Predator and friend

Quote of the Day

”If the Third World War is fought with nuclear weapons, the Fourth will be fought with bows and arrows.”

• Lord Mountbatten

Funnily enough, I’m reading  2034: A Novel of the Next World War by Elliott Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis and thinking along the same lines.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Handel | ”The Harmonious Blacksmith” | Wilhelm Kempff

Link

I’ve loved this piece ever since I first heard it. There are also some delicious adaptations of it — for example this for Oboe, Bassoon and Harpischord.

Long Read of the Day

 Data isn’t oil, so what is it?

We need a better metaphor, because metaphors shape the way we think. And at the moment we’re wilfully misunderstanding ‘data’.

Really insightful essay by Matt Locke.

Thanks to Andrew Curry for spotting it.

Got an electric car but no home charger?

If you have an EV (as I do) then charging it at home is the obvious thing to do. But in order to do that you need to have a driveway so that the vehicle off the road while being charged. This is an obvious limitation on the adoption of EVs by people who live in apartments or in urban houses with no off-street parking.

Which is why this story by Miles Brignall in the Guardian caught my eye.

Electric car owners with a charger installed at their home can sign up to a community app that allows them to share it with neighbours, while making them a little extra cash at the same time.

Designed to get local communities sharing the 300,000 privately owned electric chargers across the country, the Co Charger app puts electric vehicle owners who don’t have a charger of their own in touch with neighbours who do.

Joel Teague, the man behind it, came up with the idea after his new electric Renault Zoe arrived without its charger. A kind neighbour allowed him to use his, with Teague popping £5 in his letterbox each time.

The app matches people with home chargers, the hosts, to “chargees” – those who would like to share them. It is free to download and it handles the whole booking process, works out how much the chargee owes the host, and makes the payment directly into their bank account…

Singapore Approves Covid Breath Test With One-Minute Result

From Bloomberg.

A breath test designed to detect Covid-19 and give accurate results within one minute has been approved for use in Singapore, the National University of Singapore said in a statement.

The test, developed by NUS spin-off startup Breathonix, works much like a standard breathalyzer test that police might use to see if an erratic driver is drunk. A person blows into a one-way valve mouthpiece, and compounds in the person’s breath — think of it as a breath signature — are compared by machine-learning software to the sort of breath signature expected from someone who’s Covid-positive.

Accurate tests at that speed could be key to unlocking a travel sector that’s crucial for Singapore’s economy but has slowed to a crawl during the pandemic. Even as the U.S. and parts of Europe begin to reopen with higher viral caseloads, Singapore and other “Covid-Zero” countries in Asia have been hesitant to open borders and have cracked down harshly on any sign of flare-ups.

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I haven’t worn a suit (or tie) for 14 months, so getting ready yesterday evening for the first College dinner since last March meant re-learning old skills. Like how to knot a tie! It turned out to be a really nice evening, with colleagues who haven’t met in person for at least a year gathered round a table, exchanging gossip and ideas.

It was also a reminder that Zoom is a mighty bloodless substitute for life, as Charles Lamb might have said.

Quote of the Day

”To eat well in England you should have a breakfast three times a day.”

• Somerset Maugham

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Traveling Wilburys | End Of The Line

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Fall of the House of Gates?

Fully reckoning with Bill Gates means not just focusing on how he treats women—vital as that is—but also confronting our own deep-seated worship of wealth and hardwired belief in hero narratives. By Tim Schwab Link

Galaxy Upcycling: How Samsung Ruined Their Best Idea in Years

By Kevin Purdy of iFixit.

This is a great story — of how Samsung had a great idea for making use of older smartphones and reducing waste, and how it fizzled out. The imperative to planned obsolescence and corporate conservatism triumphed.

