“Impartiality is a pompous word for indifference”.
G.K. Chesterton
Monthly Archives: November 2016
Donald in computerland
Leave aside for the moment the mysterious role (and behaviour) of the FBI Director in the last week of the election campaign and focus for a moment on one aspect of the supporters of the two candidates — different levels of education. A few weeks ago my colleague David Runciman wrote this in the Guardian:
The possibility that education has become a fundamental divide in democracy – with the educated on one side and the less educated on another – is an alarming prospect. It points to a deep alienation that cuts both ways. The less educated fear they are being governed by intellectual snobs who know nothing of their lives and experiences. The educated fear their fate may be decided by know-nothings who are ignorant of how the world really works. Bringing the two sides together is going to be very hard. The current election season appears to be doing the opposite.
The headline on the essay was “How the education gap is tearing politics apart.”
Yesterday the FBI Director wrote to Congress saying that his staff had reviewed the relevant emails on Anthony Weiner’s laptop and found nothing that would cause the Agency to review its earlier judgment that there was no justification for taking action against Hillary Clinton.
Needless to say, this was meat and drink for Trump. “You can’t review 650,000 emails in eight days,” he said yesterday in an appearance at the Freedom Hill Amphitheater in Michigan.
“You can’t do it folks. Hillary Clinton is guilty. The investigations into her crimes will go on for a long, long time. The rank-and-file special agents at the FBI won’t let her get away with her terrible crimes, including the deletion of her 33,000 emails after receiving a congressional subpoena.”
Needless to say, Trump’s supporters were delighted. Here’s a sample tweet:
There are only two conclusions to be drawn from this: (a) Trump knows nothing about computer technology; or (b) he does, but is reckoning that his supporter base knows nothing about it.
My hunch is (b), but it doesn’t really matter either way. The task of getting software to trawl through any number of electronic documents looking either for metadata (like “From:”. “To:” or “cc:”) or keywords is computationally trivial. Ask Edward Snowden:
In fact, as one expert pointed out the real question that the FBI Director should have to answer is: what took you so long?
Q1: Who wrote this? Q2: And of whom does it remind you?
Like the earlier mob leaders, the spokesmen for totalitarian movements possessed an unerring instinct for anything that ordinary party propaganda or public opinion did not care to touch. Everything hidden, everything passed over in silence, became of major significance, regardless of its own intrinsic importance. The mob really believed that truth was whatever respectable society had hypocritically passed over, or covered with corruption … The modern masses do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience … What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.
Answers:
- Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism
- One of the current candidates for the presidency of the United States.
So the government is serious about cybersecurity? Really?
This morning’s Observer column:
On Tuesday, the chancellor, Philip Hammond, announced that the government was “investing” £1.9bn in boosting the nation’s cybersecurity. “If we want Britain to be the best place in the world to be a tech business,” he said, “then it is also crucial that Britain is a safe place to do digital business… Just as technology presents huge opportunities for our economy – so to it poses a risk. Trust in the internet and the infrastructure on which it relies is fundamental to our economic future. Because without that trust, faith in the whole digital edifice will fall away.”
Quite so; cybersecurity is clearly important. After all, in its 2015 strategic defence and security review, the government classified “cyber” as a “tier 1” threat. That’s the same level as international military conflict and terrorism. So let’s look at the numbers. The UK’s defence budget currently runs at £35.1bn, while the country’s expenditure on counterterrorism is now running at about £3bn a year. That puts Hammond’s £1.9bn (a commitment he inherited from George Osborne, by the way) into perspective. And the money is to be spent over five years, so an uncharitable reading of the chancellor’s announcement is that the government is actually investing just under £400m annually in combating this tier 1 threat.
All of which suggests that there’s a yawning chasm between Hammond’s stirring rhetoric about the cyber threat and his ability to muster the resources needed to combat it…
Lucky me!
Aw, isn’t that nice. Matt Brittin, the UK boss of Google has just written to me to inform me that I’ve won a big prize in a lottery organised by the company.
