The Guardian is 200 today!

And if you’re puzzled by this, read Robert Shrimsley’s wonderful satirical piece that appeared in Saturday’s Financial Times, which explains all.

Quote of the Day

”After 27 years, Melinda Gates finally gets to use a Mac.”

• Dave Pell

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ry Cooder & David Lindley | If Walls Could Talk

Link

Ry Cooder was the kind of guy my mother warned me about. She was right!

Long Read of the Day

 The Computers Are Getting Better at Writing

Yeah I know that all the stuff about GPT-3 seems a bit iffy, but this long piece in the New Yorker by Stephen Marche is something else. He starts with Kafka’s famous unfinished novel.

The second section of “The Metamorphosis” continues the story this way:

As soon as Gregor was alone, he began to feel ill. Turning around was an effort. Even breathing was an effort. A thin stream of blood trickled from his flank down his fuzzy belly. He wanted to crawl away from it, but there was no place to go. He lay still on the spot where he had come to rest just in order to get his breath back and to stop the bleeding. “I’m in a bad way,” said Gregor. It had never occurred to him before that he could really become ill. He had seen sick animals—a dove once in a while, which had fallen out of the nestling into the gutter and could not fly any more, or the weak infants of the woman next door who had to be picked up with the tongs and thrown into the dustbin, or the bugs his father used to bring to him when he was still a young boy and which he had liked so much.

Except the second section of “The Metamorphosis” doesn’t begin that way. An artificial-intelligence application called Sudowrite wrote the paragraph above. I inputted the text of the first section of “The Metamorphosis” and then pressed a button called Wormhole. The computer composed the continuation.

Sudowrite is an interesting idea. Basically, it accesses GPT-3’s interface and turns it into a legible tool that any writer can use. It’s currently in beta but its founder sees it product turning into a resource that writers will pay fifteen to twenty dollars per month to use.

Fascinating essay — at least for those of us who write for a living — even if it doesn’t mention the horrendous environmental cost of the initial training of GPT-3.

Twitter expands Spaces to anyone with 600+ followers, details plans for tickets, reminders and more

From Techcrunch:

Twitter Spaces, the company’s new live audio rooms feature, is opening up more broadly. The company announced today it’s making Twitter Spaces available to any account with 600 followers or more, including both iOS and Android users. It also officially unveiled some of the features it’s preparing to launch, like Ticketed Spaces, scheduling features, reminders, support for co-hosting, accessibility improvements and more.

Along with the expansion, Twitter is making Spaces more visible on its platform, too. The company notes it has begun testing the ability to find and join a Space from a purple bubble around someone’s profile picture right from the Home timeline.

Hmmm… I have 7,652 followers at the time of writing, so I should be entitled to ‘a live audio room’. But what would I do with it? This is clearly a pre-emptive strike to make sure Clubhouse doesn’t make too many inroads.

Hypocrisy on stilts?

From Benedict Evans’s indispensable weekly newsletter:

In January, the CEO of Axel Springer wrote an impassioned essay claiming that the web should be totally private and no ‘big company’ should collect any kind of personal data at all. He published this on Business Insider (which he owns), on a page with no less than 68 different third party trackers. Now, Axel Springer is part of a group of German publishers complaining about Apple’s privacy changes in iOS 14.5. Pick one, please.

When I opened the Business Insider page on my machine, the Ghostery ad-tracker found 23 trackers rather than the 68 that Ben mentions; but that could be a reflection of the fact that I use a VPN which also blocks stuff. Still, 23 reinforces his point.

Another, hopefully interesting, link

• Do You Live in a Bubble? Just enter your address to find out. Link Neat idea, but this version only works for the US. It’d be nice to have one for the UK. Hmmm…

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The Blossom Explosion

Our apple tree. Every year it happens. And every year its exhuberance takes us by surprise. Yesterday, I stood under it in the morning and all I could hear was birdsong and the humming of hundreds of bees.

Quote of the Day

“It’s quite easy to keep all your principles intact and end up with a result which is not what you wanted.”

• Classicist Mary Beard, in an interview with the Financial Times, 1 May 2021.

It’s what’s known as the ‘reformer’s trap’.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Schubert | Ständchen | Camille Thomas and Beatrice Berrut

Link

First time I’ve heard an instrumental version of it.

