Security is protection from, or resilience against, potential harm (or other unwanted coercive change) caused by others, by restraining the freedom of others to act. Beneficiaries (technically referents) of security may be of persons and social groups, objects and institutions, ecosystems or any other entity or phenomenon vulnerable to unwanted change. Security mostly refers to protection from hostile forces, but it has a wide range of other senses: for example, as the absence of harm (e.g. freedom from want); as the presence of an essential good (e.g. food security); as resilience against potential damage or harm (e.g. secure foundations); as secrecy (e.g. a secure telephone line); as containment (e.g. a secure room or cell); and as a state of mind (e.g. emotional security).
Back when I started writing this blog, hacking was something that was done against ‘the man’, usually as a political statement. Now breaches are part of organised crime’s day to day operations. The Chinese government so thoroughly hacked Nortel that all its intellectual property was stolen along with commercial secrets like bids and client lists. The result was the firm went bankrupt. Russian ransomware shuts down hospitals across Ireland. North Korean government sanctioned hackers robbed 50 million dollars from the central bank of Bangladesh and laundered it in association with Chinese organised crime.
Now it has spilled into the real world with Chinese covert actions, Russian contractors in the developing world and hybrid warfare being waged across central Europe and the middle east.
RUSI put together a great presentation on the nature of illicit finance from the perspective of terrorism and terrorist states including Russia and the People’s Republic of China. The foundations of illicit finance seems to be the offshore financial structures that were build up by the United Kingdom in the post-war period to capture the EuroDollar market.
In some ways this lecture on Illicit finance felt very familiar. It is exactly the same structures that John Le Carre outlined in his post-cold war novel Single and Single. The nature of illicit finance was also covered in Michael Oswald’s documentary The Spider’s Web – Britain’s Second Empire. This linkage was not lost on the audience attending the talk.
The concerns about illicit finance now are because these structures are being used to attack democracies at their core and buy influence for hostile states such as Russia and China. It is like the west is slowly awakening from a slumber as its enemies try to slit their throat.
Riding the slow train in China | The Economist – As Mr Xi enters his second decade as supreme leader, his sternly paternalist version of Communist Party rule seeks to draw ever more legitimacy from the provision of customer-friendly public services, supplied via modern infrastructure. In the case of China’s railways, at least, that promise of order and efficiency has been kept.
Wintershall’s empty bank accounts expose plight of western companies still in Russia | Financial Times – “We helped create a very powerful and dangerous Russia without being cognisant of the risk,” he said, while acknowledging that the country had done its best to remedy this in the past 12 months. And he said BASF risked repeating its Russian mistake in China. “What I’m really surprised about, and almost upsets me, is that while this is all happening . . . BASF decides to invest €10bn in China,” he said, referring to a planned chemicals complex that will be the company’s largest ever foreign investment. “That’s the most upsetting part,” he said. “That we don’t learn from it.” – this quote from Thomas Schweppe of 7Square nails the problem neatly
Finance
Thousands of offshore companies with UK property still not stating real owners | Tax havens | The Guardian – wealthy businessmen, Gulf royalty and states such as China have legally bought up billions of pounds of mostly London property, often via jurisdictions such as the British Virgin Islands (BVI) and the Channel Islands. Stephen Abbott Pugh, head of technology for Open Ownership, a non-governmental organisation focused on beneficial ownership transparency, said the fact that so many of the offshore companies are declared as owned by other companies or trusts means “the public still aren’t able to easily discover the people behind those companies in many cases”. “With access to many European beneficial ownership registers being shut off following a 2022 court ruling, the Register of Overseas Entities shows how useful public data is for tracking how offshore money is used to buy assets,”
Health
The 1964 House Report on how smoking affected the health of Americans went around the world. Sales dropped 30 percent in a week, and then picked up back to normal after existing smokers addiction kicked in.
How Microsoft’s Stumbles Led to Its OpenAI Alliance — The Information – For more than a decade, Microsoft Research, the company’s in-house research group, has touted artificial intelligence breakthroughs such as translating speech to text and software that could understand human language or recognize objects in images. But the company’s effort to commercialize its AI research moved at more of a crawl – this was at the centre of Microsoft’s innovation narrative for the best part of two decades. It’s embarrassing
Inside the secret Facebook groups where women review men | Dazed – then there’s the whole other side of ‘Are We Dating The Same Guy’, which is a lot more ethically ambiguous. Is it ever OK to publicly share someone’s photos and private conversations without their consent? Or in other words, to ‘doxx’? There’s a clear power differential, but if genders were reversed and guys were exposing females to strangers on the internet, it’s unlikely we’d see the group in such a positive light. “If a boy posted me and people were writing ‘red flag’ in the comments, I would genuinely be quite hurt,” says Tara, 20. She notes how, sometimes, users make particularly unfair remarks: for example, they’ll lambast a date for having “shit chat”, or “[talking] like a 60-year-old dad”.
Getting Personal With State Propaganda – China Media Project – Nanchang Aviation University (南昌航空大学), located in China’s southern Jiangxi province, announced that it had launched the “Jiangxi International Communication Research Center” (江西国际传播研究中心) in cooperation with the China Media Group, the state media conglomerate formed in 2018 directly under the CCP’s Central Propaganda Department. According to coverage by China Education Daily, a newspaper directly under the Ministry of Education, the new center is an experiment in combining central CCP media and universities (央媒+高校) to carry out international communication by using the “overseas student resources” (留学生资源) of the university.