“There is another way to create even more value” than recycling, Samsung said in a video at the time. “It’s called upcycling.” With code and creativity, upcycling could turn a Galaxy S5 into a smart fish tank monitor, a controller for all your smart home devices, a weather station, a nanny cam, or lots more. Upcycling not only kept your old phone from being shredded or stuck in junk-drawer purgatory, it could keep you from buying more single-purpose devices. It was a smart way to reduce our collective upgrade guilt.

We were so excited, in fact, that when Samsung asked us to help launch the product in the fall of 2017, we jumped at the chance. You’ll see iFixit’s name and logo all over Samsung’s original Galaxy Upcycling materials. Samsung, a company without much of a public environmental message, was tossing around big ideas born at a grassroots level. This was something new. We were jazzed, and after validating the concept with working code in our labs, lent our name and credibility to the effort.

But sometimes well-intentioned projects get muzzled inside giant companies. The version of Galaxy Upcycling that finally launched, four years later, is nearly unrecognizable. It makes Samsung seem like a company that hit its head and lost all memory of an idea that would really make a difference for their customers and the planet.

The original Upcycling announcement had huge potential. The purpose was twofold: unlock phones’ bootloaders—which would have incidentally assisted other reuse projects like LineageOS—and foster an open source marketplace of applications for makers. You could run any operating system you wanted. It could have made a real dent in the huge and ever-growing e-waste problem by giving older Samsung devices some value (no small feat, that). It was a heck of a lot more interesting than the usual high-level pledges from device makers about carbon offsets and energy numbers.

Sigh. Pity.

AI emotion-detection software is being tested on Uyghurs

BBC report

A camera system that uses AI and facial recognition intended to reveal states of emotion has been tested on Uyghurs in Xinjiang, the BBC has been told.

A software engineer claimed to have installed such systems in police stations in the province.

A human rights advocate who was shown the evidence described it as shocking.

Xinjiang is home to 12 million ethnic minority Uyghurs, most of whom are Muslim.

Citizens in the province are under daily surveillance. The area is also home to highly controversial “re-education centres”, called high security detention camps by human rights groups, where it is estimated that more than a million people have been held.

This isn’t just a Chinese story: there are tech companies in the West which are experimenting with this technology. When I mentioned this to a sceptical acquaintance he assumed I was pulling his leg. So, in a sense, one good thing about China at the moment is that it provides a demonstration that the fears some of us have about machine-learning are not the nightmares of technophobes, but concerns about real technology that is already in use for sinister purposes.

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Seen in the Children’s Books section of Waterstones on Monday.

Quote of the Day

”The road to ignorance is paved with good editions.”

• George Bernard Shaw

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mark Knopfler, Eric Clapton, Sting & Phil Collins | Money for Nothing | Live

Link

Long Read of the Day

Tim Harford has lunch with Daniel Kahneman

Link

As I wave my plate of paella in front of the webcam, Daniel Kahneman drops the bombshell.

“I have had my lunch.”

Awkward.

A lunch over Zoom was never an especially appetising prospect, and perhaps it was too much to expect Kahneman to play along. He is, after all, 87 years old, a winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics — despite being a psychologist — and, thanks to the success of his 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow, vastly more famous than most of his fellow laureates. For the sake of form I ask him to describe the lunch.

“Well, I had sashimi salad and shumai from a restaurant, and to be absolutely complete and precise, I had a baked apple which I baked myself.”

He raises his chin in defiance, then smiles impishly. “And that was my lunch. It was fine. Not exceptional, but it was fine.”

I set my paella to one side; I am somewhat relieved.

Do read on…

Culture war passes most Brits by

I was really cheered up by this — partly because in an online event recently I was asked if I approved of ‘cancel culture’ and had to admit that I didn’t really have a view since I had paid no attention to the various furores about it. (My feeling was that the questioner was astonished by my ignorance.)

But maybe I’m relatively normal. At any rate,

The UK public are as likely to think being “woke” is a compliment (26%) as they are to think it’s an insult (24%) – and are in fact most likely to say they don’t know what the term means (38%), according to a major new study of culture wars in the UK.