Long Read of the Day

 What Conspiracy Theorists Don’t Believe is as important as what they believe

Characteristically thoughtful essay by Tim Harford on why it’s difficult to persuade conspiracy theorists that what they believe is nonsense — and how companies exploit that cognitive bias:

In the 1950s, when Big Tobacco faced growing evidence that cigarettes were deadly, the industry turned doubt into a weapon. Realizing that smokers dearly wished to believe that their habit wasn’t killing them, Big Tobacco concluded that the best approach was not to try to prove that cigarettes were safe. Instead, it would merely raise doubts about the emerging evidence that they were dangerous. The famous “Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers” from 1954 managed to look socially responsible while simultaneously reassuring smokers that “research scientists have publicly questioned” the significance of the new findings.

Publicly questioning things is what research scientists always do, but that didn’t matter. The artful message from the tobacco industry to smokers was “This is complicated, and we’ll pay attention to it so that you don’t have to.” When we are confronted with unwelcome evidence, we don’t need much of an excuse to reject it.

Give that the tech companies are currently discovering the tactics of the tobacco companies, we’ll see a lot more of this.

That Lenin guy, he was some dude, and no mistake

Amazing what one finds in the London Review of Books. Consider, for example, this letter from Paul O’Brien.

Ingólfur Gíslason writes that an Icelander called Jón Stefánsson, who was researching in the British Library at the same time as Lenin, recounted that Lenin pronounced the ‘th’ in ‘thanks’ as if he was German (Letters, 4 March). More likely, it was a Hiberno-English pronunciation, where the ‘th’ sound is similar to the German. According to Roddy Connolly, the son of the Irish socialist James Connolly, who was in Moscow in 1921, Lenin spoke English with a Dublin accent. Connolly’s recollection is confirmed by H.G. Wells, who met Lenin in Moscow in 1920 and noticed his Irish accent. When Lenin lived in London, his English teacher was a man from Ireland.

Malcolm Gladwell and the importance of changing one’s mind

I’ve always thought that, deep down, Malcolm Gladwell is superficial. After reading this FT piece (which, Deo gratias, doesn’t seem to be behind a paywall) I’m not so sure. The peg for it is his new book, The Bomber Mafia: A Story Set in War, but that’s ok. It’s the way the book industry and literary journalism works.

Here’s an excerpt that gives a flavour of the piece:

I ask Gladwell what he’s changed his mind about recently, and the man who popularised “broken windows” is telling me he’s now pretty close to being a prison abolitionist. “That is not a position I thought I would ever take. But I’m very close to thinking that no one should ever go to prison. Do I know how to resolve the problematic cases? No, I don’t. What do you do with someone who murdered someone in cold blood? I don’t know.”

One of Gladwell’s conclusions from the Black Lives Matter protests last summer was that “we were arguing about the wrong thing. That prison is infinitely more toxic and corrosive to the fabric of free society than inadequate policing is. It’s not that I’m opposed to correcting police. I just thought, if I was going to pick something to get really upset about, prisons, mass incarceration, has just been devastating to this country. Whereas good policing, if it’s done well, everybody wins.”

Nice, thought-provoking, interview. And it’s made me change my mind — a bit.

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Coastal magic

On Friday neither of us had anything in our diaries and so we took the day off and went to the North Norfolk coast to walk and watch birds.

It was an utterly magical day, during which we saw:

• A Jay
• Two Reed Warblers
• Several astonishingly elegant Avocets
• Lots of Pocard Ducks
• Lots of Coots
• An Egret
• A magnificent Curlew, asleep in the sunshine and perched on one leg. (How do they do that without falling over?)
• Two Larks (ascending and descending — all we needed was Vaughan-Williams as a soundtrack.

And the most unexpected thing of all — the call of a cuckoo, repeated several times.

But the thing that stuck in our minds afterwards was the continual birdsong we heard all day.

Quote of the Day

”Democracy: the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.”

• H.L. Mencken

Doesn’t apply to the current occupant of the White House, but does to the Johnson crowd in 10 Downing Street.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Tom Waits | Christmas Card From A Hooker In Minneapolis

Link

Gravelly beauty.

Long Read of the Day

Low-Skill Workers Aren’t a Problem to Be Fixed

The label “low-skill” flattens workers to a single attribute, ignoring the capacities they have and devaluing the jobs they do.

Great piece piece by Annie Lowrey.

Being a prep cook is hard, low-wage, and essential work, as the past year has so horribly proved. It is also a “low-skill” job held by “low-skill workers,” at least in the eyes of many policy makers and business leaders, who argue that the American workforce has a “skills gap” or “skills mismatch” problem that has been exacerbated by the pandemic. Millions need to “upskill” to compete in the 21st century, or so say The New York Times and the Boston Consulting Group, among others.

