- Let’s All Stop Mindlessly Clicking and Sharing Zombie Links Amen. Sharp commentary based on what happened to Deadspin.
- The Mavening of sports writing Another commentary on the Deadspin story. Essential is you want to know what ‘Mavening’ means.
- How Toronto Reined In Big Tech A bit premature, perhaps. But it shows that some municipalities won’t allow themselves to be walked over by tech giants — in this case Google.
- Biology is Eating the World: A Manifesto Comes from a well-known venture capitalist, so must be taken with a good helping of salt. But interesting nevertheless.
- The four faces of Boris Johnson Player, gambler, Machiavelli or greased piglet, since you ask. From the Economist, if you please.
Parson Woodforde
We’ve been reading (and enjoying) The Diary of a Country Parson, the extraordinary record of English rural social life in the 18th century by James Woodforde, the Rector of Weston Longville in Norfolk. On our way back from the coast recently we went to visit his church and found this memorial to him.
Quote of the Day
“A word is a frozen thought that thinking must unfreeze.”
- Hannah Arendt
Linkblog
- The oil industry may decline, but it won’t go quietly Nice Economist piece pegged to Aramco’s upcoming IPO.
- What John Rawls missed Terrific (long) review article about a new study of Rawls’s work and the puzzle about why it was so dominant even though American society was the antithesis of his political philosophy.
- “Facebook coming to the help of the news industry is roughly like having the North American Meat Institute endorsing Greta Thunberg.” Frederic Filloux on Facebook’s new deal with (a few) publishers.
- The power (and limits) of Boris Johnson Best-informed piece I’ve read on how Johnson and the Irish Taoiseach broke the Brexit deadlock.
Tide’s out
On a salt-marsh in Norfolk.
Trump’s Cybersecurity czar bricks his iPhone
Another one of those stories you couldn’t make up.
The month after Rudy Giuliani was named the US president’s cybersecurity adviser, the former mayor of New York queued up outside an Apple Store in San Francisco to get staff to reset his iPhone because he couldn’t remember the passcode.
Giuliani had typed into the wrong code more than 10 times, seizing up the phone and an Apple staffer reset and restored the iPhone 6 using his iCloud backup, according to NBC News which today saw and posted a picture of the internal Apple memo concerning the visit.
The yarn – which has not been disputed – has left security experts stunned. As an adviser on cybersecurity to President Trump and more recently as his personal lawyer, Giuliani has direct access to the White House and, if reports are to be believed, is in charge of a parallel foreign policy effort involving a range of countries, most notably Ukraine.
Or, in other words, Giuliani’s phone is a prime target for surveillance efforts and he simply handed it over to a random Apple employee. Not only that but he couldn’t remember his own passcode, and has backed everything up to Apple’s iCloud. He is a walking security risk.
Not just a security risk.
Quote of the Day
“Doubt is an art which has to be acquired with difficulty.”
- Charles Sanders Peirce
Titchwell church
Click to enlarge. Titchwell church is tiny. But it has the most distinctive spire in Norfolk
Linkblog
- Learning from the Ridley plan Fascinating essay on what an incoming Labour government could learn from Thatcher’s project.
- History of AI research Useful compendium by Luke Posey of significant papers and developments.
- New elevation data triple estimates of global vulnerability to sea-level rise and coastal flooding Sobering data from new satellite survey,published in Nature. Moral: best not to live in low-lying coastal regions. (Includes lots of large cities.)
- Key election safeguards won’t be ready for December poll Government was too busy with Brexit to legislate, apparently. And of course it has nothing to do with the Conservative’s social-media strategy for the election.
Linkblog
- If a Robotic Hand Solves a Rubik’s Cube, Does It Prove Something? Solving the cube is easy once you know the algorithm. But building a robotic hand that’s nimble enough to manipulate the cube is harder. The OpenAI researchers built a computer system “that learned to solve the Rubik’s Cube largely on its own”. (Italics added.) Wonder what ‘largely’ means.
- “Conspiracy loons claim victory in Brighton and Hove as council rejects plans to build 5G masts” Note the objective headline. But then that’s The Register’s style for you. Standfirst reads: “No next-gen mobile internet for you but, hey, no cancer either”.
- Machine learning on a USB stick Well, not quite. But we’re not far off as Google moves its Coral system off Beta status. The technology is on the way to being commoditised.
- Fascinating comparison of two photographs of the White House Situation Room during the Bin Laden mission and the Bagdadi mission Guess which one looks most staged.