Is nepotism really that bad? | LinkedIn – Jed Hallam wrote an essay on nepotism and the effects that he perceives it as having on inequality. Jed tries to steer a line on nepotism somewhere between recognising that the people may have an interest and talent, whilst pointing out inequality related issues derived from nepotism. Nepotism itself is widespread, whether its impact is small or large.
Jed is concerned that nepotism can actively remove opportunities for less conventional candidates that may do better if assessed solely in merit.
Social, cultural and economic barriers
Even if nepotism disappeared, our unconscious desire to hire people more like us, can mean that candidates face challenges in social, cultural and economic realms. I don’t drink, don’t have an interest in rugby union or football. I knew no one down here and sold my car to pay my first month’s rent when I moved to London. The analogy of a viking burning his boat behind him would be apt. I didn’t, and couldn’t if I wanted to, move to London earlier than my late 20s. I had to put myself through university and build up a modest amount of money to back myself as my parents didn’t have any.
One aspect of Jed’s essay on nepotism particularly surprised me:
“the proportion of people from working-class backgrounds operating in the creative industries has more than halved since the 1970s–falling from 16.4 percent to just 7.9 percent”
The problem with nepotism is that its hard to define and work out the difference between good and bad nepotism. For instance:
I line managed some one who had gone to Harrow and had found it harder to get into a creative agency because he was considered to be too posh by interviewees. He since went on to work successfully for other agencies, inhouse at a well loved brand and now runs his own shop
Would someone following on into the family profession be a case of nepotism? A classic example from the creative industry would be Thomas Bangalter of Daft Punk, whose father is disco producer ‘Daniel Vangarde’ aka Daniel Bangalter. One could imagine how being exposed to music and a studio environment from an early age made Thomas the kind of producer he was.
Or the Arnault children taking roles in LVMH? European business often rely on intergenerational family ownership and management
Nepotism is more obvious when you have events like the recent US college scandal. The problem with debate about any hot subject like nepotism is the lack of room for nuance and good judgement. A second aspect to it is making people feel like victims of nepotism and inequality, rather than encouraging striving. Admittedly that is even made harder to do when inequality that underpins nepotism has become much more extreme.
People look for easy solves and clear lines for issues like nepotism, when what we really need are better decision making and good judgement.
Nepotism unresolved
There will always be people who feel hard done by, it wasn’t them it was X external factor. Sometimes it isn’t your time, or you didn’t make clear how good you were. Equal opportunity doesn’t equate to equal outcomes, the case in point that nepotism can learn from is currently going through the US Supreme Court. In an age of algorithmically filtered CVs I can see nepotism become attenuated rather than resolved.
V Shanshan, “Why are you Forcing me to Embrace Solidarity?” – Reading the China Dream – Weibo post from someone whose uncle had died from complications from covid the previous day, writing to express his anger and bitterness at the hectoring calls in China’s official media to “come together” and “look to the future” as China decides to live—and die—with covid. That such calls ring hollow for many Chinese makes perfect sense, since China’s mighty messaging machine seems to have turned on a dime, suddenly arguing that Omicron is no big deal and that “everyone is responsible for their own health” after insisting for years that the virus is deadly and that collective behavior was the only way to control it
A Place for Fire – The Paris Review – the primal draw of fire in the home. This reminded me of the central role of the turf and wood fuelled range in the Irish farmhouse where I spent a good deal of my childhood
Project MUSE – The Surge of Nationalist Sentiment among Chinese Youth during the COVID-19 Pandemic – Since 2012, Beijing has been promoting a strain of populist nationalism which underscores both the institutional superiority of the ruling party and the cultural superiority of being Chinese. At the international level, however, the image of both the regime and the Chinese has been marred due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak in Wuhan (December 2019–January 2020). This study examines the extent and the form that the surge in nationalist sentiment of Chinese young people has taken during the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on a questionnaire survey of 1,200 students from a sample of 20 colleges/universities in China (June–July 2020), this study shows that the respondents express high satisfaction with the state’s performance in tackling the pandemic, and that there is a substantial surge of nationalist sentiment with a high level of hostility towards other nations (e.g. the United States). Such nationalist sentiment, however, is found to express a bifurcated pattern in that young Chinese also tend to embrace the opportunity to work and study in the Western societies they ostensibly dislike – yeah, is it smart to let them in though, given Chinese laws obligating them to cooperate with the MSS if requested?
Project MUSE – Living with the State-Led Order: Practical Acceptance and Unawareness of the Chinese Middle Class – China’s expanding middle class is often found to support the regime and lack democratic aspirations. We find that one section of the middle class depends upon the state for jobs and other material benefits, and the other works for the private and foreign sectors of the country’s economy. Once separated as such, we found that the non-state middle class clearly shows lower support for the regime. Furthermore, unlike the state middle class, which registers lower democratic support, the non-state middle class shows a similar level of democratic support as other social classes. In general, however, while only pragmatically accepting the current order, both middle class groups nonetheless appear lacking practical knowledge and understanding of liberal democratic institutions such as free media and multiparty elections. The unforthcoming attitudes toward democracy might also derive from a general sense of fearing the loss of order and the other related uncertainties
Economics
The true priorities of the global elite – by Judd Legum – The New York Times’ Peter Goodman, author of “Davos Man” — a blistering criticism of the WEF and its neoliberal ideology — recently offered this brief description: The World Economic Forum is not a secret government or organized conspiracy. It is a giant business meeting, a chance for the heads of multinational oil giants to sit opposite Persian Gulf potentates — fronted by the performance art of earnest panel discussions aimed at solving the problems of the day. More than anything, Davos is a prophylactic against change, an elaborate reinforcement of the status quo served up as the pursuit of human progress. Tuesday’s WEF program included a panel with Senators Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) and Joe Manchin (D-WV). The pair shared an on-stage high-five in celebration of the filibuster, which has been used to block increases in the minimum wage, protections for voting rights, and efforts to maintain access to reproductive health care.