The research, by the Policy Institute at King’s College London and Ipsos MORI, also finds that a majority of the public have heard little to nothing about the phrases “cancel culture” or “identity politics”, and that there is limited awareness of the culture war debate more generally in the UK – despite a huge surge in related media coverage in recent years, from just 21 newspaper articles focused on the issue in the UK in 2015 to over 500 in 2020.

The study is the first in a series of reports that provides an in-depth assessment of the UK’s culture wars.

At last, an original way of challenging Amazon

Yesterday, the Attorney General of the District of Columbia, Karl Racine, has launched a legal argument against Amazon that is both novel and venerable — and which might yield results.

Here’s how the NYT reports it:

It’s a longstanding claim by some of the independent merchants who sell on Amazon’s digital mall that the company punishes them if they list their products for less on their own websites or other shopping sites like Walmart.com. Those sellers are effectively saying that Amazon dictates what happens on shopping sites all over the internet, and in doing so makes products more expensive for all of us.

Racine has made this claim a centerpiece of his lawsuit. Amazon has said before that merchants have absolute authority to set prices for the products they sell on its site, but that ignores that the company has subtle levers to make merchants’ products all but invisible to shoppers. If a merchant lists a product for less on another site, Amazon can respond by making it more cumbersome for a shopper to buy the item.

Why is this significant? Well, mainly because US competition laws — both as written and as interpreted by generations of judges — make it tricky to sue technology giants for breaking antitrust laws. The interesting thing about Mr Racine’s lawsuit it that it bypasses this by arguing that Amazon hurts the public the same way that 19th-century railroads and steel giants did — by strong-arming competition and raising prices at will.

It’s nice to see legal creativity in some other area than increasing fees.

Why Economics is failing us

A Bloomberg column by Tyler Cowen, himself a distinguished practitioner of the dismal science.

Here’s the dirty little secret that few of my fellow economics professors will admit: As those “perfect” research papers have grown longer, they have also become less relevant. Fewer people — including academics — read them carefully or are influenced by them when it comes to policy.

Actual views on politics are more influenced by debates on social media, especially on such hot topics such as the minimum wage or monetary and fiscal policy. The growing role of Twitter doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Social media is egalitarian, spurs spirited debate and enables research cooperation across great distances.

Still, an earlier culture of “debate through books” has been replaced by a new culture of “debate through tweets.” This is not necessarily progress. Economics is failing us.

I agree with him if by “us” he means democracy.

Another, hopefully interesting, link

“I photoshop Paddington into another movie every day until I forget”. This is daft — and sweet: a guy on Reddit who’s been photoshopping an image of Paddington Bear once a day into a movie. When I looked today he was on Day 77. Link.

H/T to Charles Arthur.

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Cloudscape

Seen on our cycle to the postbox today.

Quote of the Day

”Architecture is the art of how to waste space”.

• Philip Johnson

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Joseph Haydn | Piano Sonata nº 59 in E flat, Hob. XVI:49 | Alfred Brendel

Link

21 minutes of pure delight. And a good excuse for a second cup of coffee.

Long Read of the Day

How the Covid pandemic ends: Scientists look to the past to see the future

Very interesting piece by Helen Branswell, who’s an experienced and distinguished medical journalist. (In 2010-11 she was a Nieman Global Health Fellow at Harvard, where she focused on polio eradication. And in 2020 she received the George Polk Award in the public service category for her coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic.)

The truth is, she says, that pandemics always end. And to date vaccines have never played a significant role in ending them. (That doesn’t mean vaccines aren’t playing a critical role this time. Far fewer people will die from Covid-19 because of them.)

So how did previous pandemics end?

The viruses didn’t go away; a descendent of the Spanish flu virus, the modern H1N1, circulates to this day, as does H3N2. Humans didn’t develop herd immunity to them, either. That’s a phenomenon by which a pathogen stops spreading because so many people are protected against it, because they’ve already been infected or vaccinated.