Those are ubiquitous arguments in elite policy conversations. They are also deeply problematic. The issue is in part semantic: The term low-skill as we use it is often derogatory, a socially sanctioned slur Davos types casually lob at millions of American workers, disproportionately Black and Latino, immigrant, and low-income workers. Describing American workers as low-skill also vaults over the discrimination that creates these “low-skill” jobs and pushes certain workers to them. And it positions American workers as being the problem, rather than American labor standards, racism and sexism, and social and educational infrastructure. It is a cancerous little phrase, low-skill. As the pandemic ends and the economy reopens, we need to leave it behind.

I couldn’t agree more. From time to time we’ve employed a wonderful small builder. He’s no intellectual, but every time he’s worked on our house what I’ve seen is someone coming up against dozens of unforeseen problems every day — and (here’s the point) solving them! He’s endlessly creative in a way that many (most?) intellectuals are not.

And I think of him every time I tackle a DIY job and run into an unanticipated problem (say, a broken screwhead in an awkward location) which I then spend half a day not solving!

Apple comes out swinging with iOS 14.5

Yesterday’s Observer column:

iOS 14.5 apparently changes all that; now, iPhone users are asked if they want to opt in to tracking. A pop-up dialogue box appears saying: “Allow [app name] to track your activity across other companies’ apps and websites?” and providing two options: “ask app not to track” and “allow”. En passant, note that it says “ask” rather than “tell”, another subtle indicator of how much tech companies actually care about their users’ agency.

When Apple announced months ago that it was planning to make this change, the big shots in the data-tracking racket went apeshit, rightly inferring that many iPhone users would decline to be tracked when offered such an obvious escape route. Suddenly, the lucrative $350bn business of collecting user data to sell to data brokers, or linking a user’s app data with third-party data that was collected in order to target ads, was under threat. The new rules, Apple said, would also affect other app processes, including sharing location data with data brokers and implementing hidden trackers for the purpose of conducting ad analytics. Momentarily taken aback by the ferocity of the storm, Apple decided to postpone the introduction in order to give the industry “time to adapt” to the forthcoming reality, thereby breaking the golden rule that one should never give gangsters an even break.

Basecamp: Take 2

You may recall that on Friday I quoted approvingly the six new principles that Jason Fried, Basecamp’s co-founder, set out as the bullet-points for going forward after a little local difficulty in the 50-person company…

Turns out, I was a trifle naive, not to say gullible. It was more than “a little local difficulty”, as Casey Newton pointed out in “What really happened at Basecamp”.

Interviews with a half-dozen Basecamp employees over the past day paint a portrait of a company where workers sought to advance Basecamp’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion by having sensitive discussions about the company’s own failures. After months of fraught conversations, Fried and his co-founder, David Heinemeier Hansson moved to shut those conversations down.

”In the end, we feel like this is the long-term healthy way forward for Basecamp as a whole — the company and our products,” Fried wrote in his blog post.

Several employees, though, are already making their exit plans.

Basecamp, which makes workplace collaboration tools and launched the email service Hey last year, has long been recognized for producing “opinionated software.”

“We’ve hired opinionated people, we’ve created opinionated software, and now basically the company has said, ‘well, your opinions don’t really matter — unless it’s directly related to business,’” one told me. “A lot of people are gonna have a tough time living with that.”

And Rachel Kraus reported on Mashable that at else a third of employees of the company were quitting.

That’ll teach me to take company founders’ manifestos with a good helping of salt.

And thanks to Greg Jeffreys, Steve Waller and Dave Winer for alerting me to what had ensued from Fried’s bullet points.

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Hello!

Michael Murpurgo’s new book

There was a nice interview with the writer Michael Murpurgo on the Today programme yesterday morning.

Link

Quote of the Day

”We saw a picture in the paper the other day of a little girl to whom John D. Rockefeller gave two dimes. It may have been only a coincidence, but on the same day the price of gasoline went up one cent.”

• The Charleston Gazette

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Elvis Costello and Mumford & Sons | The Ghost of Tom Joad & Do Re Mi Medley (Acoustic Cover)

Link

Unusual, unexpected and lovely: great musicians doing something together. Tom Joad was the central character in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath — a former convict who has decided to live only for the present moment. He’s a fervent believer in carpe diem — but is transformed in the novel into someone who believes in striving for a better future.

The Ghost of Tom Joad was an album released by Bruce Springsteen in 1995.

Long Read of the Day

 Someone has to run the fabs

Egalitarianism is important but we neglect STEM education at our peril

Fabulous piece by Noah Smith.