German tank manufacturer’s warning puts pressure on Ukraine’s allies | Ukraine | The Guardian – Battle tanks from German industrial reserves wanted by Ukraine will not be ready to be delivered until 2024, the arms manufacturer Rheinmetall has warned, increasing pressure on Nato allies to support Ukraine with armoured vehicles in active service instead, ahead of a key meeting this week.“Even if the decision to send our Leopard tanks to Kyiv came tomorrow, the delivery would take until the start of next year,” Rheinmetall’s chief executive, Armin Papperger, told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper. Rheinmetall, which manufactures the battle vehicle’s gun, has 22 Leopard 2 and 88 older Leopard 1 tanks in its stocks. Getting the Leopard tanks ready for battle, however, would take several months and cost hundreds of millions of euros the company could not put up until the order was confirmed
Macau gaming: Chau’s jail term warns punters and investors alike | Financial Times – It is worthwhile considering this in part of the wider picture of how China is trying deal with capital flight. It also chimes with efforts to move Hong Kong from being about ‘wealth management’ i.e. schemes to allow capital flight out of the mainland to the west to trying to pull in western money to invest in Chinese businesses. Macau was part of that process too.
Expect a clampdown on insurance policy sales people. At the moment a lot of them sell these things via WeChat with a view to providing financial services to mainlanders in a similar way to what daigou do with luxury goods from abroad. I know work at home mums that do this for Prudential as a side hustle
Auction houses have expanded like crazy in Hong Kong during the pandemic and I would expect the authorities to look at how they can shut this off or use to only import items into China rather than having them leave again. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are strongly encouraged to shutdown in Hong Kong and up up in Sanya on Hainan island instead so they stay inside the yuan firewall
Expect pressure on foreign banks on wealth management / capital flight vehicles. There maybe some latitude through mainland banks where the government can monitor the flow through back-end access into their systems
Ultimately, Singapore will be the new Hong Kong – which is happening already due to ‘run culture’ and a plethora of wealth management and family office services being provided.
Hong Kong’s financial hub is at a crossroads | Financial Times – Look for a senior job in Hong Kong these days on LinkedIn and you’re unlikely to find any openings unless you’re a speaker of Cantonese or Mandarin, or both. “That’s a big change,” confides a longtime British expat in the territory. “It’s understandable. But it’s a big change.” The evolving jobs market is just one of the visible signs of the tilt to mainland China that promises to redefine Hong Kong’s role as a global financial centre. Beijing’s growing influence on the former British colony — evident in four years of security crackdowns and tough Covid lockdowns — has raised existential questions about the sustainability of the territory’s role as Asia’s unparalleled bridgehead to global finance – yeah soon even the finance bros will go
Japan was the future but it’s stuck in the past – BBC News – Japan had emerged from the destruction of World War Two and conquered global manufacturing. The money poured back into the country, driving a property boom where people bought anything they could get their hands on, even chunks of forest. By the mid-1980s, the joke was that the grounds of the imperial palace in Tokyo were worth the same as all of California. The Japanese call it the “Baburu Jidai” or the bubble era. Then in 1991 the bubble burst. The Tokyo stock market collapsed. Property prices fell off a cliff. They are yet to recover. A friend was recently negotiating to buy several hectares of forest. The owner wanted $20 per square metre. “I told him forest land is only worth $2 a square metre,” my friend said. “But he insisted he needed $20 a square metre, because that’s what he’d paid for it in the 1970s.” Think of Japan’s sleek bullet trains, or Toyota’s “just-in-time” marvel of assembly-line manufacturing – and you could be forgiven for thinking Japan is a poster child for efficiency. It is not. Rather the bureaucracy can be terrifying, while huge amounts of public money are spent on activities of dubious utility – this says more about the persons values than about Japan. Also coming from Britain’s public broadcast service, it is ironic that Japan is at the centre of many critical global supply chains and Britain is being stripped out of them. A bit of introspection is required
Luxury Brands Beware: Angered Chinese Tourists Are Avoiding Japan And South Korea | Jing Daily – South Korea issued yellow tags for China’s inbound travelers to wear at its airports, and Japan followed suit, giving red tags to passengers coming from the country. The initiative has elicited outrage online. On Weibo, the hashtag “Japan issues red tags to mark Chinese travelers” has gathered 200 million views, becoming the fourth most trending topic at one point. Many Chinese travelers complained that they not only had to pay for COVID tests and potential quarantines in subpar conditions upon entering South Korea but also had to wear a yellow tag on their necks to identify themselves as coming from China for special inspection at airports. The tags, along with South Korean reporters snapping photos at them, made them feel like they were criminals being transferred
Good to see that we’re finally beyond the 3D printing hype bubble and its true benefits can be appreciated. This article is a good run down of the pros and cons of 3D printing in an industrial setting. In some ways it reminds me of the ‘manufacturing cells’ concept were a computer controlled machine tool with switchable tool faces would do multiple jobs and process multiple types of products in small batches.
Not all manufacturing is true Fordian production lines. Just in the same way that digital printing has been good for small run books and catalogues or printing on demand; yet ‘traditional printing’ is still used for bigger print runs – additive manufacturing will be alongside traditional manufacturing processes.