Instead, the viruses that caused these pandemics underwent a transition. Or more to the point, we did. Our immune systems learned enough about them to fend off the deadliest manifestations of infection, at least most of the time. Humans and viruses reached an immunological détente. Instead of causing tsunamis of devastating illness, over time the viruses came to trigger small surges of milder illness. Pandemic flu became seasonal flu.

The viruses became endemic…

Read on.

Why CAPTCHAs are getting harder

Useful video explanation by Vox. Eight minutes well spent.

Thanks to the kind reader who spotted it.

Currys Law: how everything that can go wrong, will go wrong

(& why Amazon will rule the world)

Lovely blog post by Geoff Mulgan on the amazing incompetence and inefficiency of many companies (to the point where one wonders why they are not insolvent).

This is a boring blog. You can jump a few paragraphs down to the punchline if you like. It’s about the remarkable, indeed baffling, inefficiency of some big organisations. As a customer or passenger I can’t help but notice how systems are organised – so this piece is about how even the most basic things can be got wrong and how they could be put right.

It’s about very trivial problems by comparison with pandemics, disease and unemployment. But I suspect we all sometimes find that very trivial things take up a ridiculous amount of time and even emotional energy, crowding out the more important things we would rather have to think about. So this – a story about my failure to buy a cooker, and the larger failure of parts of British business to run themselves well – is in part personal therapy to get it off my chest.

Here goes. I bought a Rangemaster cooker from Currys/Dixons in mid-June 2020, to replace a similar older model which was broken. I also opted for installation and removal of the old cooker in the order. The delivery date, initially promised for 29th June, was repeatedly postponed, but eventually was fixed for August 15th. When the team arrived it turned out there was no gas installer with them and so no delivery was made.

If you’ve dealt with one of these companies, you could write the story yourself.

“On 23rd March (2021) — i.e. eight months after ordering the cooker,

the delivery lorry arrived, for the fifth time. As I had feared they said they could not deliver because of the steps. I told them I had offered to organise carriers but had been told this wasn’t necessary. They told me to take this up with customer services. Eventually I got through to them – to be told that the order had been cancelled, by them.

Geoff doesn’t tell us when the cooker was eventually up and running. But as I read the saga it brought to mind the problems we had with BT and getting fibre to our house some years ago. But that’s for another day…

The Colonial Pipeline Ransomware Hackers Had a Secret Weapon: Self-Promoting Cybersecurity Firms

Great ProPublica story, though one that’s sadly predictable.

On Jan. 11, antivirus company Bitdefender said it was “happy to announce” a startling breakthrough. It had found a flaw in the ransomware that a gang known as DarkSide was using to freeze computer networks of dozens of businesses in the U.S. and Europe. Companies facing demands from DarkSide could download a free tool from Bitdefender and avoid paying millions of dollars in ransom to the hackers.

But Bitdefender wasn’t the first to identify this flaw. Two other researchers, Fabian Wosar and Michael Gillespie, had noticed it the month before and had begun discreetly looking for victims to help. By publicizing its tool, Bitdefender alerted DarkSide to the lapse, which involved reusing the same digital keys to lock and unlock multiple victims. The next day, DarkSide declared that it had repaired the problem, and that “new companies have nothing to hope for.”

“Special thanks to BitDefender for helping fix our issues,” DarkSide said. “This will make us even better.”

DarkSide soon proved it wasn’t bluffing, unleashing a string of attacks — including the one on the Colonial pipeline.

This has been a feature of cybercrime stories for ages — most of the media coverage comes in the shape of quotes from the myriad ‘cybersecurity’ firms that inhabit this shadowy underworld. Some of them may be perfectly reputable. But one wonders…

What’s your favourite Bob Dylan song?

He was 80 yesterday. Can you believe it? The Guardian had a nice idea — to ask Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, Tom Jones, Judy Collins and more for their favourite Dylan number.