Changes at Basecamp

Basecamp is an interesting software company which has been around for quite a long time (20 years — aeons in Internet time). And it’s clearly been going through a period of internal turmoil (as many liberal organisations do from time to time). What’s different is that the co-founder, Jason Fried has published the six conclusions he and his co-founder have reached. Here they are:

1. No more societal and political discussions on our company Basecamp account.
2. No more paternalistic benefits.
3. No more committees. (Yay!)
4. No more lingering or dwelling on past decisions.
5. No more 360 reviews.
6. No forgetting what we do here.

We make project management, team communication, and email software. We are not a social impact company. Our impact is contained to what we do and how we do it. We write business books, blog a ton, speak regularly, we open source software, we give back an inordinate amount to our industry given our size. And we’re damn proud of it. Our work, plus that kind of giving, should occupy our full attention. We don’t have to solve deep social problems, chime in publicly whenever the world requests our opinion on the major issues of the day, or get behind one movement or another with time or treasure. These are all important topics, but they’re not our topics at work — they’re not what we collectively do here. Employees are free to take up whatever cause they want, support whatever movements they’d like, and speak out on whatever horrible injustices are being perpetrated on this group or that (and, unfortunately, there are far too many to choose from). But that’s their business, not ours. We’re in the business of making software, and a few tangential things that touch that edge. We’re responsible for ourselves. That’s more than enough for us.

I like the frankness and clarity of this. Wish more organisations could do it.

A note from the future

From a Digital Humanities newsletter to which I subscribe:

In 20 years fountain pens will be given as swag at Digital Humanities & Arts conferences.

Of course said swag will come in the form of instructions for 3D printing.

As a long-time collector (and admirer) of fountain-pens I am indignant about this.

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Light and shade and all that rot

Quote of the Day

”The real villain of the 1970s oil crisis is the Harvard Business School. Almost every Arab sheik now in charge of his country’s oil policy was trained at Harvard.”

• Art Buchwald

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bob Dylan | Like A Rolling Stone | Live at Newport, 1965

Link

Long Read of the Day

NYT Obituary of Dan Kaminsky

I mentioned Dan’s tragic early death the other day. This New York Times obit goes a long way to explaining why he is such a loss. Includes some lovely stories about him.

This is worth your time, even if you’re not geeky, because it throws a light on the fragility of our networked world, and the need for integrity in those who understand it.

In the court of King Boris, only one thing is certain: this will all end badly

Lovely column by Rafael Behr.

Instead of a cabinet, Britain has courtiers. In place of a prime minister, there is a potentate. The traditional structures still exist, but as tributes to an obsolescent way of governing. There are still secretaries of state. But their place in the formal, constitutional hierarchy has little bearing on real power, which swirls in an unstable vortex of advisers and officials vying for proximity to Boris Johnson’s throne.

The product of this arrangement is the acrid stew of scandal leaking out of Downing Street – a mixture of financial irregularities, reckless statecraft and vendetta, some of it involving the prime minister’s fiancee, just to complete the impression of Byzantine intrigue.

And there there’s Johnson’s character.

The prime minister approaches truth the way a toddler handles broccoli. He understands the idea that it contains some goodness, but it will touch his lips only if a higher authority compels it there. Everyone who has worked with him in journalism and politics describes a pattern of selfishness and unreliability. He craves affection and demands loyalty, but lacks the qualities that would cultivate proper friendship. The public bonhomie hides a private streak of brooding paranoia. Being incapable of faithfulness, he presumes others are just as ready to betray him, which they duly do, provoked by his duplicity.

Johnson is driven by a restless sense of his own entitlement to be at the apex of power and a conviction, supported by evidence gathered on his journey to the top, that rules are a trap to catch weaker men and honour is a plastic trophy that losers award themselves in consolation for unfulfilled ambition. Having such a personality at the heart of government makes a nonsense of unwritten protocol. Much of British politics proceeds by the observance of invisible rails guarding against the tyrannical caprices that formal constitutions explicitly prohibit. There is an accrued cultural expectation of democratic propriety, a self-policing code of conduct summarised by historian Peter Hennessy as the “good chap” theory of government.

Footnote: Fintan O’Toole had a nice column (behind a paywall) in the Irish Times about Johnson’s ‘character’. This is how it begins:

It’s not when Boris Johnson is lying that you have to worry. If he’s lying, that just means he’s still breathing. No, the real danger is the gibbering. It’s what he does when he can’t be bothered to think up a lie.

Spot on. And many thanks to the generous reader who alerted me to that gem.

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Upcoming Quote of the Day

”If I read ‘upcoming’ in the Wall Street Journal again, I shall be downcoming and somebody will be outgoing.”

