A conversation with the great Ben Katchor.

"The thing is, wealth doesn’t corrupt you just criminally, it also corrupts your tastes. You don’t look at things, you don’t study things, you become, you know, an

On America's 'Data-Driven Defeat in Afghanistan'

"They mistook war as a matter of process, when its nature is ruled by paradox."
https://t.co/ColMD35yFf
On Our collective Deathwish.

"The true defining characteristic of American political society at present isn’t widespread violence from either the left or the right, but a propensity for dramatic overreach combined with utter toothlessness."
https://t.co/RaBQsrKHTj
On The New Truth.

"And so the new argument proceeds, burying contrary evidence in unmarked graves while erecting new religious monuments and shrines at which the growing number of the faithful pay obeisance."
https://t.co/FotGnphMqX
On the deadly new regime of total information control.

"Perhaps the most messed-up thing about the case of the purged Google doc is that no one seems to care that it happened, aside from those publications that celebrated the monopolist’s censorship."
https://t.co/lCPGd6Csvd
On Our Superdense Foreign Policy Black Hole.

"Russiagate merging with the war in Afghanistan was inevitable because both wield America’s world-powerful military & intelligence apparatus against domestic political foes, dressed up as foreign adversaries."
https://t.co/KfBGVzJkB8
On Left Heretics and the New Media Collective.

"The secret motive driving people in the news business is the fear of standing alone. Most journalists look around to see what the journalists they imagine are important are doing, and they copy that."
https://t.co/Vj5p2qENz8
On Joe Rogan, Aleph.

"Joe Rogan's prominent cranium and bulging physiognomy are physical manifestations of a fluctuating aperture through which one glimpses the cultural mood that is, at that moment, most popular and most repressed."
https://t.co/lKABT6oHzG
And closing out the year, my first piece for @unherd On the Iron Law of the Elite: as long as everyone fails together, everyone fails upwards.

"For the American ruling class, expertise is a ceremonial costume conferring power through mystifying rituals."
https://t.co/zwWXqQ1DXx

More from Crime

My students @maxzks and Tushar Jois spent most of the summer going through every piece of public documentation, forensics report, and legal document we could find to figure out how police were “breaking phone encryption”. 1/


This was prompted by a claim from someone knowledgeable, who claimed that forensics companies no longer had the ability to break the Apple Secure Enclave Processor, which would make it very hard to crack the password of a locked, recent iPhone. 2/

We wrote an enormous report about what we found, which we’ll release after the holidays. The TL;DR is kind of depressing:

Authorities don’t need to break phone encryption in most cases, because modern phone encryption sort of sucks. 3/

I’ll focus on Apple here but Android is very similar. The top-level is that, to break encryption on an Apple phone you need to get the encryption keys. Since these are derived from the user’s passcode, you either need to guess that — or you need the user to have entered it. 4/

Guessing the password is hard on recent iPhones because there’s (at most) a 10-guess limit enforced by the Secure Enclave Processor (SEP). There’s good evidence that at one point in 2018 a company called GrayKey had a SEP exploit that did this for the X. See photo. 5/
Yesterday I did a thread on how Huawei is trying to manipulate Belgian policy audiences with a fake online ecosystem ahead of a key 5G decision. (https://t.co/ViIp7X5KsN) Huawei did not take kindly to my research.


Mike Bai, the "President of Strategy Marketing Western Europe" for Huawei doubled down and tagged me and the organisations listed in my profile in a promoted (!) tweet. It's still doing the rounds now.


But who is Mike Bai? An analysis of his Twitter account by Botometer rates him a dubious 2.2/5 (by comparison, I rate 0.4, where 0 is best). @villaraco points out that he gained 800K followers in 9 months: https://t.co/YfoVaVNq2y


Bai's sudden and massive online presence for Huawei started at the exact same time as the fake ecosystem of blogs and websites started being built, in March 2020. I can find no job history for him pre-Huawei, starting in March of this year.

I did find another (?) Mike Bai. The other Mike Bai authored a blog that posts Chinese state propaganda about things like the Covid-19 outbreak not originating in China. I won't link to the blog as not 100% sure it's same person, but here's a screenshot of part of the text.

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