Interesting. Up to now the US has not directly (or at least publicly) accused the Chinese regime of cyber-espionage. This NYTimes story suggests that there’s been a change of heart.
WASHINGTON — The White House demanded Monday that the Chinese government stop the widespread theft of data from American computer networks and agree to “acceptable norms of behavior in cyberspace.
The demand, made in a speech by President Obama’s national security adviser, Tom Donilon, was the first public confrontation with China over cyberespionage and came two days after its foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, rejected a growing body of evidence that his country’s military was involved in cyberattacks on American corporations and some government agencies.The White House, Mr. Donilon said, is seeking three things from Beijing: public recognition of the urgency of the problem; a commitment to crack down on hackers in China; and an agreement to take part in a dialogue to establish global standards.
I’m a bit sceptical about allegations that there is a lot of IP theft by the Chinese, partly because of the provenance of many of the allegations. But then again, maybe it’s a bit like banks and cyber-crime: they’re reluctant to admit that they’ve been hacked in public. Maybe IP-rich companies are behaving the same way. Either way, it’d be nice to see some evidence.
I’m in (snowy) Ireland where, according to the newspaper I’m reading, one in four mortgages is in trouble and yet the eviction rate is only 0.25%. In the UK, which is not going through a property crisis on anything like the same scale, the rate is 12 times higher. In the US it’s 5%. Something has to give.
But eviction (aka foreclosure) has terrible historical connotations in Ireland, much as the Highland clearances have for Scots. So on the one hand the current situation is unsustainable. On the other hand, it’s hard to see an Irish government condoning what ruthless English landlords used to do to their peasantry (aka my ancestors). Politics in Ireland is the art of the impossible. And meanwhile tomorrow is the start of the Cheltenham racing festival. Now there’s something really serious.
The clowns who are currently running the EU are very cross because Paul Krugman has been pointing out that their current economic policies (if one can call them that) are manifestly not working. So they’ve been twittering abuse in his direction. His riposte (tactfully headed “Of cockroaches and Commissioners”) reads, in part:
The dignity of office can be a terrible thing for intellectual clarity: you can spend years standing behind a lectern or sitting around a conference table drinking bottled water, delivering the same sententious remarks again and again, and never have anyone point out how utterly wrong you have been at every stage of the game. Those of us on the outside need to do whatever we can to break through that cocoon — and ridicule is surely one useful technique.
There’s an especially telling tweet in there about how “unimpressive” I was when visiting the Commission in 2009. No doubt; I’m not an imposing guy. (I’ve had the experience of being overlooked by the people who were supposed to meet me at the airport, and eventually being told, “We expected you to be taller”). And for the life of me I can’t remember a thing about the Commission visit. Still, you can see what these people consider important: never mind whether you have actually proved right or wrong about the impacts of economic policy, what matters is whether you come across as impressive.
And let’s be clear: this stuff matters. The European economy is in disastrous shape; so, increasingly, is the European political project. You might think that eurocrats would worry mainly about that reality; instead, they’re focused on defending their dignity from sharp-tongued economists.
One of my academic colleagues spends a lot of time in Brussels and tells me that the one tactic that never fails to get Eurocrats riled is to ask whether a particular wheeze/project is “a good use of taxpayers’ money”.
I’ve just been reading a lovely blog post by Angus Croll about the Oxford comma.
“Eh?” I hear you say. It’s the comma that comes at the end of a list, just before the “and” or the “or” — which is why it’s also called the ’serial’ comma. It got the Oxford adjective because of endorsement long ago by that university’s Press’s ancient style manual.
What brought me up short was the realisation that, in a writing career that goes back to the 1960s, I’ve always eschewed the Oxford comma. It’d be nice to claim that this is because I got much of what passes for my education at the Other place, but in fact it’s simply due to the fact that I always thought that the Oxford comma looked wrong, somehow. Well, that and plain ignorance of the issues involved.
The great thing about Mr Croll’s post is that he provides an argument to buttress my inchoate intuition. He shows that the Oxford comma can be positively misleading. Thus:
It turns out that for every phrase that the Oxford comma clarifies, there’s another for which it obfuscates. “Through the window she saw George, a policeman and several onlookers” clearly refers to two people and some onlookers. Throw in the Oxford comma and George has become a policeman: “Through the window she saw George, a policeman, and several onlookers”.
It’s not all plain sailing, though. In the interests of objectivity, Croll cites a case where the (Cambridge?) absence of a comma can cause problems.
“She lives with her two children, a cat and a dog.”
To which I respond that I’ve known people who regarded their pets as if they were their offspring.