• Bernard Kilgore, Managing Editor of The Wall Street Journal from 1941 to 1965 and head of the Dow Jones company.

(BTW: Many thanks to the many readers who answered my question about who advised improving one’s writing by striking out every fine passage.

It was Samuel Johnson. Kevin Cryan was first out of the traps, shortly after the email hit his inbox.

“Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.”

• Samuel Johnson, The Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D. Vol 2

It is so nice to have erudite readers.

Felicity Allen reported that “at art school we were told that Picasso had said if you’ve painted a good bit, get rid of it.”

Sheila Hayman suggested Elmore Leonard’s dictum as an alternative:

”My advice to writers: try to leave out all the parts readers skip.”

Come to think of it, that might also be advice for bloggers. But then I would have to consult the ‘analytics’ to find out, and that would be cheating, not to mention unethical.)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Grateful Dead | Truckin’

Link

Well, I’m a Deadhead.

Long Read of the Day

 The Woman Who Shattered the Myth of the Free Market

Nice essay by Zachary Carter on Joan Robinson, the under-estimated heroine of Keynesian economics, whose work on the routine imperfection of markets is finally coming back into view.

What’s Behind the Apple-Facebook Feud?

From this week on, if you’re an iPhone user and you’ve updated to the latest version of iOS then you’ll find that companies and advertisers must ask your explicit permission — in the form of yes-or-no messages that pop up on the screen — to track you from one app to another. Many companies that make apps — for example Facebook — believe (correctly) that large numbers of people (including this blogger) will say no. And that means that businesses which rely on showing people online ads will have less data to customise those ads based on what tracking you tells them about your activity and interests.

What’s not to like?

Facebook, in particular, is predictably enraged by this move by Apple, for the very good reason that it will have an deleterious impact on FB’s revenues. (Personally, I doubt that it will be that big, but you never know. And nor does Facebook at the moment.) Accordingly, Zuckerberg and his satraps have been waging a fierce publicity campaign against Apple. The complaints have focussed on two themes. The first is that Apple is abusing its monopolistic hold on the iPhone. The second is the claim that the new iPhone regime will have a terrible impact on small and medium-sized companies which allegedly rely on the precise targeting that Facebook provides for them. Cue violins.

This is pure pass-the-sickbag stuff. To see Facebook shedding crocodile tears over the plight of small businesses stretches satire to its limits. And it reminds this blogger of good ol’ Sam Johnson’s observation that “the loudest yelps for liberty are heard from the drivers of slaves”. (He didn’t say ‘slaves’, but you get the gist.)

If you’re interested in the details of this farce, then the New York Times has useful explanations, as does Vox.

Think before you Link(In)

Helen Warrell, writing (behind a paywall) in the FT on April 19 reported that MI5 caused a “frisson of social media excitement” (whatever that is) with its debut on Instagram, evidently hoping to attract recruits from ‘influencers’. This coincided with a warning from the spooks aimed at civil servants using LinkedIn. It seems that China has been using it to lure targets to meetings in person where they “may be subjected to bribery or blackmail” in order to obtain intelligence.

Tut, tut.

Not to be outdone, the excellent Chris Nuttall reports that Jeremy Fleming, the director of GCHQ, has been warning about the UK facing a “moment of reckoning” in the race to protect itself from the influence of adversaries like China and Russia. He thinks that we need to up our tech game to ensure leadership in areas such as quantum computing.

Ah, that magic word “leadership” again: the quality that ageing hegemons prize so highly.

If we don’t wise up, says the GCHQ boss, “the key technologies on which we will rely for our future prosperity and security won’t be shaped and controlled by the west”. What key technologies would that be, exactly? Why ‘AI’ (aka machine learning and facial-recognition), of course. And then there’s quantum computing which could render existing encryption methods useless. In which case all our secrets could be exposed, without — as the FT wryly puts it — “any need for a fake LinkedIn account”.

I had a LinkedIn account once, for about three days. Having concluded that it was basically a ‘spamhaus’ for business people, I deleted my account — only to find that it took me about three years to stop receiving spammy emails from it.

Bang went my chance of being recruited by Beijing. Sigh.

How The Father was made

‘The Father’ is a remarkable film about dementia that has collected a number of Oscars. Judging from the trailer it looks like a worthy winner. It stars Anthony Hopkins as an elderly man with dementia who lives alone in London and has refused another nurse that his daughter Anne (brilliantly played by Olivia Colman) has set up for him. Exuberant and independent, Anthony is struggling as his memory begins to slip. Anne announces she is moving to Paris with a new boyfriend, but later in the living room Anthony sees a stranger claiming to be Anne’s husband. Who is this man? Confusion sets in…

After watching the trailer I came on a lovely conversation between the film’s Director, Florian Zeller, Olivia Colman and Anthony Hopkins. Well worth viewing.

