Seen on the Interwebby thing.

Quote of the Day

”In my experience, if you have to keep the lavatory door shut by extending your left leg, it’s modern architecture.”

• Nancy Banks-Smith, The Guardian, 1969.

Nancy was the Guardian’s TV critic for many years. I occupied the same post on the The Observer between 1987 and 1995, so was in an excellent position to know how good she was. As a critic she was wonderfully funny, sharp — and occasionally lethal for pretentious performers.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Samuel Barber | Adagio for Strings, Op.11 | Vienna Philharmonic | Conducted by Gustavo Dudamel with pianist Yuja Wang as soloist | Summer Night Concert 2019

Link

Long Read of the Day

 How to curate (just about) anything

Lovely essay by Glenn Anderson about a subject that bothers most of us and obsesses some. Tidying up is a start. But it won’t get you to the kind of lived-in, personalised space that defines an ideal of home.

Double-think about the climate crisis

If you’re optimistic about the political world’s determination to address the crisis, then this piece by Adam Tooze might make you choke on your muesli. Sample:

“Higher gasoline costs, if left unchecked, risk harming the ongoing global recovery. The price of crude oil has been higher than it was at the end of 2019, before the onset of the pandemic. While Opec+ recently agreed to production increases, these increases will not fully offset previous production cuts that Opec+ imposed during the pandemic until well into 2022. At a critical moment in the global recovery, this is simply not enough. President Biden has made clear that he wants Americans to have access to affordable and reliable energy, including at the pump. Although we are not a party to Opec, the United States will always speak to international partners regarding issues of significance that affect our national economic and security affairs, in public and private.”

Yes, you read that correctly. One of the most senior figures in the Biden administration, the administration that promised climate was “everywhere” in its policy, is declaring that an increase in petrol prices to $3.17 per gallon is a matter of national security and that the US reserves the right to cajole Opec and Russia into flooding the world with more oil.

Not to be outdone, the current UK government is allowing oil drillers to keep exploring the North Sea for new reserves, despite its pledge to tackle carbon emissions, as long as they pass a “climate compatibility” test.

Why are CAPTCHA images so depressing?

I hadn’t thought about this. I just find them annoying. But an interesting essay by Clive Thompson finds six reasons why they’re so off-putting:

1. They’re generally devoid of humans.
2. The angles are all wrong — usually shot from extremely awkward positions and angles that humans would never choose.
3. They’re voyeuristic: nobody gave consent for them to be taken.
4. They look like crime-scene footage — frequently grainy and badly focused.
5. The grids on the photos are an alien’s-eye view of the world.
6. There’s very little sign of nature in them. Self-driving vehicles need to recogne things in the built environment — red lights, taxis, cyclists, fire hydrants, pedestrian crossings. They don’t care about trees, or flowers or birds or any of the other sights to which the human eye naturally gravitates.

In other words,

They weren’t taken by humans, and they weren’t taken for humans. They are by AI, for AI. They thus lack any sense of human composition or human audience. They are creations of utterly bloodless industrial logic. Google’s CAPTCHA images demand you to look at the world the way an AI does.

It’s no wonder we wind up feeling so numbed and depressed as we click through them, day in and day out.

Nice, observant piece.

Why is the tech industry so enthused about a dystopian future?

The current faux-excitement in the industry about the ‘Metaverse’ idea floated by Mark Zuckerberg and other techbros is weird. It makes one wonder if any of these enthusiasts have actually read Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash — which supposedly is the origin of the idea.

Here is an excerpt from Brian Merchant’s splendid blast on the subject:

The hero of Snow Crash is named Hiro, and he is a gig worker delivery driver who moonlights as a hacker, and lives in abject poverty in a 20×30 storage unit he shares with an alcoholic roommate. “Hiro spends a lot of time in the metaverse. It beats the shit out of the U-Stor-It.”

The U.S. as we know it has ceased to exist, and corporate entities and organized crime control whole city-states. Workers like Hiro can be killed for taking too long to deliver a pizza, and they are driven into the metaverse underworld to find extralegal work and enough money to make ends meet. The only reasonably safe places in the physical world are heavily fortressed “burbclaves” where the wealthy reside behind batteries of guns and gated communities.