Chinese Celebrities’ Political Signalling on Sina Weibo | The China Quarterly | Cambridge Core – Recent studies have revealed how the state disciplines and co-opts celebrities to promote patriotism, foster traditional values and spread political propaganda. However, how do celebrities adapt to the changing political environment? Focusing on political signalling on the social media platform Sina Weibo, we analyse a novel dataset and find that the vast majority of top celebrities repost from official accounts of government agencies and state media outlets, though there are variations. Younger celebrities with more followers tend to repost from official accounts more often. Celebrities from Taiwan tend to repost less than those from the mainland and Hong Kong, despite being subject to the same rules. However, the frequent political signalling by the most influential celebrities among younger generations suggests that the state has co-opted celebrity influence on social media to broadly promote its political objectives
Macs In the Enterprise: A Cisco Case Study – Creative Strategies – Despite extremely high desire from employees to use Macs (66% according to a study we did last year), most IT organizations keep the Mac users in their organization at arm’s length. Offering true platform of choice matters when it comes to employee experience and employee satisfaction with their workplace, tools, and IT departments. This is exactly what Cisco found when they studied internal employees. A Cisco report on IT satisfaction of employees found satisfaction to be significantly lower when employees were not offered their platform of choice in a laptop – this bullshit has been going on my entire career, HR departments are a major issue as well
I subscribe to all kinds of weird and wonderful newsletters to get content for these posts, the idea of a Ukraine beta test was inspired by this post on SOFREP: Combat Sandbox: Ukraine’s ‘MacGyver Army’Tests Western Weaponry | SOFREP. SOFREP is written a self-described team of a team of former military, intelligence and special operations professionals. While some of their stories are repeats of tabloid fantasies: UK Apache helicopter gunships for Ukraine, they also provide some smart editorial thinking.
Western military ideas were designed to run against Russian and Chinese campaigns. The Ukraine beta test seems to have failed for Russia’s hybrid warfare concept, when it was executed on a large scale basis. Russia were trying to execute on an idea first outlined by an American theorist Frank Hoffman in his work Conflict in the 21st century: the rise of hybrid wars for a think tank. The Russians themselves call it ‘non-linear warfare‘. After careful preparation, Russia used non-linear warfare to capture Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine in 2014. On the surface of it, a successful Ukraine beta test for Russia. Yet 7 years later on a larger scale approach Russia failed and is having to go back to older ways of doing things.
Part of the Ukraine beta test works because of the Ukrainians and everything that they have on the line. Part of it was down to better tactics by Ukraine compared to Russia and at least some of which was down to the use of western weapons systems used in an innovative way.
There has since been a Ukraine beta test of western military ideas:
Delta is a system for collecting, processing and displaying information about enemy forces, coordinating defense forces, and providing situational awareness according to NATO standards, developed by the Center for Innovation and Development of Defense Technologies of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, founded in 2021 at the base of the A2724 military unit, which, in turn, was created in 2015 from the volunteer group Aerorozvidka.
Delta is used for planning operations and combat missions, coordination with other units, secure exchange of information on the location of enemy forces, etc. In particular, Delta has integrated chatbots developed by the Ministry of Digital Affairs – “eVorog” and the Security Service of Ukraine – “STOP Russian War”.
The system is equipped with modern means of monitoring suspicious activity. From 2021, allied cyber units are constantly scanning the system for vulnerabilities, intrusion attempts, data leaks, and more.
According to the developers, Delta provides a comprehensive understanding of the battle space in real time, integrates information about the enemy from various sensors and sources, including – intelligence, on a digital map, does not require additional settings, and can work on any device – laptop, tablet or even on a mobile phone. Roughly speaking, Delta is such a modern real-time command map and troop control center
It has taken years for western powers to build comparable systems. Delta is powered by a mix of human intelligence, Ukrainian open source intelligence and also includes NATO electronic intelligence and satellite imagery. Integration of NATO for Delta is a Ukraine beta test in itself. NATO will learn from the successes and challenges of Delta. At a tactical level the idea of a Ukraine beta test shows how well weapons systems work under real-world ‘near peer’ war conditions, giving them valuable understanding of what systems are most effective against Russian systems.
The Ukraine beta test shows where the gaps are in NATO systems. For instance the Gepard tank is a short range anti-aircraft system phased out by Germany a decade ago, that has shown the value of similar gun based systems against drones and low flying aircraft as a cost effective method to engage.
All of which makes me wonder why the arms industry aren’t taking the obvious step and ‘donating’ trial systems to the Ukrainian military for a Ukraine beta test to show their mettle and value to western clients? The closest that we’ve seen to this is the GLSDB. The GLSDB is an existing Boeing bomb mated to recycled rocket motors. But the arms industry could do so much more as part of a Ukraine beta test.