Trust in news and in those who provide it

The Reuters Institute in Oxford has published a fine report on an investigation its researchers conducted into the extent to which citizens of four countries (Brazil, India, the UK, and the US) trust or mistrust news. The investigation was qualitative, not quantitative, (mostly by using focus groups) but in a way that makes it more illuminating because it captures nuances that statistical surveys miss.

It’s long but worth a read if you’re interested (as I am) in trustworthiness of media. And it includes a neat Venn diagram that captures the essence of the conversations.

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In a rural garden

Max Hastings is not carried away by the new ‘Global Britain’ aircraft-carrier

This interview on yesterday’s BBC Today programme made my day. I hope it also makes yours.

Link

Quote of the Day

“I fired him because he wouldn’t respect the authority of the President. I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son-of-a-bitch, although he was, but that’s not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in gaol.”

• Harry Truman on General Douglas MacArthur

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Chris McMullan playing Amazing Grace

Link

I’ve always thought of this as a somewhat hackneyed tune. Not this version, though.

Long Read of the Day

What Substack is really doing to the media

Insightful essay by Will Oremus.

The current excitement about Substack (the outfit that I use to publish the daily version of this blog) is a classic case of how intellectual chatter falls into Michael Mann’s trap of “the sociology of the last five minutes”. Substack is great for writers because it enables them to earn a crust — or a fortune — from their work and ‘liberates’ them (if that’s the right word) from media organisations that were formerly their employers. But it does little or nothing for news — the lifeblood of a functioning liberal democracy because a huge proportion of what’s on Substack is just opinion. Nothing wrong with that — a vibrant public sphere needs a diversity of opinion. But Substack does nothing to solve the existential problem of the withering away of organisations that do real journalism — the heavy lifting of holding power to account.

Well worth your time.

Dan Kaminsky RIP

A celebrated — and much-loved — information security expert has died from diabetic ketoacidosis at the age of 42.

Iain Thompson has a lovely obituary of him on The Register.

When your Register hack asked Kaminsky why he hadn’t gone to the dark side and used the flaw to become immensely wealthy – either by exploiting it to hijack millions of netizens’ web traffic, or by selling details of it to the highest bidders – he said not only would that have been morally wrong, he didn’t want his mom to have to visit him in prison.

If you want to see what he was like, try this DEFCON talk.

And thanks to Cory Doctorow for spotting a bad typo (now fixed).

Boris Johnson as Lear?

Lovely blast from Jonty Bloom.

There has been much talk this weekend about how the PM has been ranting about the betrayal of Dominic Cummings and is now like King Lear driven half mad. Wrong play, wrong King.

Boris Johnson is Macbeth; he seized the crown in an act of utterly selfish betrayal, destroying any semblance of honesty, integrity and decency along the way. Then he purged those who didn’t support him, trust him or believe him; in a bloodbath that left him surrounded by sycophants, liars, chancers and back stabbers.

It would be nice to think this all might end like Macbeth. With the usurper destroyed and a rightful and decent leader supported by the whole country once again in power. The trouble is if the PM does fall he will be replaced with another courtier, quite possibly even worse than he is. Yep.

How to improve your writing

This, from Dave Winer’s blog, is good advice.

It reminds me of something I read somewhere but can’t remember where (you know the feeling) which went like this: “always re-read your work carefully, and whenever you come upon a particularly fine passage, strike it out”. I thought it was Sam Johnson, but it’s not. Wonder if anyone out there knows it

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• Huge ‘superyacht’ squeezes through narrow Dutch canals. Link A reminder — if you needed one — that any mogul rich enough to own one of these ludicrous vessels ought to be taxed until his pips squeak.

• Earth has shifted on its axis due to melting of ice Link

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Blossoming

Our apple tree, yesterday.

Quote of the Day

”Silly, snobbish, lecherous, tipsy, given to high-flown sentiments and more than a little of a humbug; he needed Johnson as ivy needs an oak.”

• Cyril Connolly on Thomas Boswell, Samuel Johnson’s biographer.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Jeanine De Bique | Handel’s Messiah | ’Rejoice greatly’ | BBC Proms

Link

Wow!

Long Read of the Day

Tinkering and thinking

Lovely reflective essay by Venkatesh Rao, who’s gone back to tinkering with electronics kit.