Or maybe this is the future that the Silicon Valley overlords are really looking forward to. After all, they will be the ones in the burbclaves.

What I’m reminded of most is Heidegger’s observation that “technology is the art of arranging the world so that you don’t have to experience it”.

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Quote of the Day

”I cannot bring myself to vote for a woman who has been house-trained to speak to me as though my dog has just died.”

• Daily Mirror columnist Keith Waterhouse on Margaret Thatcher

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Oboe Quartet in F Major, K. 370 | First movement: Allegro | Itzhak Perlman, Ray Still, Pinchas Zukerman, Lynn Harrell

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Real Story of Pixar 

How a bad hardware company turned itself into a great movie studio.

(And how Steve Jobs made a great investment after Apple threw him out.)

Link

How did this school do it?

From Politico’s London newsletter yesterday:

One epic success story: Fair play to Brampton Manor Academy in east London, where 55 pupils got into Oxford and Cambridge — compared with 48 students from Eton. The Standard reports: The majority of pupils at Brampton Manor Academy are from ethnic minority backgrounds, in receipt of free school meals, or will be the first in their family to attend university.” Remarkably, of the 350 Brampton students who took their A-levels this year, 330 got into Russell Group universities. There must be lessons here for all secondary schools. Wonder what they are.

Meanwhile, here’s the Metro report on the school.

What we know (and don’t know) about the Delta variant at the moment

From Technology Review’s daily newsletter:

What we know: The delta variant is nearly twice as contagious as previous versions of the virus, according to the CDC. It also seems to lead to higher viral loads. The evidence suggests that vaccinated people may be able to transmit the virus, perhaps even just as readily as unvaccinated people. The overwhelming majority of infections are still in unvaccinated people. So far, it looks as if vaccines still largely work, especially in preventing severe illness.

What we don’t know: The appearance of a new variant has people worried we’ll see other, even worse variants. There is some genuine cause for concern: viruses mutate all the time, so as long as there are places in the world where there’s unchecked spread, we’ll likely continue to see more variants that will behave differently. The solution is to increase vaccination rates, and fast.

Revisiting ‘The Limits to Growth’

The Limits to Growth (LtG) project, funded by a shadowy outfit called The Club of Rome in the early 1970s, was the first (and, as far as I know, still the only) serious attempt to build a dynamic model of the world viewed as a single system. It used System Dynamics, a simulation language developed by Jay Forrester at MIT which had earlier been used to create simulation models of (a) industrial corporations and (b) urban areas. (Urban Dynamics was a report on the findings from a simulation model of an unnamed city — in actual fact Detroit — and later on was the inspiration for the Sim City computer game.)

The Club of Rome project involved creating a ‘world dynamics’ model, which was published in 1972 and attracted a great deal of interest and controversy (in which I played an insignificant part — though, later, one of my PhD students did a dissertation on the ideological background to the Urban Dynamics model).

Most people have forgotten the LtG model, but its basic idea — conceptualising the world as a global dynamic system — has suddenly re-acquired salience in the light of the looming climate catastrophe. So it was a delightful surprise to open Andrew Curry’s Substack blog this morning and find a fascinating and insightful post on more recent scholarship which examines how four of the various scenarios explored by the LtG team relate to our recent experience.

The four are:

• Business as Usual (BAU);

• Business as Usual2 (BAU2) — a revised, later version of BAU;

• CT (continual technological innovation — the Bill Gates scenario, I guess); and

• SW (Stabilised World — a scenario assuming that, in addition to sustained technological innovation, global societal priorities change to favour, among other things, low desired family size, perfect birth control availability and a deliberate choice to limit industrial output and prioritise health and education services).

You can guess which one is worth backing; unfortunately, it’s also the one we’re least likely to choose.

Andrew has a great discussion of all this, which is why I think it’s worth reading in full.

Chart of the Day

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Quote of the Day

“War is the unfolding of miscalculations.”