Jagger’s was Desolation Row (predictable, that). Tom Jones’s was Blowin’ in the Wind. Mine too.

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The Trolley Problem

Quote of the Day

”Now that you’ve got me right down to it, the only thing I didn’t like about The Barretts of Wimpole Street was the play.”

• Dorothy Parker in The New Yorker, 1931

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Creedence Clearwater Revival | Bad Moon Rising

Link

Nobody seeps at the back when this is on.

Long Read of the Day

How Lois Lew mastered IBM’s 1940s Chinese typewriter

Lovely story by Thomas Mullaney on his search for the remarkable woman who mastered the ill-fated behemoth of a typewriter that IBM had developed for the Chinese language.

I had seen this woman before. Many times now. I was certain of it. But who was she? In a film from 1947, she’s operating an electric Chinese typewriter, the first of its kind, manufactured by IBM. Semi-circled by journalists, and a nervous-looking middle-aged Chinese man—Kao Chung-chin, the engineer who invented the machine—she radiates a smile as she pulls a sheet of paper from the device. Kao is biting his lip, his eyes darting back and forth intently between the crowd and the typist. As I thought, I’d encountered the typist previously in my research, in glossy IBM brochures and on the cover of Chinese magazines. Who was she? Why did she appear so frequently, so prominently, in the history of IBM’s effort to electrify the Chinese language? The IBM Chinese typewriter was a formidable machine—not something just anyone could handle with the aplomb of the young typist in the film. On the keyboard affixed to the hulking, gunmetal gray chassis, 36 keys were divided into four banks: 0 through 5; 0 through 9; 0 through 9; and 0 through 9. With just these 36 keys, the machine was capable of producing up to 5,400 Chinese characters in all, wielding a language that was infinitely more difficult to mechanize than English or other Western writing systems.

To type a Chinese character, one depressed a total of 4 keys—one from each bank—more or less simultaneously, compared by one observer to playing a chord on the piano. Read on.

Great read.

A New Marshall plan for the world?

Brilliant post by Scott Galloway.

Seventy-five years ago, the world was ravaged by the defining crisis of the 20th century. Tens of millions died, societies were shattered, and geopolitical power plates experienced tectonic shifts. Of the world’s great powers, only one emerged relatively unscarred, with its innovation, leadership, and manufacturing stronger: the United States. America seized the opportunity to extend a hand of unprecedented strength and generosity to its allies and former enemies. It poured aid into their economies, dispatched expertise, and invested in treaties and global organizations on a historic scale.

This was enlightened self-interest, and altruism … which are not mutually exclusive. Through these programs, the U.S. reconstructed the roads, factories, businesses, and even cultures of other nations in its own image. The U.S. shaped enduring alliances with the most innovative economies in Europe and Asia. The result has been nearly a century of prosperity and (relative) peace.

Scott’s argument: Today, we face a similar crisis, and a similar opportunity.

The crisis is clear. As Americans unmask and return to Disneyland, the pandemic is tightening its grip elsewhere. The University of Washington estimates that in India the true daily death toll is nearly 13,000. In Brazil, the pandemic has killed half a million and counting. In both countries, health-care workers have died by the thousands, and the social-support infrastructure is collapsing.

Great idea.

If Apple is the only organisation capable of defending our privacy, it really is time to worry

Yesterday’s Observer column:

The computerised, high-speed auction system in which online ads are traded seems not to be compatible with the law – and is currently unregulated. That is the conclusion of a remarkable recent investigation by two legal scholars, Michael Veale and Frederik Zuiderveen Borgesius, who set out to examine whether this “real-time bidding” (RTB) system conforms to European data-protection law. They asked whether RTB complies with three rules of the European GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) – the requirement for a legal basis, transparency and security. They showed that for each of the requirements, most RTB practices do not comply. “Indeed,” they wrote, “it seems close to impossible to make RTB comply.” So, they concluded, it needs to be regulated.