As I was tinkering, I was idly wondering about whether there was any fodder for blog posts in what I was up to. I don’t mean Maker posts. A lot of people write about Maker stuff, and do it a lot better than I ever could. I mean riffs on Life, the Universe, and Everything inspired by tinkering with a new power supply.

Most of my writing to date has been inspired by things like working in an office, consulting, watching TV and of course, reading words written by others. That stuff is good fodder for riffs on Life, the Universe, and Everything.

Though I’m having a lot of fun rediscovering engineering with a middle-aged mind, I’ve found it surprisingly difficult to mine tinkering for insights on Life, the Universe, and Everything. Tinkering In, Words Out, TIWO, is a tougher transformation than SIWO: Symbols In, Words Out. Which is why it’s an interesting challenge.

ARM needs a helping hand from Boris Johnson

My column in yesterday’s Observer:

Last September, Nvidia, the American manufacturer of graphics processing chips, and the Japanese company SoftBank announced an agreement under which Nvidia would acquire the British chip designer Arm from SoftBank for $40bn. Since SoftBank had acquired Arm in 2016 for $32bn, you could say that a 25% profit on a five-year investment isn’t to be sneezed at, especially if industry mutterings about SoftBank’s crackpot investment strategy and Arm’s internal difficulties with its China-based operation are to be believed.

But even if one were foolish enough to sympathise with SoftBank’s desire to climb out of the hole it had dug for itself, the idea that Arm should be sold to a US chip manufacturer is so daft that even Boris Johnson’s administration had begun to smell a rat. And so on Monday it announced that the secretary of state for digital, culture, media and sport was “intervening in the sale on national security grounds”, based on advice received “from officials across the investment security community”. To which decision the only possible response is: what took him so long?

”Would you like to see my ventilators?”

Marina Hyde on Boris Johnson’s se…, er, textual, addiction . Sample:

Are we even totally sure the individual on the other end of Johnson’s text exchange is the actual hand-dryer genius James Dyson? It might just be a pseudonym for whichever tech mompreneur/concert trombonist/basic Rixo-shopping Sloane is currently keeping Johnson on the boil. I mean, MAYBE it’s a chat about respiratory aids, but maybe it’s just some mad sex code. Roughly speaking, the following is what we’re dealing with. Dyson, or rather “Dyson”: “Would you like to see my ventilators?” Johnson, panting in whatever broom cupboard in which he’s skiving off a Cobra meeting: “Oh God yes show me your ventilators.” “Sadly,” replies “Dyson”, “you need to remove the tax barriers to see them.” “I will fix it tomo!” judders the desperate Johnson. Say it. Say it. “JAMES I AM FIRST LORD OF THE TREASURY.” There you go. Better out than in.

The only statement from Downing Street this week that I actually believe is the denial that cabinet secretary Simon Case ever told Johnson to change his phone number, the PM apparently having had the same one for more than a decade. Very wise advice. That phone’s like the ghost containment grid from Ghostbusters. If you switch it off, extremely bad things will happen. Even if he’s as mediocre a yes-man as he appears, Case will surely have worked out that the phone is basically the safest repository for innumerable entities who are best “managed” rather than fully ghosted. Attempting to shut down the phone completely could result in a vast release of potentially fatal psychokinetic energy to the Sunday newspapers.

Do read the whole thing.

Exclusive!!! Dominic Cummings discovers ethics and the need to respect Parliament!

From his blog:

Re the flat. The Prime Minister’s DOC (Director of Communications) has also made accusations regarding me and leaks concerning the PM’s renovation of his flat. The PM stopped speaking to me about this matter in 2020 as I told him I thought his plans to have donors secretly pay for the renovation were unethical, foolish, possibly illegal and almost certainly broke the rules on proper disclosure of political donations if conducted in the way he intended. I refused to help him organise these payments. My knowledge about them is therefore limited. I would be happy to tell the Cabinet Secretary or Electoral Commission what I know concerning this matter.

…

The proper way for such issues to be handled is via an urgent Parliamentary inquiry into the government’s conduct over the covid crisis which ought to take evidence from all key players under oath and have access to documents. Issues concerning covid and/or the PM’s conduct should not be handled as No10 has handled them over the past 24 hours. I will cooperate fully with any such inquiry and am happy to give evidence under oath. I am happy for No10 to publish every email I received and sent July 2019-November 2020 (with no exceptions other than, obviously, some national security / intelligence issues).

(Emphasis added)

Interesting. Would this be the same Dominic Cummings who contemptuously refused to appear before the House of Commons Digital, Culture, media and Sport Select Committee inquiry into fake news and the Cambridge Analytica scandal?