• Barbara Tuchman

Exactly the thought I have as I watch the unfolding of Chinese/American rivalry.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Brian McGrath | Blackthorn Hornpipe, The Blackthorn Reel and The Killarney Boys of Pleasure

Link

Long Read of the Day

The politics of lies: Boris Johnson and the erosion of the rule of law

Terrific dispatch by Annette Dittert, London bureau chief for Germany’s public broadcaster, explaining to her fellow-citizens what has happened to Britain.

And, yes, I realise that we (residents of this sceptered isle) know it all. But it’s interesting to see what a perceptive external observer makes of it.

Thanks to James Miller for spotting it.

How media coverage trivialises harbingers of climate catastrophe

Interesting critique by the Columbia Journalism Review:

The heat wave that swept the Pacific Northwest and Western Canada in late June was an extraordinary disaster. A mass of high-pressure air over the region trapped heat there, creating a “heat dome”—a term that recurred in news coverage. In Oregon, power cables melted; in Washington, roads buckled. Record-breaking temperatures in Lytton, British Columbia, and nearby First Nations communities, were followed by a devastating wildfire.

The sustained temperatures in Washington have since been called “the state’s deadliest weather-related disaster.” According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 800 heat-related deaths occurred across the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia between June 25 and 30. An additional 2,800 people across Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska ended up in an emergency room due to heat-related illness.

The devastating heat—more harbinger than anomaly—exposed weaknesses in the media’s representation of deadly temperatures as well as their connection to climate change. The images that led news stories widely minimized the event. Many photos made it look like a run-of-the-mill heat wave; some were so banal as to conjure stock photography. Photo slideshows confused the issue with a juxtaposition of the ordinary and extraordinary.

For example, this Reuters photograph in the sainted New York Times, which at first sight might suggest a picnic.

The Oxford Reuters Institute published a useful report a while back about international media coverage of the climate crisis.

En passant: Here are the front pages of the main UK newspapers yesterday morning — the day after publication of the IPCC report.

Putting yourself in the shoes of a harassed news editor and you can see why wacky or quirky pictures of people apparently coping with intense heat might be popular. But in aggregate they contribute to public complacency about the looming catastrophe because their subliminal message is: “we can hack it”.

Chart(s) of the Day

So basically the Tory dream of turning Britain into a homeowning democracy looks like a fantasy.

And the consequence of this? An entire generation at the mercy of a rentier class.

(Images from a new website associated with a forthcoming book by Bobby Duffy.)

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Clowns’ Day Out

Cover of this week’s Private Eye.

Quote of the Day

“I go to the pantomime only at Christmas.”

• W.S. Gilbert, on being asked if he had seen Sir Henry Irving in Faust.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ennio Morricone | Cinema Paradiso | in concert | Venice | 2007)

Link

Music from one of my favourite films, conducted by the composer in St Mark’s square. Magical.

Long Read of the Day

Vaclav Smil: We Must Leave Growth Behind

Transcript of an interview by David Wallace-Wells recorded two years ago after the publication of Smil’s magisterial book, Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities. The interview one the best expositions I’ve seen for my putative Theory of Incompetent Systems — ones that can’t fix themselves. Unfortunately, we humans belong to one of those.

DW-L: Let me start by asking you about the very end of the book. I know so much of this was written in a spirit of caution and care and wanting to avoid drawing long-term, large-scale conclusions from the material. But from my read, at least, it ends on a quite definitive note. “The long-term survival of our civilization cannot be assured without setting limits on the planetary scale.”

Smil: That has been always the case. There’s nothing new in this, except many people have been refusing to recognize it.

DW-L: Can you tell me a bit about how you came to that conclusion?

Smil: Speaking as an old-fashioned scientist, I think the message is kind of a primitive and, again, old-fashioned message. This is a finite planet. There is a finite amount of energy. There is finite efficiency of converting it by animals and crops. And there are certain sensitivities in terms of biogeochemical cycles, which will tolerate only that much. I mean, that should be obvious to anybody who’s ever taken some kind of kindergarten biology.

Unfortunately, this is a society where nobody’s taking kindergarten biology because everybody’s studying what’s communications, writing in code, economics, business administration, liaising the state office, and things like that. This is a new civilization we have. People are totally detached from reality. If you are attached, at least a bit, to reality, all of this is common sense.

