The ships came within 60 yards of a collision

After Antiplagiat, a private plagiarism detection company, accused Russia's scientific and scholarly journals of being rife with plagiarism, self-plagiarism, duplication and other misconduct, the Russian Academy of Sciences chartered a committee to investigate the problem: their report confirmed the accusations, finding more instances of plagiarism/self-plagiarism, as well as instances in which the same paper was published in different journals under different authors' names. Read the rest

My 16-year-old daughter is fascinated by the Rasputin, the "Mad Monk," who was born into poverty in 1869 and became an influential and charismatic power player in Russian politics. Here's a TED-Ed video that recounts his life in five minutes.

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Well, this is rather bold, isn't it. Read the rest

Yesterday, r/redditsecurity announced that it believes leaked internal secret documents about trade agreement discussions between the United States and the United Kingdom were posted to /r/worldpolitics by Russians:

Earlier this year Facebook discovered a Russian campaign on its platform, which was further analyzed by the Atlantic Council and dubbed “Secondary Infektion.” Suspect accounts on Reddit were recently reported to us, along with indicators from law enforcement, and we were able to confirm that they did indeed show a pattern of coordination. We were then able to use these accounts to identify additional suspect accounts that were part of the campaign on Reddit. This group provides us with important attribution for the recent posting of the leaked UK documents, as well as insights into how adversaries are adapting their tactics.

In late October, an account u/gregoratior posted the leaked documents and later reposted by an additional account u/ostermaxnn. Additionally, we were able to find a pocket of accounts participating in vote manipulation on the original post. All of these accounts have the same shared pattern as the original Secondary Infektion group detected, causing us to believe that this was indeed tied to the original group.

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The most on-brand name since “Fraud Guarantee.” Read the rest

Uh-oh, someone's in trouble.

“Intelligence officials believe that one of the people the Kremlin relied on to spread disinformation about Ukrainian interference was Oleg V. Deripaska, a Russian oligarch who had ties to Mr. Manafort.”

Well, old Donald sure has got himself into a mighty fine pickle. Read the rest

Whoever installed this power pole support in the middle of a road in Vladimir, Russia decided it would be a waste of money to erect the support in such a way that a driver wouldn't hit it and die.

<em>Image: YouTube</em> Read the rest

SCP Foundation is an online shared world whose members create delightful fiction, movies, games and other media. It's a sprawling, global, friendly phenomenon, licensed under Creative Commons. Read the rest

Wired security reporter Andy Greenberg's latest book is Sandworm (previously), a true-life technothriller that tells the stories of the cybersecurity experts who analyzed and attributed as series of ghastly cyberwar attacks that brought down parts of the Ukrainian power grid, and then escaped the attackers' control and spread all over the world. Read the rest

“It would be the right (thing). But it’s not up to us to decide,” Putin said.

One for the ages. Almost looks like one of those garage sale black velvet paintings with the dogs playing poker. Read the rest

Traitorous Trump is making spring travel plans with Vladimir Putin. Read the rest

Donald is throwing Gordon Sondland under the Trump bus.

You knew this was inevitable.

Remember that time Sondland gave him a million dollars? Read the rest

Even Bill Barr knew it was dumb