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Where I’d like to be today.

Vox and the higher bullshit

Here are the first two sentences of a lazy piece by Peter Kafka on Vox.

Apple more or less invented podcasting. Now it’s finally going to try to make money from it.

The first sentence is completely wrong. The second is possibly true. Dave Winer is rightly infuriated by this kind of journalistic laziness, and points to Walter Isaacson’s terrific podcast episode on the actual history of the technology. It’s baffling how media people continually get things like this wrong. Invincible ignorance is a necessary but not a sufficient explanation; it’s also because they don’t know that most things in tech have a history.

Quote of the Day

“Never interrupt your enemy when they are making a mistake.”

• Napoleon Bonaparte

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Vivace from Bach’s double concerto — but sung!

Link

Magical. Many thanks to Seb Schmoller for spotting it.

Long Read of the Day

Everyone On Facebook’s Oversight Board Should Resign

Lovely *Wired piece by Jessica Gonzalez and Carmen Scurato on Facebook’s ludicrous ‘Supreme Court’.

It’s beyond comprehension why all those supposedly eminent people agreed to serve as Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘useful idiots’ (to use Lenin’s phrase about Western intellectuals). Could it have been the money?

I liked Charles Arthur’s summing-up on his Overspill blog:

The board is, very evidently, a very expensive (viewed from outside Facebook; cheap, inside it) figleaf. I suspect if anyone does resign, there will be a certain dambreaking effect. But it also means giving up a fat paycheque for doing very occasionally what content moderators do, for far less money, all day long.

Why anonymisation of personal data is a pipe-dream

Wonderful post by Cory Doctorow.

“Wanting it badly is not enough” could be the title of a postmortem on the century’s tech-policy battles. Think of the crypto wars: yeah, it would be super cool if we had ciphers that worked perfectly except when “bad guys” used them, but that’s not ever going to happen.

Another area is anonymisation of large data-sets. There are undeniably cool implications for a system that allows us to gather and analyse lots of data on how people interact with each other and their environments without compromising their privacy.

But “cool” isn’t the same as “possible” because wanting it badly is not enough…

It’s a great piece. We continue to see the planned releases of large datasets with assurances that they have been anonymised. And it’s standard practice to demand your “consent” to have your data shared once it has been de-identified.

This is, as Cory points out, a meaningless proposition. The ‘anonymised’ dataset that cannot be re-identified has yet to be invented.

To show just how easy re-identification can be, why not visit The Observatory of Anonymity, a web-app that shows you how easily you can be identified in a data-set?

Try it.

Click on the link, give your country and region, birthdate, gender, employment and education status and it tells you how many people share those characteristics.

I’ve just tried it. Conclusion: “If a record were to be found in any anonymous dataset matching your attributes, there is a 25% chance that this record actually belongs to you”.

And the moral? In Cory’s inimitable style: “You are far less of a haystack-needle than you think.”

Lina Khan’s Senate confirmation appearance

If you haven’t heard of Lina Khan before, then can I suggest that you take note. She’s a remarkable young woman who has done more to reshape how we think about antitrust than anyone since Robert Bork did (to malevolent effect) in 1978. And Joe Biden has nominated her as one of the five members of the US Federal Trade Commission, a wilfully somnolent body in recent years but one with great powers if it chooses to use them.

Matt Stoller watched her confirmation hearing and has this to say.

The most important thing to know about Lina Khan is that she is at heart an investigative journalist. When she was 15, she did a story on Starbucks for her school newspaper, and it got picked up by the New York Times. Before she became a lawyer, she did investigations on everything from the rise of big chocolate to airlines to poultry to banks to Monsanto’s appetite for data.

Her law review piece on Amazon came out of research she did on the economy as a news gatherer, and the investigation of big tech for the Antitrust Subcommittee was basically just high-quality journalism. Khan has what is necessary in a great enforcer and regulator, which is a sense of curiosity about how the world works. She starts with empirical reality, asking what’s happening in business and how it is shaped by the law.

Khan will be just one of five votes, so she won’t be able to run the commission herself. But her nomination is a huge deal. The FTC used to be an afterthought agency, a place to stack cronies with a nice cushy job flying off to Europe to attend privacy conferences, with the need to occasionally vote to permit a massive mega-merger. If nothing else, Khan’s nomination shows that is no longer the case.

Correction

I wrongly attributed the lovely Peatlands essay that was yesterday’s Long Read to Richard Gibbons rather than to Sami Emory. Richard was the photographer, but the words are Sami’s.

Apologies to both. And many thanks to Carrie Fitton for spotting it.

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