It does. Often the problem with tech regulation is that our legal systems need to be overhauled to deal with digital technology. But the irony in this particular case is that there’s no need for such an overhaul: Europe already has the law in place. It’s the GDPR, which is part of the legal code of every EU country and has provision for swingeing punishments for infringers. The problem is that it’s not being effectively enforced.

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!

Still life with reflections

One of those pictures one snatches before the light changes. Reflections of a log fire and shadows of foliage cast by the winter sunshine flooding in through a window.

Quote of the Day

”Virginia Woolf herself never got used to the fact that if you write books, some people are bound to be rude about them.”

• Anthony Powell

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

J.S. Bach | Suite for Solo Cello No. 3 in C Major, BWV 1009: II. Allemande | Andrés Segovia

Link

I love these suites and often have them playing when I’m writing.

Long Read of the Day

On Rereading

Serendipity works! I stumbled on this meditation in the Yale Review by Victor Brombert on how the re-reading of long-forgotten books in his library during the pandemic lockdown made him reassess what those books had meant to him in his youth.

But the supreme lesson in flux came with my reading of the Essays by Michel de Montaigne, who has accompanied me ever since an admired mentor made me appreciate his restless curiosity, openminded skepticism, and fondness for paradoxical ideas. Montaigne looked with equanimity at the other side of any argument. The protean nature of his thinking delighted me, as did the unpredictable twists and turns of his conversational style. I found wisdom in his readiness to cohabit with what the flesh is heir to. After absorbing hefty doses of his writings, my glance turned inward. I was impressed by his justification for the unremitting interest he took in himself. Others look outward, he remarked, but he wished to penetrate into his own intimacy, and to explore his self in all its folds and creases, its “naturels plis.” The reason, however, is not narcissistic. No self-­indulgence here. Montaigne looks at himself as the only human reality he can observe with some accuracy, not as a unique and irreplaceable individual, but as a reflection of the entire human condition. Yet even this closely examined self tends to elude him, for it is multifaceted, constantly evolving and mutating. Flux is indeed the great lesson. Human nature is multifarious and unstable. Life allows for no fixity. A terse formula sums up Montaigne’s project. “I do not depict being. I depict passage.” I have reread these words many times in my mind.

A very nice, intellectually spacious, read.

How Paul Romer became disenchanted with tech

Paul Romer used to be Silicon Valley’s second favourite economist (after Hal Varian, Google’s Chief Economist) because of his ‘endogenous growth’ theory — the theory that ideas are the fuel that drives economic progress. Since the tech crowd view themselves as ultra-smart innovators, they regarded Romer as providing high-level theoretical justification for their profitable exploitation of ideas, an opinion that appeared to be confirmed in 2018 by the award of the Nobel Prize in economics to him and William Nordhaus.

But now, according to the New York Times Romer has changed his mind about the tech companies and turned into a fierce critic, championing new state taxes on their advertising businesses. His specific contribution is

a proposal for a progressive tax on digital ads that would apply mainly to the largest internet companies supported by advertising. Its premise is that social networks like Facebook and Google’s YouTube rely on keeping people on their sites as long as possible by targeting them with attention-grabbing ads and content — a business model that inherently amplifies disinformation, hate speech and polarizing political messages.

So that digital ad revenue, Mr. Romer insists, is fair game for taxation. He would like to see the tax nudge the companies away from targeted ads toward a subscription model. But at the least, he said, it would give governments needed tax revenue.

In February, Maryland became the first state to pass legislation that embodies Mr. Romer’s digital ad tax concept. Other states including Connecticut and Indiana are considering similar proposals. Industry groups have filed a court challenge to the Maryland law asserting it is an illegal overreach by the state.

Mr. Romer says the tax is an economic tool with a political goal. “I really do think the much bigger issue we’re facing is the preservation of democracy,” he said. “This goes way beyond efficiency.”

The puzzle is: what took him so long? After all, he’s smart enough to have realised this decades ago. Still, any convert is welcome. Or maybe in those days he didn’t think there was enough evidence of what was wrong.