Not a comfortable read, but a salutary one.

The IPCC Report

It’s out and it contains no surprises — at least for anyone who’s been paying attention. The TL;DR version is simple: climate science has advanced rapidly; climate action has not. Or, as Dave Pell put it in his newsletter:

The fight that pits humanity vs climate change isn’t over. But so far, humanity has been beaten up, knocked around the ring, and dropped to the canvas a few times. And even in this heat, climate change has barely broken a sweat, choosing to just sit back and watch as humanity punches itself in the gut. In short, the bad news is that the scientists we ignored when they accurately warned us about the risks of temperature hikes, sea rises, and deadly weather patterns are back to inform us that what they said would happen has happened and things are, inevitably, going to get worse in the coming years. BBC: Climate change: IPCC report is ‘code red for humanity.’ The good news is that all is not lost. We know what’s causing the changes and we know how to slow things down before the Earth turns into a rolling fireball. All we have to do is come together as humans, follow the science, and do what it takes to change course before it’s too late. You know, sort of how we handled Covid.

Yep.

Paul Krugman on Albert Hirschman

Apropos yesterday’s Long Read about Albert Hirschman, Bill Janeway (Whom God Preserve) emailed asking if I’d read Jeremy Adelman’s great biography of Hirschman (I hadn’t) and also reminding me of an old essay by Paul Krugman that he (Bill) had quoted in the early pages of his book, Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy (which I have read). The particular excerpt that Bill had used was the passage about the emerging relationship between maps of Africa and the reality of that continent.

Needless to say, I dug out the Krugman essay and spent an enjoyable hour reading it. It’s an interesting and very perceptive piece on the role of models and metaphors in economics. In fact, if you’re busy, that section of the piece is worth it just for that.

Of course, for me it turned out to be a rabbit-hole — albeit an enjoyable and instructive one. But now the Adelman biography has been added to my reading list. Sigh.

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Sun, sea and sky

This is where I was last week. Maybe you can see why I love Norfolk.

Quote of the Day

”The older I get the more clearly I remember things that never happened.”

• Mark Twain

And the older I get, the more sympathetically I view this proposition.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ry Cooder & David Lindley | Bon Ton Roulie

Link

Just the thing for an August Monday. Another bootleg recording from my misspent youth.

Long Read of the Day

From probable to possible: the ideas of Albert O Hirschman

A terrific essay in Aeon on the life and ideas of Albert Hirschman, the most interesting 20th-century economist never to win a Nobel prize. (Keynes died long before the economics Prize was conceived).

Hirschman was deeply alive to the ‘grand tension’ that characterises societies undergoing processes of transformation and modernisation, and feared the consequences that frustrated hopes for development might trigger in the event that overly ambitious plans should ultimately fail. Indeed, failure might have worse consequences than ineffectiveness – it might produce violence and destruction. ‘Futility,’ he wrote, ‘can be abruptly replaced by brutality, by utter disregard for human suffering, for acquired rights, for lawful procedures, for traditional values, in short, for [what John Maynard Keynes in 1938 called the “thin and precarious crust of civilisation”.

What I find inspiring in Hirschman is his emphasis on ‘possibilism’. As he once put it in a discussion of his work: “The fundamental bent of my writings has been to widen the limits of what is or is perceived to be possible, be it at the cost of lowering our ability, real or imaginary, to discern the probable”. This strikes me as particularly relevant to us as we contemplate the likelihood of climate disaster.

Anyway, it’s a great essay. Worth reading in full.

Six countries ‘most likely to survive’ societal collapse caused by a climate catastrophe

Interesting study by the Global Sustainability Institute of Anglia Ruskin University. The key takeaway is that islands are the best bet.

‘Nodes of persisting complexity’ are geographical locations which may experience lesser effects from ‘de-complexification’ due to having ‘favourable starting conditions’ that may allow the retention of a degree of complexity. A shortlist of nations (New Zealand, Iceland, the United Kingdom, Australia and Ireland) were identified and qualitatively analysed in detail to ascertain their potential to form ‘nodes of persisting complexity’ (New Zealand is identified as having the greatest potential). The analysis outputs are applied to identify insights for enhancing resilience to ‘de-complexification’.