China
The politics of China’s Belt and Road workers in Africa – Asia Times – strong empirical evidence that democracies host significantly fewer Chinese workers than autocracies, all other things being equal. The results hold up using a variety of different statistical modeling techniques. In Ghana, a vibrant democracy, we found that both the country’s main political parties faced pressure to ensure that Chinese-built projects delivered local jobs. For example, in the construction of the Bui Dam, the agreement between Sinohydro, the Chinese state-owned behemoth contracted to complete the project, and the Ghanaian government stipulated that a certain proportion of the workforce would be local. In Algeria, on the other hand, Chinese labor has been used to quickly complete projects seen as politically expedient. Algeria is a “hybrid” regime that was ruled by a single man, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, from 1999 to 2019. Even when domestic discontent over Chinese workers prompted measures to limit their presence, the measures were not implemented. Our findings have several important implications. First, host country agency is important. Host governments have the ability to ensure Chinese companies hire locally. Second, projects that hire locally may bring more long-term economic benefits to host countries. This can happen both directly through the jobs that they create, and via knowledge and technology transfers into the wider economy. Our analysis, therefore, suggests that the wider developmental benefits of Chinese-built infrastructure may actually be stronger in democracies than in autocracies
China is flashing red on the skewed consensus indicator | Financial Times – The only strong standout finding is on China, around which a strength of current optimism has no offset. Morgan Stanley didn’t think to even offer one. It’s a Goldilocks scenario with no bears – this doesn’t make sense. Wall Street seems to have an irrational belief in China as a market. For example: China moves to take ‘golden shares’ in Alibaba and Tencent units | Financial Times – expect this is to be about more than censorship. More like military – civil fusion – also likely to have big implications for media engagement on social platforms
Ryanair unsure if softening in UK demand here to stay – “There’s no doubt that the UK economy by any stretch of the imagination, in terms of going into recession or whatever, is different than the other European economies,” – interesting that they are concerned about travel overall rather than thinking about a pivot to them from BA etc
Is this the end of the bachelor pad? – The Face – the bachelor pad has been gobbled up by the economy. Nearly a third of 20 – 34-year-olds in the UK are living at home with their parents. I did feel a bit triggered by the author’s dismissal of stainless steel as a material and good quality furniture like an Eames lounge chair as being emblematic of toxic masculinity. But the economic points are very valid
Mainland rush to return to Hong Kong, Macau post zero-Covid nears 1 million | South China Morning Post – travel demand has been growing since China relaxed its border restrictions in December, with around 998,000 mainland residents applying for travel documents to Hong Kong or Macau, and 353,000 people applying for a new passport – expect Hong Kong fatalities to surge. Hong Kong has an even older population than mainland China. There is a corresponding low vaccination rate amongst them, partly down to vaccine distrust due to often Chinese orchestrated misinformation
Wokeness as prairie fire – by Noah Smith – Noahpinion – Anyway, with all that said, the point of this post is that wokeness’ role in American society is evolving as we move into the early 2020s. In particular, I see three simultaneous trends:
An increasing anti-woke pushback from conservatives
Increasing entrenchment of woke ideas and practices within liberal institutions
A general exhaustion with wokeness among thought leaders and young people
Who Are You Calling a Great Power? – Lawfare – trying to define great power status is difficult in ways that are evident from the mismatched assortment of candidates that emerge in the recent literature. Power varies across issues and domains in ways that are glossed over when international politics is reduced to great power competition. It can be a convenient shorthand, but policymakers should not lose track of the nuances: Who counts as a great power may vary from issue to issue
Saudi Aramco bets on being the last oil major standing | Financial Times – What is often forgotten is how oil is also needed as a feedstock for materials. You want electric batteries they need a plastic based insulator and cables need plastic insulation. Mercedes et al tried soy plastic based cable insulation in the late 1990s and the wiring looms of these cars have had to be remade. All of which will be needed if you want a LiON or hydrogen economy. Then there are seals, bushings, coatings, medicines etc all of which rely on hydrocarbon feedstocks. Oil isn’t just about carbon emissions. Aramco is being prescient about this, Companies like Shell etc are increasingly looking at plastics manufacturing for exactly the same reasons
Lidl, Zara’s owner, H&M and Next ‘paid Bangladesh suppliers less than production cost’ | Retail industry | The Guardian – Lidl, Zara’s owner Inditex, H&M and Next have been accused of paying garment suppliers in Bangladesh during the pandemic less than the cost of production, leaving factories struggling to pay the country’s legal minimum wage. In a survey of 1,000 factories in the country producing clothes for UK retailers, 19% of Lidl’s suppliers made the claim, as did 11% of Inditex’s, 9% of H&M’s and 8% of Next’s. A majority of suppliers of those four brands, and also of Tesco and Aldi, told researchers that almost two years after Covid-19 was declared a global pandemic they were still being paid at the same rate – despite soaring raw material and production costs in the interim
EU draws up plans to stockpile scarce medicines | Financial Times – “a systemic challenge with numerous vulnerabilities”, including overreliance on a few countries for certain products, and the way drugs are regulated and bought. The EU’s Health Emergency and Response Authority (Hera), established in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, could organise joint procurements for several countries to improve supply. Health commissioner Stella Kyriakides outlined the plan in a reply to Greek health minister Thanos Plevris, who had demanded action in a letter to her last week. “There is a shortage in certain branded drugs containing paracetamol, antibiotics and inhalers . . . particularly for children,” Plevris said at a news conference last week where he announced a series of measures that would tackle the shortages. – because China
UK supermarket uses facial recognition tech to track shoppers – Coda Story – In July, civil liberties group Big Brother Watch filed a complaint to the U.K.’s Information Commissioner’s Office against Southern Co-op and Facewatch — the company providing the surveillance system. Joshua Shadbolt, a duty manager at the Copnor Road supermarket, told me that high levels of theft have forced him and his colleagues to hide, for instance, all the cleaning products behind the till. Without the technology, he fears customers would be given free range to steal. Since Covid restrictions were lifted in the U.K. in early 2021 following a third national lockdown, shoplifting has been on the rise. This is likely to have been compounded by a cost-of-living crisis. Still, even if theft has not reached pre-pandemic levels, for Shadbolt, the biometric camera has been an effective and necessary tool in tackling crime. For Big Brother Watch, the camera is a breach of data rights and individual privacy. Every time a customer walks into a shop or business that uses Facewatch’s system, a biometric profile is created. If staff have reasonable grounds to suspect a customer of committing a crime, whether it’s shoplifting or disorderly conduct, they can add the customer to a Facewatch list of “subjects of interest.” Facewatch’s policy notice says that the police also have the power to upload images and data to Facewatch’s system. Anyone uploading the data, which includes a picture of the suspected person’s face, their name and a short summary of what happened, must confirm that they either witnessed the incident or have CCTV footage of it. But the policy does not indicate what the bar for “reasonably suspecting” someone is.