 This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!

Quote of the Day

”The Act of God designation on all insurance policies means, roughly, that you cannot be insured for the accidents that are most likely to happen to you.”

• Alan Coren

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Eric Clapton | San Francisco Bay Blues (Acoustic) | Live at MTV Unplugged, Bray Film Studios, Windsor, England.

Link

If this doesn’t wake you up, then nothing will.

Long Read of the Day

Writing out loud: Andrew Sullivan on ‘Why I Blog’

A classic essay published in 2008 — 13 years ago. It remains the best articulation of the nature and value of blogging as a medium.

Sample:

No columnist or reporter or novelist will have his minute shifts or constant small contradictions exposed as mercilessly as a blogger’s are. A columnist can ignore or duck a subject less noticeably than a blogger committing thoughts to pixels several times a day. A reporter can wait—must wait—until every source has confirmed. A novelist can spend months or years before committing words to the world. For bloggers, the deadline is always now. Blogging is therefore to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.

And a paragraph I particularly like:

To blog is therefore to let go of your writing in a way, to hold it at arm’s length, open it to scrutiny, allow it to float in the ether for a while, and to let others, as Montaigne did, pivot you toward relative truth. A blogger will notice this almost immediately upon starting. Some e-mailers, unsurprisingly, know more about a subject than the blogger does. They will send links, stories, and facts, challenging the blogger’s view of the world, sometimes outright refuting it, but more frequently adding context and nuance and complexity to an idea. The role of a blogger is not to defend against this but to embrace it. He is similar in this way to the host of a dinner party. He can provoke discussion or take a position, even passionately, but he also must create an atmosphere in which others want to participate.

It’s a great read, from start to finish. And Sullivan is still blogging — though, since he now makes his living from it, you have to pay ($50 a year) for a subscription.

On the other hand, Dave Winer, who is the maestro of the medium, and whose wonderful blog has been running for (when I last checked) 26 years, 7 months, 13 days, 1 hour, 34 minutes and 35 seconds), doesn’t charge a cent.

How to divide the working day

Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule

Lovely essay by Paul Graham on why managers and those who make things inhabit different universes.

There are two types of schedule, which I’ll call the manager’s schedule and the maker’s schedule. The manager’s schedule is for bosses. It’s embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you’re doing every hour.

When you use time that way, it’s merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you’re done.

Most powerful people are on the manager’s schedule. It’s the schedule of command. But there’s another way of using time that’s common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.

When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in…

Science fiction as prophecy

Nice Bloomberg column by Tyler Cowen.

I have been reading science fiction for half a century, having spent my childhood consuming it in various forms. Now, for the first time in my life, I feel like I am living in a science fiction serial.

The break point was China’s landing of an exploratory vehicle on Mars. It’s not just the mere fact of it, as China was one of the world’s poorest countries until relatively recently. It’s that the vehicle contains a remarkable assemblage of software and artificial intelligence devices, not to mention lasers and ground-penetrating radar.

There is a series of science fiction novels about China in which it colonizes Mars. Published between 1988 and 1999, David Wingrove’s Chung Kuo series is set 200 years in the future. It describes a corrupt and repressive China that rules the world and enforces rigid racial hierarchies.

It is striking to read the review of the book published in the New York Times in 1990. It notes that in the book “the Chinese somehow regained their sense of purpose in the latter half of the 21st century” — which hardly sounds like science fiction, the only question at this point being why it might have taken them so long. The book is judged unrealistic and objectionable because its “vision of a Chinese-dominated future seems arbitrary, ungrounded in historical process.”

I’m reading another novel about China at the moment, and it’s not Sci-fi but a plausible account of how we might get to Armageddon earlier than envisaged.

Another, hopefully interesting, link

• Google’s Project Starline Making video conferencing more people-friendly. Link

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How to play the market

Quote of the day

”For the first time I was aware of that layer of blubber which encases an English peer, the sediment of permanent adulation.”