As Charles Arthur (Whom God Preserve) notes about New Zealand (a favourite hideout for Silicon Valley squillionaires) if you’re thinking of migrating there you might think hard about whether you wanted one as a neighbour.

Good to see, though, that Ireland is one of the six.

Must Listen of the Day

Michael Lewis, IMHO the best non-fiction writer alive, talks to Andrew Sullivan about the pandemic, about Lewis’s book — The Premonition; A Pandemic Story and about grief (Lewis’s daughter, Dixie, died tragically in a road accident in May).

It’s long (54 minutes) but unmissable — and very moving. So make an appointment with it.

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Armchair sailors

Quote of the Day

”What the mulberry leaf is to the silkworm, the author’s book, treatise, essay, poem is to the critical larvae that feed upon it. It furnishes them with food and clothing.”

• Oliver Wendell Holmes

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Arvo Pärt | Spiegel im Spiegel

Link

I’ve always thought this would make great background music for hypnotherapy. Watch ze watch, watch ze watch, watch ze….. Zzzzz.

Long Read of the Day

What if military AI is a washout?

Absolutely fascinating and thought-provoking essay by Jack McDonald.

A rough summary (by the author) goes like this:

The argument goes something like this: The socially transformative vision of AI sold by venture capital over the last decade and a bit looks like it is going to wash out as a few niche areas of tremendous improvement, but no self-driving taxi fleets in London. The integration of some AI technologies will enable automation/autonomy in parts of pre-existing military processes (e.g. kill chains), but no robot super-soldier, HAL 9000 strategists, and limited institutional change. This would still have a huge impact on warfare by rendering machine-recognisable objects vulnerable to automated destruction by any variety of autonomous systems. This visibility asymmetry will make it harder to project power and sustain military forces in the field and reduces the capability gap that state militaries seek to maintain relative to non-state actors. Rections to this asymmetry will drive warfare towards urban environments. In short: worry about marginal improvements to what has already been fielded, and ways to constrain proliferation of those platforms, because the future is now (to shamelessly quote Non Phixion).

But the detailed reasoning is riveting. Some of it also applies to ‘peaceful’ uses of so-called ‘AI’.

Thanks to Sheila Hayman (Whom God Preserve) for pointing me to it.

Chart of the Day

What goes into an EV battery

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Twilight in Norfolk

In a way, this is an extraordinary photograph. It’s a 2-second handheld exposure taken on Brancaster Staithe with an iPhone 11, after sunset. And although I have a pretty steady hand, it isn’t 2-second steady. So some heavy-duty computational processing went into making this image as sharp as it is.

Quote of the Day

”The difference between an author and a horse is that the horse doesn’t understand the horse-dealer’s language.”

• Max Frisch

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Crosby, Stills and Nash | Teach Your Children | Live

Link

I know I’ve posted this before but I love it and it just popped up on a playlist and I’m on holidays with some of my kids, so it seems appropriate. Not that there’s anything I can teach them :-)

Long Read of the Day

John Banville on Graham Greene

Pure delight of a review essay in The Nation.

Sample:

Greene chafed under the privilege into which he was born. His family may have been top dogs, but from his earliest days Graham was firmly on the side of the underdog. His parents’ people were moneyed, with business interests including brewing, which involved the slave trade: An ancestor, Benjamin Greene, ran a business on the island of St. Kitts in the West Indies that was worked by 225 slaves. Greene’s parents were first cousins, and both had tainted genes. Charles Greene’s father suffered from what Graham judged to be manic depression, like himself, and his maternal grandfather, an Anglican priest, was also mentally ill. The latter labored under a burden of guilt—presumably he had Doubts—and according to Graham, “when his bishop refused his request to be defrocked, he proceeded to put the matter into effect himself in a field,” doffing his frock and standing naked before his goggle-eyed parishioners. Perhaps understandably, the Reverend Greene became an unmentionable in the family, so that his grandson assumed he was dead (though in fact he lived until 1924) and must have posed “a living menace” to his daughter and her family. Out of such stuff are novelists made, and a “Catholic novelist” in particular.