I guess before we go into cracking the RSA algorithm, we need to discuss what the RSA algorithm is. The RSA algorithm is the mathematical equation behinds the RSA crypto-system. The RSA in question are Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman who publicly described back in 1977.
Note the distinction about ‘publicly’; it is important because a British boffin Clifford Cooks came up the same solution independently whilst working at GCHQ. But it was only at the end of the 1980s when open internet protocols were being developed that this kind of cryptography really found its use as an underpinning principle of public key cryptography.
RSA is a relatively slow algorithm, so is not commonly used to directly encrypt user data. Instead it is used to transmit shared keys for faster cryptographic methods, which are then used for larger encryption–decryption jobs.
Cracking the RSA algorithm gives access to data like credit card details, login credentials or keys to access a bigger data set. As computing power has improved the size of key used to encrypt using RSA has had to be increased in size. In 1999, 512bit length keys could be cracked using 100s of computers in parallel. 20 years later, this could be done in a third of the time on a single well-specced home computer. The safe size of keys today is estimated to be between 2048 and 4096 bits long
Chinese claims on using quantum computing to cracking the RSA algorithm using 2046 bit length keys
The Chinese team claim the ability for cracking the RSA algorithm at 2046 bit key length, using a quantum computer equivalent to IBM’s Osprey system to calculate the keys. Bruce Schneier’s critique on their paper pokes a lot of holes in their claims.
Chinese military affiliated hackers compromised the ‘seed keys’ used to support RSA Security’s products at the time. if you had known me back then, I had a grey lump with digital display on it that was called SecureID and used to access my work computer.
SecureID tags
SecureID was not only used in corporate environments but government contractor, research and military networks. So stealing the seed keys rendered all of them vulnerable.
PR News | Get Ready for the Gen Z Onslaught –Gen Z “has both the ability and motivation to organize online to reshape corporate and public policy, making life harder for multinationals everywhere and disrupting politics with the click of the button,” according to an essay by Eurasia chairman Cliff Kupchan and president Ian Bremmer. Gen Z grew up as America’s post-Cold War dominance waned and experienced formative historical events such as the 2008 financial crisis, Arab Spring, Brexit, Trump’s election, Black Lives Matter movement, MeToo reckoning, mass shootings in the US, COVID-19 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “The result is a generation radicalized by the turbulent nature of its times and the failures of leaders and existing institutions to respond,” wrote Kupchan and Bremmer. “Gen Z has broader expectations, demands and policy impulses than its predecessors, including a marked distrust of institutions and traditional channels of political change and economic achievement.” – This isn’t generational per se but related to not hitting life stages
Lawyers exit Hong Kong as they face campaign of intimidation – Anonymous threats sent by text message and email. GPS tracking devices placed under a car, and Chinese “funeral money” sent to an office. Ambushes by reporters working for state-controlled media. Accusations of disloyalty in the press. These are some of the methods deployed in a campaign of intimidation being waged against lawyers in Hong Kong who take on human rights cases, have criticized a China-imposed national security law or raised alarms about threats to the rule of law. While some of Hong Kong’s leading rights lawyers have been detained in the past two-and-a-half years, many others have become the target of a more insidious effort to cleanse the city of dissent – part of a wider crackdown by the ruling Communist Party on lawyers across China, say activists, legal scholars and diplomats. Michael Vidler, one of the city’s top human rights lawyers, is among them. Vidler left Hong Kong in April, a couple of months after a judge named his law firm six times in a ruling that convicted four pro-democracy protesters on charges of illegal assembly and possession of unauthorized weapons. Vidler interpreted the judgment as “a call to action” on the city’s national security police “to investigate me,” he told Reuters in an interview last month in Europe
Facebook’s hardware ambitions are undercut by its anti-China strategy – The Washington Post – The executives discussed ways to shift components and manufacturing for a planned smartwatch from China so the company could demonstrate to U.S. customs authorities that it merited a Made in Taiwan label — instead of one that says Made in China. They thought a Made in Taiwan label would save the company on tariffs and be a better look politically. But doing so was very difficult because the supply chain for smart electronic devices is in China, the people said, and countries such as Vietnam, Taiwan and India are only starting to develop those capabilities. Company leaders also hoped to obtain a Made in Italy label for its smart glasses, made in partnership with Ray-Ban, but doing so also wasn’t feasible, the people said. Executives also looked, unsuccessfully, for ways to move manufacturing of Oculus to Taiwan.
Visvim’s Toshiyuki Ueno in this film made in partnership with Porsche Japan, as we learn about the fundamental philosophy of ‘monozukuri’, or craftsmanship, behind the storied Japanese brand, as well as Ueno-san’s joy of ownership with long-lasting products.
Ueno’s joy of ownership comes from products that are potential candidates of what I called on this blog ‘heirloom design‘. Something that might develop a patina, but manages to last a lifetime. EDC or everyday carry is a category of products designed around the joy of ownership. Products over engineered and made of easy to service parts, yet are used everyday.
One can see this joy of ownership ethos in Visvim’s own products such as their iconic daypack. These look superficially like the classic Jansport design, but are over built in order ensure the bag outlasts the owner.