• Cyril Connolly in Enemies of Promise

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Loose Marbles | Burgundy trees Blues

Link

Long Read of the Day

 The 60-Year-Old Scientific Screwup That Helped Covid Kill

This long piece in Wired by Megan Molenti is truly wonderful. It gives the historical background to how the WHO and the CDC (and public health authorities everywhere) came to be so focussed on droplets and so sceptical about aerosol transmission of Covid-19 for so long — and with such deadly consequences.

How to make Russian hackers think again

Intriguing blog post by security guru Brian Krebs.

DarkSide and other Russian-language affiliate moneymaking programs have long barred their criminal associates from installing malicious software on computers in a host of Eastern European countries, including Ukraine and Russia. This prohibition dates back to the earliest days of organized cybercrime, and it is intended to minimize scrutiny and interference from local authorities.

In Russia, for example, authorities there generally will not initiate a cybercrime investigation against one of their own unless a company or individual within the country’s borders files an official complaint as a victim. Ensuring that no affiliates can produce victims in their own countries is the easiest way for these criminals to stay off the radar of domestic law enforcement agencies.

But here’s the thing: Digital extortion gangs like DarkSide take great care to make their entire platforms geopolitical, because their malware is engineered to work only in certain parts of the world.

DarkSide, like a great many other malware strains, has a hard-coded do-not-install list of countries which are the principal members of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) — former Soviet satellites that mostly have favorable relations with the Kremlin.

Since a lot of cybercrime gangs are based in Russia, they have a visceral appreciation of the fact that attracting the attention of Putin’s goons is not a good career move. So if their malware detects that the compromised machine has a Russian keyboard, they self-delete and exit, pronto.

Which of course leads to the thought that installing a Russian keyboard mapping to your computer’s operating system might be a useful way of making those intruders flee.

‘Might’ being the operative word, of course.

Will installing one of these languages keep your Windows computer safe from all malware? Absolutely not. There is plenty of malware that doesn’t care where in the world you are. And there is no substitute for adopting a defense-in-depth posture, and avoiding risky behaviors online.

But is there really a downside to taking this simple, free, prophylactic approach? None that I can see, other than perhaps a sinking feeling of capitulation. The worst that could happen is that you accidentally toggle the language settings and all your menu options are in Russian.

Helpful advice for Windows 10 users: To install a different keyboard language hit the Windows key and X at the same time, then select Settings, and then select “Time and Language.” Select Language, and then scroll down and you should see an option to install another character set. Pick one, and the language should be installed the next time you reboot. And if for some reason you need to toggle between languages, Windows+Spacebar is what you need.

Haven’t checked what Mac users need to do.

Thanks to Charles Arthur (Whom God Preserve).

End CAPTCHAs now

Guess how much time we humans collectively spend doing these reverse Turing tests — solving puzzles in order to persuade a machine that we are real people rather than machines.

Go on, have a guess.

According to this post on the Cloudflare blog it’s 500 years per day.

Based on our data, it takes a user on average 32 seconds to complete a CAPTCHA challenge. There are 4.6 billion global Internet users. We assume a typical Internet user sees approximately one CAPTCHA every 10 days.

This very simple back of the envelope math equates to somewhere in the order of 500 human years wasted every single day — just for us to prove our humanity.

Today, we are launching an experiment to end this madness. We want to get rid of CAPTCHAs completely. The idea is rather simple: a real human should be able to touch or look at their device to prove they are human, without revealing their identity. We want you to be able to prove that you are human without revealing which human you are! You may ask if this is even possible? And the answer is: Yes! We’re starting with trusted USB keys (like YubiKey) that have been around for a while, but increasingly phones and computers come equipped with this ability by default.

Today marks the beginning of the end for fire hydrants, crosswalks, and traffic lights on the Internet.

Er, hopefully. Cloudflare is a serious outfit, and this is an interesting article.

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