Project was a personal pet project that born around last QtCon and i took as a letter of love for the project that basically formed my professional life.

So this mad-man (or genius, it’s hard to say) has revamped the original KDE 1.0 code for the modern era. A very cool project, and fascinating to see old tech anew. Of course, sometimes our memories of how awesome something was is more powerful than the reality of how awesome it actually was. It’s left for you to decide if that’s the case here or not though :)