Anyway, I’m too old to change the habits of a lifetime. And I’m damned if I will use something from the Other place.
The test of a movie, I always think, is not so much the impact it has on one in the cinema, but whether it lives on in one’s mind in the days and weeks afterwards. Spielberg’s Lincoln, which we saw last night, passes that test with flying colours. There are lots of reasons for admiring the movie, and most of them have been extensively rehashed by critics more knowledgeable than me, so I won’t dwell on them here, except to say that Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance as Lincoln is truly awe-inspiring in capturing the greatness and the humanity of the man: his inner confidence, his conversational style, his unique combination of patience and impatience, his combination of realism and idealism, his wit. And, above all, his weariness.
And who would have thought that you could make a Hollywood blockbuster out of 150 minutes of pure dialogue? But actually the film’s dialogue is a work of genius. Or, more precisely, of a genius, name of Tony Kushner, who strove not just for wit and sparkle, but also for historical accuracy. He worked with the 20-volume OED by his side, checking the historical accuracy of the terms used by the characters. The only made-up word, he told the Boston Globe, was “grousle” — used by Lincoln in exasperation at the cavilling of his cabinet: “You grousle and heckle and dodge about”, he expostulates, “like pettifogging Tammany Hall hucksters.” The dialogue I enjoyed most, however, came not from Lincoln but from Thaddeus Stevens (played by Tommy Lee Jones), whose withering scorn for his political opponents left this viewer awestruck with admiration. (I used to be a TV critic, and so am a connoisseur of invective.) When he moderated his radical stance (he was a fervent believer that all men are created equal) for pragmatic reasons to the statement that “all men are equal before the law”, he was challenged by George Pendelton of Ohio on whether he believed that all men were equal. “You”, he said, staring at Pendleton, “are more reptile than man, George, so low and flat that the foot of man is incapable of crushing you.”
What’s most admirable about the movie is its willingness to embrace the complexity of the story of the Thirteenth Amendment. Politics is always a messy business, and politics in time of war is even messier. What the movie brings out brilliantly, though, is how politics is the art of the possible. It shows Lincoln achieving a supremely worthwhile end (enshrining the outlawing of slavery in the Constitution) by dubious – but not illegal — means. It leaves one thinking romantically about Churchill’s trope about democracy being “the worst system — except for all the others”. And shaking one’s head at the mess that Lincoln’s successors have made of his legacy.
Wonderful story in The Register about Jimmy Wales’s explanation for the popularity of Wikipedia in Chinese restaurants.
Wales also dropped some fascinating vignettes about the online encyclopedia. The organization was banned in China until the Beijing Olympics, and is still not as popular with local internet users as it is in the rest of the world. But the name has started cropping up on local restaurant menus.
He showed images sent in of menus listing beef brisket with Wikipedia, stir fried Wikipedia with peppers, steamed eggs with Wikipedia, and even a bread company that takes its name from the site. The Chinese Wikipedia editors are mystified by this, but Wales suggested a hypothesis.
“What we figured out was that just around the time of the Beijing Olympics a lot of restaurants were expecting millions of foreigners to flood into the county for the first time,” he said. “Restaurants that wouldn’t normally see foreigners decided to translate their menus and if you type almost anything into a search engine what’s the first thing that comes up? Wikipedia.”
Wales also showed off some country statistics that raised a few chuckles. The most popular type of category for Wikipedia articles in Japanese is pop culture information, he said, which given the country’s documented obsession with such matters is unsurprising.
But in German the most popular topic is geography, which raised a smattering of chuckles from those who know their 20th Century history. In France, one of the least popular categories was sex, which Wales attributed to the fact that the population spent more time actually having sex and so was less inclined to read about it.
I’m not a fan of David Cameron, but I had given him the benefit of the doubt on the same-sex marriage Bill. My feeling was that he could only have embarked on such a divisive issue (divisive for his party, that is) because he believed passionately in the cause. But Geoffrey Wheatcroft, in a perceptive piece in today’s Guardian puts it down to political ineptitude: it was part of his campaign to de-toxify the Tory party. “Of all Cameron’s own goals”, Wheatcroft writes,
none is stranger than the same-sex marriage bill. Try to set aside the rights and wrongs and look at this in terms of brute calculation of political advantage (and that’s how politicians do view matters, whatever they may say to the contrary). Bear in mind that Cameron’s critics are correct when they say that same-sex marriage was in neither the Tory manifesto (or any other party’s) or the coalition agreement.