The joy of ownership is at odds with many aspects of our modern world. People no longer have digital or music collections. Instead relying on play lists on streaming services to give them the right muzak for whatever they are doing at the time. Online business Rent The Runway does away with the joy of ownership and curation of your look, you no longer need a wardrobe beyond the basics. Luxury brands are now talking about a circular economy play where consumers are encouraged to only enjoy the joy of ownership for a short while and they might then be resold. At the other end, fast fashion from Shein and H&M.
The much prescribed ethos of fast failure, agile methodologies and Facebook’s ‘move fast and break things’ are a world away from the philosophy behind the joy of ownership. This is the reason why Bang & Olufsen is a shadow of its former self, yet a vintage BeoSystem still provides the joy of ownership. More related content to the joy of ownership can be found here.
Xi Jinping shows his strength by muscling women away from power – Nikkei Asia – China’s path toward becoming a modern socialist country, as officials describe their aim, has historically been framed as incorporating gender egalitarianism. “Genuine equality between the sexes can only be realized in the process of the socialist transformation of society as a whole,” Mao Zedong wrote in 1955. By this measure, one would expect the Chinese Communist Party to at least signal that it cares about women’s representation in 2022. But last month’s 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party broke tradition by elevating 24 men and no women to the party’s Politburo, omitting its usual token female for the first time in 25 years. Women took just 11 of 205 seats on the new party Central Committee. Loyalty and utility to the top leader, above qualifications or affirmative action-style standards, are now the major determinants of officials’ prospects for promotion. Party leader Xi Jinping no longer feels any obligation to gesture toward gender equality – what this misses out on is that Mao Zedong’s public and private conduct were in sharp contrast. Mao was an avowed paedophile.
TikTok ‘ghost mall’ indicator of problems with Malaysia’s failed Silicon Valley | South China Morning Post – “It’s the only Malay-Muslim concept mall in Malaysia,” Abdul said, adding that he feels attached to the mall as “there is a brotherhood here.”While the mall didn’t have many customers, I was struck by the lively camaraderie among the staffers working there. Outside the mall, I found a singer performing for a small crowd. A couple meters away stood a unit where a popular Thai restaurant once operated. While it’s listed as operating on Google Reviews, one of Fadzil’s staff told me it has “closed down for good.” The restaurant appeared to once have good reviews online, with diners describing the food as “affordable” and “delicious.” The lot was padlocked and the tinted glass walls obscured what was inside, but my fat zoom lens captured an eerie image of the restaurant’s interior. Kitchen tools were piled in a corner and dozens of bottles of beverages stood packaged together, unused. It looked like a scene that had been quickly and hastily abandoned. – retail is tough at the best of times, but there is also a constant tale in Malaysia of expensive white elephants and failed economic policies once it had been decolonised
Ethics
Filmmaker Andrew Callaghan Says Cable News “Ramped People up” for Jan. 6 – I think that January 6th is much more of a riot than it is an insurrection. And I think that the mainstream media is endlessly focusing on it because it’s, it’s very good eye candy. It makes great news. It makes all conservatives look like absolute morons, and it’s good for selling ads. So it was a terrible thing, but there’s reasons they’re dragging it out, and they’ll continue to drag it out until the next major conservative fuck up like that. I don’t feel, necessarily, that the frontline brainwashed Capitol riot soldier is to blame for what happened. I think it’s the people who push them into action, particularly on the fringe as well. I think mainstream media and social media play a role in ramping up division, but I think it’s people like Alex [Jones] and Enrique [Tarrio] who really are primarily just merchandise salesmen. We have a serious problem with media echo chambers and informational literacy in this country. We have to take it upon ourselves to be more educated and think on a different level. So what’s in it for influencers like them? The “MAGA-sphere” allows for a ridiculous array of hustles and grifts. There’s Forgiato Blow, who built a rap career around the MAGA train. Enrique Tarrio runs the largest right-wing t-shirt shop on the Internet. Alex Jones makes millions of dollars selling brain pills, basically. There’s so many ways to make money in the MAGA world. It’s really appealing for someone trying to get their start as an entrepreneur or a politically active person – probably one of the smarter views that I have read on January 6.
Siegfried Muller’s interview shows the complexity in modern German history. Muller was plied with alcohol and interviewed by East German interviewers who then put together this film (presumably with editing). For Muller, the threat of communism was real. You can read more on Muller here.