Here’s the beginning of his email:
Note the impressive ‘watermarking’ on the email.
But that’s not all, there’s a ‘seal’ on the bottom (to show it’s legit) and it’s even signed by Larry Page himself.
I wonder who falls for this stuff?
The genius of Donald J. Trump
Jack Shafer nails it:
No matter who claims the presidency on November 8, the 2016 election was a story about one human being’s domination of the media. Not since 9/11 has a single topic so colonized all of the media territories—print, television, and the Web—as thoroughly as Donald J. Trump did. Exactly how did he do that? It wasn’t through brute force: Trump ignored all the orthodoxies, eschewing the traditional campaign-building, almost ignoring the field offices and a “ground game.” By April, his campaign had only 94 payrolled staffers compared with Hillary Clinton’s 795. No focus groups, no pollsters, practically no outside speech writing, and little in the way of TV ads. He practiced a political version of lean business management.
Trump’s secret was almost exactly the opposite of what even the best-paid consultant would advise. He has run a media campaign directly against the media, helping himself to the copious media attention available to a TV star while disparaging journalists at every podium and venue…
Yep. Worth reading in full. Sobering and depressing.
World Exclusive!!!
The rule of law…
… is one of the basic criteria for a functioning democracy. The UK is (still) a democracy in that sense. But it looks as though the creeps who run the country’s tabloid newspapers don’t understand that.
Which is why this statement from the Chair of the Bar Council is welcome:
“The judiciary of England & Wales is the envy of the world because it is independent of Government or any other influence. When we speak to lawyers in other jurisdictions, it is our judiciary that they particularly praise for its professionalism and independence. “Publicly criticising individual members of the judiciary over a particular judgement or suggesting that they are motivated by their individual views, political or otherwise, is wrong, and serves only to undermine their vital role in the administration of justice. It also does no favours to our global reputation.
“None of the parties suggested that the Court did not have jurisdiction to decide the point at issue. They are simply doing their job – impartially ruling on a dispute between parties, one of whom happens to be the Government in this instance. The right to appeal is there to challenge the Court’s decision if a party feels they have grounds to do so. Whilst acknowledging that this question is one of potentially significant constitutional importance, the independent role of the Court should be respected, particularly by those who disagree with the outcome.”
Foreign readers who are unfamiliar with Britain’s toxic tabloid culture might find Andy Beckett’s essay useful.
SEE ALSO Charlie Falconer’s excellent piece
Facebook: still growing
From today’s New York Times:
The social network on Wednesday reached the latest milestones in its quest to dominate the world, topping 1.79 billion monthly visitors as of the end of September, up 16 percent from a year ago. Facebook also added a record number of new daily users and said for the first time that more than one billion people regularly used its network exclusively on their mobile device every month.
And those numbers do not even include Facebook’s other properties, such as the photo-sharing service Instagram and the messaging service WhatsApp.
Facebook’s user growth defies the usual trajectories for social media companies, which often start strong out of the gate and then sharply slow down. Twitter, which added four million new visitors last quarter, now serves a user base roughly one-sixth the size of Facebook’s. Snapchat, while popular among young users, has about 150 million daily users, about half as many as Twitter…
Impact of autonomous vehicles on (mostly male) employment
From a Guardian column by Paul Mason:
these battles between regulators and the rent-seeking monopolists who have hijacked the sharing economy are, in the long term, irrelevant. The attempt to drive down cab drivers’ wages and reduce their employment rights to zero are, in their own way, a last gasp of the 20th-century economic thinking.
Because soon there won’t need to be drivers at all. Given that there are 400,000 HGV drivers in the UK, that at least a quarter of Britain’s 2.5 million van drivers are couriers, and that there are 297,000 licensed taxi drivers – that is a big dent in male employment.
The most important question facing us is not whether Uber drivers should have employment rights (they should), but what to do in a world where automation begins to eradicate work. If we accept – as Oxford researchers Carl Frey and Michael Osborne stated in 2013 – that 47% of jobs are susceptible to automation, the most obvious problem is: how are people going to live?