 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

”We like to think of ourselves as living in a post-industrial era, but tell that to someone breaking their body in an Amazon fulfilment centre.”

• Jack McDonald

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Beach Boys | Surfin’ U.S.A.

Link

A relic of my misspent youth.

Long Read of the Day

Suspended Hell

Lovely meditation by Katie Kadue on Twitter, Hell, Milton’s Paradise Lost and being an early-career academic researcher.

Link

Chart of the Day

The planet’s vital signs

One key concern: the lack of lasting impact the Covid-19 pandemic had on the “vital” indicators.

“Huge behavioural changes by humans in reducing energy consumption as a result of the pandemic had such a small effect,” one of the authors cited by the Financial Times explained. “We need to be thinking about big transformative change at this stage . . . yet, we are still in a fossil fuel society.”

Energy consumption from fossil fuel sources fell as the pandemic brought industry and services near to a standstill in 2020. Yet global energy use originating from coal power is expected to reach above pre-pandemic levels this year, the forecasts suggests, while energy consumption from oil and natural gas sources will rebound.

MeetingBuster and the Christmas Call Diary

Entrancing story on Quentin’s blog about how he got interested in Voice over IP (VoIP) — aka Internet telephony — and some of the ways he adapted it for his own purposes.

The thing you need to know about Quentin is that he is constitutionally incapable of not inventing things. He started many years ago with the Webcam and he’s been at it ever since.

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!

A flower from the Fuchsia in our garden. It’s one of my favourite plants. If you go to West Kerry at this time of year you’ll find that hedgerows are full of it. And it’s a heartwarming sight.

Quote of the Day

”On the stage he was natural, simple, affecting. ’Twas only that when he was off he was acting.”

• Oliver Goldsmith on David Garrick

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Nick LaRocca and The Original Dixieland Jazz Band |Tiger Rag

Link

Just in case you were thinking of going back to bed!

Long Read of the Day

Surely We Can Do Better Than Elon Musk

Fabulous Long Read by Nathan J. Robinson in Current Affairs. Here’s how it begins…

There are two facts that I have sometimes found it difficult to reconcile. The first is that Tesla, Inc. makes innovative and genuinely impressive electric vehicles that can hold their own against the fastest performance cars in the world. The second is that the CEO of Tesla, Inc., celebrated entrepreneurial genius Elon Musk, is a liar, huckster, and moron, who regularly says things so ignorant that I cannot understand how they can come from a human adult, let alone one treated by his fans as a super-genius. Is one of these facts untrue? Are Tesla’s cars actually bad, their deficiencies carefully covered up and their quality over-hyped? Is Elon Musk actually not a liar, huckster, or moron? If you look more closely, are things that look like fraud and stupidity to me actually signs of brilliance? Or is there a way for both facts to be true?

It turns out it’s all true. The cars are impressive and their flaws get covered up. Musk is a lying ignorant grifter and he has inspired innovation in the electric car industry. Understanding that these seemingly contradictory things can be true simultaneously is important, because societies who cannot hold these two ideas at the same time may end up following scam artists and false prophets off the cliff and into the abyss…

Do read on. It’s worth it.

Apple and the Pegasus problem

Further to my column on Sunday, one interesting question I’ve been asked is why — if Pegasus spyware can infect both Apple and Android phones — there seems to be much more concern about iPhones.

It’s a good question. The answer, as a fine piece by Alex Hern in the Guardian explains, is that the demographics of iPhone users (richer and sometimes in senior managerial and governmental roles) are attractive to snoopers. And iPhones are more attractive for journalists because Apple’s security measures (and its iron control of the App Store) generally makes iPhones more secure than their Android counterparts.

And that perception is not an illusion. Ever since it launched the iPhone in 2007, Apple has tried to ensure that hacking iOS was hard, that downloading software was easy and safe, and that installing patches to protect against newly discovered vulnerabilities was the norm.

