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The Weekender: thawing threats, sizing up startups, and capturing a notorious criminal

The Weekender: thawing threats, sizing up startups, and capturing a notorious criminal

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The best of the week gone by

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Welcome to The Verge: Weekender edition. Every Saturday, we'll bring you some of the best and most important reads of the past seven days, from original reports, to in-depth features, to reviews and interviews. Think of it as a collection of some of our favorite pieces that you may have missed — or that you may just want to read again. You can follow along below, or keep up to date on Flipboard.

  • Report

    Give me $300 or the website gets it!

    Attackers took down Meetup's website last week, but not after giving the company a warning: for $300, an email said, it could pay to call off the attack. As it turns out, this type of extortion attempt might not be so uncommon – but websites haven't been eager to speak out.

  • Feature

    The end of the hunt

    Whether you believe in ghosts or think they're no more than fiction, you'll want to meet some of the real people who are chasing after them. Here's what it's like out in LA's ghost hunting scene, and how its newfound popularity may be bringing it down.

  • Report

    Climate change threatens to bring eradicated viruses back from the dead

    Researchers in France have brought a 30,000-year-old virus found frozen underground in Siberia back from the dead. The discovery allowed the research team to identify a new type of virus, but it also poses a much bigger question: what will happen to other frozen viruses as the globe keeps heating up?

  • Review

    Nikon Df review: a tale of two cameras

    It's easy for photographers to start lusting over Nikon's Df — a DSLR with plenty of manual controls, a stylish throwback design, and one of the best imaging sensors in the business. But making a camera nice to look at and nice to use are two very different things, and Nikon may have fallen short on one of them.

  • Report

    Android's co-founder is spending Google's billions hunting for the next big thing

    Android co-founder Rich Miner is now one of the top names at Google investment arm Google Ventures. We spent some time with him at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona to see how Google sizes up the show to pick out what it should be putting its money in next.

  • Feature

    Decrypting the most mysterious book in the world

    The 600-year-old Voynich manuscript is filled with beautiful illustrations and ornate, curling text. But no one's really sure what any of it means. Now, after decades of attempts to decipher it, one linguist in England believes that he's started to crack the code.

  • Report

    Behind the fall of El Chapo, Mexico's most notorious drug lord

    A powerful drug lord who's been on the run since escaping prison over a decade ago was finally apprehended in Mexico last month. Making the arrest meant overcoming a pervasive system of bribery, and no one's certain exactly how Mexico manage to do it — or why it happened now.

  • Report

    Native American tribes adopt Bitcoin-like currency, prepare to battle US government

    The Lakota nation hopes that having a currency of its own can help strengthen its community, and it's going digital to make just that happen. We spoke with programmer and activist Payu Harris about MazaCoin, its official Bitcoin alternative, to find out just what the new currency might mean for the Lakota.

  • Review

    Sony RX10 review: the everything camera

    Point-and-shoot cameras have been waning in popularity as more people switch over to their smartphones, but there's one big thing that phones just can't do: zoom. Sony goes all in with the RX10, betting that better image quality and a solid zoom lens will make for a point-and-shoot camera that people will want to carry. It turns out: Sony's bet is spot on.

  • Report

    The insanity of making six retro games in six months

    A trio of developers set themselves a challenge: make six games over six months, all based off the ideas and feedback of backers on Kickstarter. They now have a half-dozen gorgeous games to show for it, but getting them made was a lot more challenging — and a lot more time consuming — than they initially expected.