Diplomatic language

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Simon Kuper, one of my favourite columnists, has a nice piece in the FT Magazine (sadly, behind a paywall) about what states (and their diplomats) say about others in private.

I particularly like this transcript of a 1971 conversation between Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger analysing a recent visit by the Prime Minister of India, Indira Gandhi:

Kissinger Well, the Indians are bastards anyway… While she was a bitch, we got what we wanted too…”

Nixon “We really slobbered over the old witch.”

Or how about this 2011 exchange between Nicholas Sarkozy (then President of France) and Barack Obama about the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu?

Sarkozy “I can’t stand him. He’s a liar.”

Obama “You’re tired of him? What about me? I have to deal with him every day.”

In recent times, Britain’s new Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, is having to live down some of the things he’s said. For example:

“The only reason I wouldn’t visit some parts of New York is the real risk of meeting Donald Trump.”

Johnson also compared Hillary Clinton to “a sadistic nurse in a mental hospital”.

Well, at least that gets the niceties out of the way, whoever wins the election.

Remember, remember the ninth of September

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scripting_dot_com_9_11

For personal reasons I have vivid memories of 9/11, so today is always a sombre day in my calendar. But I was suddenly reminded this morning of how some of my Internet buddies rose magnificently to the challenge of the day. This is Dave Winer’s Scripting.com blog, for example. And here are Jeff Jarvis’s audio reports, as unforgettable now as they were then.

And then this memoir by the WSJ‘s John Bussey.

The long history of ‘cyber’

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My Observer piece on Thomas Rid’s alternative history of computing, The Rise of the Machines: the Lost History of Cybernetics:

Where did the “cyber” in “cyberspace” come from? Most people, when asked, will probably credit William Gibson, who famously introduced the term in his celebrated 1984 novel, Neuromancer. It came to him while watching some kids play early video games. Searching for a name for the virtual space in which they seemed immersed, he wrote “cyberspace” in his notepad. “As I stared at it in red Sharpie on a yellow legal pad,” he later recalled, “my whole delight was that it meant absolutely nothing.”

How wrong can you be? Cyberspace turned out to be the space that somehow morphed into the networked world we now inhabit, and which might ultimately prove our undoing by making us totally dependent on a system that is both unfathomably complex and fundamentally insecure. But the cyber- prefix actually goes back a long way before Gibson – to the late 1940s and Norbert Wiener’s book, Cybernetics, Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, which was published in 1948.

Cybernetics was the term Wiener, an MIT mathematician and polymath, coined for the scientific study of feedback control and communication in animals and machines. As a “transdiscipline” that cuts across traditional fields such as physics, chemistry and biology, cybernetics had a brief and largely unsuccessful existence: few of the world’s universities now have departments of cybernetics. But as Thomas Rid’s absorbing new book, The Rise of the Machines: The Lost History of Cybernetics shows, it has had a long afterglow as a source of mythic inspiration that endures to the present day…

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Time to stop firms sailing under the ‘tech’ flag of convenience

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This morning’s Observer column:

The rise and precipitous fall of Theranos is a cautionary tale for our times and is beautifully told by Nick Bilton of Vanity Fair in a fascinating article that is worth reading in full. For me, though, it has a wider significance, because it illustrates a more general problem with corporations that sail under the tech banner, namely their loud insistence that any attempt to regulate them constitutes an attempt by the analogue world to stifle innovation and hold back the digital future.

At the moment, most governments and almost all mainstream media are so dazzled by digital technology that they seem unable to appreciate what’s really going on. What’s happening is that the internet and its associated technologies have morphed from exotic novelties into a general purpose technology (GPT) like mains electricity. That has two implications. The first is that the companies that have mastered the technology are moving out of the tech compound and into the wider world. This is why Apple is planning to move into the automobile business, Tesla is heading for trucking, Google is moving into healthcare, Uber is aiming to eliminate car ownership altogether and Airbnb has the global hotel business in its sights.

The second implication is that, as Anil Dash puts it in an insightful essay, there is no “tech” industry any more…

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How traditional political parties are disintegrating

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The Republican Party is now a coalition of globalization-loving business executives and globalization-hating white workers. That’s untenable. At its molten core, the Republican Party has become the party of the dispossessed, not the party of cosmopolitan business. The blunderers at the Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable bet all their chips on the G.O.P. at the exact instant it stopped being their party.

David Brooks writing in today’s New York Times

How to make better decisions: consider two options rather than just one

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It’s not rocket science.

Ohio State University professor Paul Nutt spent a career studying strategic decisions in businesses and nonprofits and government organizations. The number of alternatives that leadership teams consider in 70 percent of all important strategic decisions is exactly one. Yet there’s evidence that if you get a second alternative, your decisions improve dramatically.

One study at a medium-size technology firm investigated a group of leaders who had made a set of decisions ten years prior. They were asked to assess how many of those decisions turned out really well, and the percentage of “hits” was six times higher when the team considered two alternatives rather than just one.

Source

That 70 per cent figure is interesting.

Collateral damage and the NSA’s stash of cyberweapons

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This morning’s Observer column:

All software has bugs and all networked systems have security holes in them. If you wanted to build a model of our online world out of cheese, you’d need emmental to make it realistic. These holes (vulnerabilities) are constantly being discovered and patched, but the process by which this happens is, inevitably, reactive. Someone discovers a vulnerability, reports it either to the software company that wrote the code or to US-CERT, the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team. A fix for the vulnerability is then devised and a “patch” is issued by computer security companies such as Kaspersky and/or by software and computer companies. At the receiving end, it is hoped that computer users and network administrators will then install the patch. Some do, but many don’t, alas.

It’s a lousy system, but it’s the only one we’ve got. It has two obvious flaws. The first is that the response always lags behind the threat by days, weeks or months, during which the malicious software that exploits the vulnerability is doing its ghastly work. The second is that it is completely dependent on people reporting the vulnerabilities that they have discovered.

Zero-day vulnerabilities are the unreported ones…

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