“And yet”, writes Alex,

Pegasus has worked, in one way or another, on iOS for at least five years. The latest version of the software is even capable of exploiting a brand-new iPhone 12 running iOS 14.6, the newest version of the operating system available to normal users. More than that: the version of Pegasus that infects those phones is a “zero-click” exploit. There is no dodgy link to click, or malicious attachment to open. Simply receiving the message is enough to become a victim of the malware.

It’s worth pausing to note what is, and isn’t, worth criticising Apple for here. No software on a modern computing platform can ever be bug-free, and as a result no software can ever be fully hacker-proof. Governments will pay big money for working iPhone exploits, and that motivates a lot of unscrupulous security researchers to spend a lot of time trying to work out how to break Apple’s security.

But this belief that iPhones are super-secure is a bug as well as a feature. If you believe (wrongly) that the lock you’ve purchased for your very expensive bike is unbreakable, you may be more confident about leaving it (locked, of course) on the street. Something of analogous misplaced confidence applies to your iPhone. Alex says that security experts he’s spoken to see the misconception at work here. For example:

“Apple’s self-assured hubris is just unparalleled,” Patrick Wardle, a former NSA employee and founder of the Mac security developer Objective-See, told me last week. “They basically believe that their way is the best way.”

A key feature of Pegasus is that once it’s successfully installed on the phone, it carefully obliterates all traces of its presence. This seems to work fine on Android devices, but it turns out that an undocumented feature of iOS enabled forensic investigators to confirm Pegasus’s presence. Alex explains it well:

There is a file, DataUsage.sqlite, that records what software has run on an iPhone. It’s not accessible to the user of the device, but if you back up the iPhone to a computer and search through the backup, you can find the file. The records of Pegasus had been removed from that file, of course – but only once. What the NSO Group didn’t know, or perhaps didn’t spot, is that every time some software is run, it is listed twice in that file. And so by comparing the two lists and looking for inconsistencies, Amnesty’s researchers were able to spot when the infection landed.

So there you go: the same opacity that makes Apple devices generally safe makes it harder to protect them when that safety is broken. But it also makes it hard for the attackers to clean up after themselves. Perhaps two wrongs do make a right?

The Pegasus project has now published on Github a geek-friendly forensics tool for doing this kind of forensic analysis. And the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto has done an independent review of Amnesty’s methodology. It concludes:

We independently validated that Amnesty International’s forensic methodology correctly identified infections with NSO’s Pegasus spyware within four iTunes backups. We also determined that their overall methodology is sound. In addition, the Citizen Lab’s own research has independently arrived at a number of the same key findings as Amnesty International’s analysis.

Big Tech Has Outgrown This Planet

Interesting blast from Shira Ovide in the New York Times. I particularly liked this bit:

The current stock market value of the Big Five ($9.3 trillion) is more than the value of the next 27 most valuable U.S. companies put together, including corporate giants like Tesla, Walmart and JPMorgan Chase, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence.

Apple’s profit just from the past three months ($21.7 billion) was nearly double the combined annual profits of the five largest U.S. airlines in prepandemic 2019.

Amazon’s stock price increases have made Jeff Bezos so rich that he could buy a new model iPhone for 200 million people — and he would still be a billionaire.

Google’s $50 billion in revenue from selling advertisements from April to June was about what Americans — all of the Americans — spent on gasoline and gas station purchases last month.

The annual revenue of one of Microsoft’s side businesses, LinkedIn, is nearly four times that of Zoom Video Communications, a star of the pandemic, in the past year.

Facebook expects to dole out more cash outfitting its computer hubs and offices in 2021 than Exxon spends around the world to dig oil and gas out of the ground in a year.

Amazon fell short of investors’ expectations on Thursday. But in the past year, Amazon’s e-commerce revenue still climbed by $109 billion — an increase in a single year that Walmart needed the past nine years to reach.

And this:

Logic would suggest that if the companies are fighting off lots of rivals, they might have to cut prices and profit margins would shrink. So how does Facebook turn each dollar of revenue, nearly all from ads it sells, into 43 cents of profit — a level that most companies can only dream of, and higher than Facebook posted before the pandemic?

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