The War in Ukraine Highlights European Rifts – Carnegie Endowment for International Peace – Despite the destruction Russia is wreaking on Ukraine, both Chancellor Olaf Scholz and sections of his Social Democratic Party and business lobbies hanker after the status quo ante. Herein lies the second rift. It is linked to EU member states’ varied historical experiences and the resulting threat perceptions. The EU as a peace project was finessed over the years without a voice from the Eastern or Central Europeans. They had to endure living under the dictatorship of the Soviet Union. Today, Western Europe, particularly France and Germany, considers a future European security architecture involving Russia in some form. For the East Europeans, security is about defending themselves against Russia. That is why the latter want Ukraine to win and Russia to be defeated. For them, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine threatens Europe’s stability and security—a threat that would be compounded if Russia were to win
Health
Race is on to develop new generation of weight-loss drugs | Financial Times – this looks like a Viagra like gold rush, on the plus side there is a lot of scientific progress being made. The biggest barriers are socio-cultural in nature. Disclosure, I worked on the global launch of Wegovy – the current category leading treatment
Hong Kong committee can bar foreign lawyers from national security cases: Beijing — Radio Free Asia – “Now the national security committee gets to decide what is and isn’t a matter of national security in all cases, not just national security cases, but in any other court cases and also in all matters of government policy, without being subject to judicial review,” he said. “They could claim that pandemic prevention was a matter of national security, or education,” Yam said. “It’s not just about the judicial system.” “It affects legislation and anything that takes place throughout the entire government system.” – Australian lawyer Kevin Yam points out the weakness that anyone using Hong Kong as a legal jurisdiction in contracts should be concerned about. Is the counter-party connected to the government, in a strategically important sector, government owned or supported by government loans? Do they employ mainland employees who might be affected by the contract. All of this could fall within the national security law. Another take by Hong Kong based legal scholar and former judge Henry Litton: HKU Legal Scholarship Blog: Henry Litton: Red Alert: Hong Kong Judicial Independence Under Existential Threat (Comment on the Admission of Owen KC). Samuel Bickett’s take on things here: Beijing’s New Year’s surprise: awarding itself broad new powers over Hong Kong and NPC Observer: Explainer: NPCSC’s Interpretation of Hong Kong National Security Law over Jimmy Lai’s Foreign Defense Counsel – Beyond the confines of Lai’s case and the specific issue it raised, the [NatSec] Committee’s seemingly broad and unreviewable power to “make [enforceable] judgments and decisions” on whether an issue of national security is involved, regardless of setting, could be cause for concern. It awaits to be seen whether and to what extent it would invoke this newly declared authority to deal with other situations in the future.
Three ways Big Tech got it wrong | Financial Times – Most of Big Tech got rich on software, which is easily updatable and basically free to distribute at scale. Such online innovation rightly places a huge premium on “failing fast”: getting a product out quickly, building a following and fixing the bugs later. The same is simply not true for a car, a medicine or even a new flavour of packaged meat. They have to work correctly and meet regulatory standards right off the bat. Production facilities and distribution networks cannot be conjured out of thin air, or easily amended after the fact. In the physical realm, an innovator can see its lead evaporate in the face of competition from rivals with experience in production and distribution. Tesla is discovering this the hard way. Tesla’s share of the US electric vehicle market has dropped below 65 per cent from 79 per cent five years ago. S&P Global Mobility predicts it will fall below 20 per cent by 2025 as other makers bring out electric trucks and cheaper models faster than Tesla can build new factories
A few things on this. I believe that hydrogen will play a far bigger role in the energy mix for transport. These cars are Toyota Mirai vehicles. Secondly, look at how easy it is for the workers to get the fit and finish right on the cars, which says a lot about the precision of their component manufacturers to get to Toyota’s legendary reliable, rattle-free vehicles.
William Davies · The Seductions of Declinism: Stagnation Nation · LRB 4 August 2022 – The claim that everything has been getting worse for decades is a gift to Thatcherites and Brexiters, who promise a dramatic turnaround in the fortunes of the nation, and would like to banish those who talk down Britain’s prospects. Edgerton went to considerable lengths in The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A 20th-Century History to dispute the claim that the interwar and postwar British economy was a failure, or that it needed ‘reviving’ in the way Thatcher promised. For Edgerton (and the Resolution Foundation appears to agree), Britain’s current economic malaise began under Thatcher, when rent-seeking via the housing market, privatisation and financial ‘innovation’ became the basis of Britain’s economic growth. But even Edgerton would agree that we are now in a very bad way. The poor quality of the Tory leadership candidates and the unseriousness of the debate between them creates the impression of a country that can now only speak to itself in slogans, oaths and insults, and has no capacity to describe or explain its problems. Away from the theatre of the leadership contest, the signs are that Britain’s elites now intend to stake everything on another financial free-for-all. Inexplicably, the Bank of England recently abolished the regulations that impose affordability criteria on the sale of mortgages, meaning that lenders no longer need to check whether borrowers have the capacity to repay if interest rates rise further. A new Financial Services Bill, supported by Sunak and the current chancellor, Nadhim Zahawi, will challenge the power of the Bank of England to regulate financial services, with the aim of releasing the City of London to engage in greater risk-taking. The Brexiters’ ideology, according to which Britain remains restricted by its conformity to EU rules, may have one more hurrah, if it can liberate speculators for another few years before the Ponzi schemes finally collapse
Fake ‘Rothschild’ Was Chased by Russian Organized Crime When She Took Pictures With Trump at Mar-a-Lago – OCCRP – the self-confessed grifter was a Ukrainian immigrant tangled up with Russian organized crime, a joint investigation by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and OCCRP has found. OCCRP and the Post-Gazette revealed in August how Yashchyshyn gained access to Mar-a-Lago without any background checks, making at least four trips to the estate in two days. The investigation and an FBI action that same month to retrieve documents from Mar-a-Lago renewed questions about security at the private club that has hosted powerful U.S. and world leaders. Those questions will only grow with the new revelations that the fake Rothschild was being chased by a serious organized crime figure as she mingled with prominent club guests and the ex-president himself.
Singapore redevelopment of its harbour in the early 1980s is fascinating. The area is now a mix of bars, cafes and restaurants. Among the buildings lost was a cinema built and owned by The Shaw Organisation – who were responsible for the post-war boom in kung fu martial arts films and even helped finance Blade Runner. The Shaws came out of a merchant background and were big in pre-war Shanghai as one of the big three film studios. They diversified into amusement parks over a decade before Disney did; though the Shaws were not as single-minded in their focus on ‘family-friendly’ experiences as their US counterpart.
The limits of growth in Singapore, some of these factors feel very Brexity, partly due to neo-liberalism