To make this clearer, go back 45 or more years, as some of us can, to the famous liberal reforms passed by parliament under Harold Wilson’s government in the late 1960s, on abortion, homosexuality and divorce. I am old enough not only to remember them but to have collected signatures when I was an undergraduate on a petition for the repeal of the existing law criminalising homosexuality, one of my last political activities and for all I know my only good deed.
But although the bills were passed under the Wilson government, they were not introduced by it. They were all private members’ bills. Abortion reform was sponsored by a recently elected Liberal called David Steel, and homosexual decriminalisation by Leo Abse, an eccentric Labour MP (and by another eccentric who deserves to be remembered with honour, “Boofy” the Earl of Arran, a Wodehousian peer who bravely steered the bill through the Lords).
As a result, although the measures were contentious, there was no animosity between parties – or within them, a contrast indeed with this latest episode. So why did Cameron bring in the bill? The answer given by his somewhat diminished claque of sycophantic admirers in the media is that it was part of his mission to detoxify the Conservatives and show they aren’t the “nasty party” any more. In that case he conspicuously failed in his own terms, since more Tory MPs voted against the bill than for it. He has merely reminded us that he is the weak leader of a bitterly divided party.
Wheatcroft’s point is that the Tories were not brought into this world to be ‘nice’. They’re supposed to be competent, he says, and to protect the world for the wilder enthusiasms of the liberal mind. But Cameron doesn’t match up to that elementary requirement — which is why a new poll ranks him just ahead of John Major and Gordon Brown in the competence stakes.
The other day a colleague related an aphorism he had picked up in conversation with someone who had been in Tony Blair’s inner circle during his time in government:
“The best way to bury bad news is to publish it on the front page of the Guardian, because then the Daily Mail won’t touch it.”
It sounds like something from an Armando Iannucci script, but I’m sure it’s true. It’s also perceptive, as the phone-hacking story demonstrated: for over a year the story was doggedly pursued by the Guardian while the rest of the UK Fourth Estate determinedly looked the other way.
And then I remembered one of Marshall McLuhan’s aphorisms:
“Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity.”
Which of course brought to mind the case of John Edwards’s extramarital affair, news of which was first brought to the world by the National Inquirer, a journal of, er, highly-blemished reputation which admits to paying for information and other breaches of Best Practice as taught by US journalism schools. Because the story was broken by the Inquirer, mainstream media wouldn’t touch it at first.
So maybe the best contemporary advice for Cameron & Co when they want to bury bad news is to by-pass the Guardian and go straight to the Daily Star.
…in order to persuade the French to forget about that nasty “link tax” idea. Well, that’s how The Registerdescribes the deal reached by Google Chairman Eric Schmidt and the French President on Friday. Google, unsurprisingly, describes it in more statesmanlike tones: “Google creates €60m Digital Publishing Innovation Fund to support transformative French digital publishing initiatives”.
Of the two, I’m afraid I’m more convinced by the Register‘s interpretation.
Dealing with Google requires a mastery of two critical elements: technology (with the associated economics), and the legal aspect. Contractually speaking, it means transparency and enforceability. Let me explain.
Google is a black box. For good and bad reasons, it fiercely protects the algorithms that are key to squeezing money from the internet, sometimes one cent at a time — literally. If Google consents to a cut of, say, advertising revenue derived from a set of contents, the partner can’t really ascertain whether the cut truly reflects the underlying value of the asset jointly created – or not. Understandably, it bothers most of Google’s business partners: they are simply asked to be happy with the monthly payment they get from Google, no questions asked. Specialized lawyers I spoke with told me there are ways to prevent such opacity. While it’s futile to hope Google will lift the veil on its algorithms, inserting an audit clause in every contract can be effective; in practical terms, it means an independent auditor can be appointed to verify specific financial records pertaining to a business deal.
Another key element: From a European perspective, a contract with Google is virtually impossible to enforce. The main reason: Google won’t give up on the Governing Law of a contract that is to be “Litigated exclusively in the Federal or States Courts of Santa Clara County, California”. In other words: Forget about suing Google if things go sour. Your expensive law firm based in Paris, Madrid, or Milan will try to find a correspondent in Silicon Valley, only to be confronted with polite rebuttals: For years now, Google has been parceling out multiples pieces of litigation among local law firms simply to make them unable to litigate against it. Your brave European lawyer will end up finding someone that will ask several hundreds thousands dollars only to prepare but not litigate the case. The only way to prevent this is to put an arbitration clause in every contract. Instead of going before a court of law, the parties agrees to mediate the matter through a private tribunal. Attorneys say it offers multiples advantages: It’s faster, much cheaper, the terms of the settlement are confidential, and it carries the same enforceability as a Court order.
