Two Hundred Millionth Verse, Same as the First…

So much has been said on the Trayvon Martin case already. It feels a little bit like World War I – when you try to explain that France is fighting Germany because a Serbian nationalist shot the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, it’s not immediately clear why either of the two belligerent parties would give a rat’s @$$.

So it is here – a Hispanic wannabe cop shoots a teenage black thug, but as always, the fault is white racism. Goyim kill Goyim, and they blame the Jews. And so everyone must take up cudgels again to defend their accustomed sides.

After almost a decade of living in this country, it’s hard to express just how dreary all this is. Lordy, I am sick to death of race, and the peculiar American preoccupation with the subject. The faux outrage, the sheer humourlessness, the constant walking on eggshells, the pissant cowardice it inspires, and the way it paralyses people from making even the most straightforward observations about the world around them.

This is the most uniquely American of pathologies. Not racism, of course. America today is perhaps the least racist country on the face of the earth. You may seem surprised, but honestly, who else would lay a claim to the title? The only other contenders are small, mono-ethnic  countries for which issues of race simply don’t arise in daily life.

No, it is the paranoia about racism, regardless of the absence of any actual racial animus, that is America’s most appalling invention. Even if you disagree with my claim that America is the least racist country on the planet, if you formed the ratio of Race Paranoia = (Worrying About Racism) / (Actual Racism), I defy anybody  to claim that America doesn't lead the world on this metric by miles and miles.

The question is not whether racism (that is, racial animus) is a problem. Like the Copernican view of the solar system, it’s absurd to pretend this is still any kind of social controversy. It is a problem, where it occurs. Rather, the question is whether you choose to see expressions of racial animus in ever more innocuous speech and actions. The question is whether you continue to view the possibility that someone, somewhere, is harbouring racial animus as the single most important problem in the world, even as the actual level of racial animus in society drops precipitously.

And what has all this brought? Has being ever more exquisitely sensitive to people’s possibly hurt feelings about the matter of race actually, you know, produced more social harmony? If it has, I can’t see much evidence of it. All I can see is what John Derbyshire memorably described as ‘an evolution towards the ever thinner-skinned’.

Like all American cultural traits, good or bad, race paranoia is slowly taking over the world.  When I left Australia, it was mercifully a place where one was largely spared the constant, relentless hand-wringing, the non-stop ‘Serious You Guys This Is The Most Important Issue In The Whole World’ evangelism of race hucksters, do-gooders and fools.

I suspect, with considerable resignation, that when or if I return, Australia will have become America in my absence.

The more things change...

In Egypt, a Dutch female reporter who was reporting on demonstrations in Tahrir Square was savagely raped. Apparently she was an intern covering the protests for Egyptian TV.

Lest you think this is just targeting western female reporters, the protesters are sportingly equal-opportunity when it comes to their rape targets. They've raped up to 91 women in the past 4 days, with reports saying they attacked a grandmother and a seven-year-old child.

This kind of thing is obviously tragic and repulsive.

And yet, this has happened so many times now that it's approaching a farce.

Back in October, I reported that female reporters covering protests in Tahrir Square were getting raped. And this was already thoroughly predictable at that time. It had already previously happened here. And here. And here. And here. And here.

Are you starting to see a pattern?

What in the name of all that is holy are news organisations doing sending female reporters into Tahrir Square? I know that the modern zeitgeist is that apparent differences between the sexes are entirely due to discrimination and that women are entirely as capable of doing any job as men.

Purely for the sake of argument, let's assume that this statement is largely true.

Do you think that at some point the equality fetishists might consider that men and women reporters at least may not be equally attractive rape targets for vicious third world mobs?

Or even if this possibility didn't occur to you immediately, do you think that after, what, the hundred-and-something-th such occurrence, you might at least partly reconsider your hypothesis?

I can only think of two possible reasons why as a female reporter you'd still sign up to report on protests in Tahrir Square.

One is that you're tragically and hopelessly naive about the darker aspects of human nature.

The other is that you have been paying no attention whatsoever to what's been going on at these protests.

Both possibilities suggest that you're probably in the wrong line of work.

Revenue (if not NPV) Positive Graffiti

I loathe graffiti. Courts tend to view it as a petty crime, just kids letting off steam.

But I find it aesthetically angering in a way that might make me seem like some crazy zero tolerance fanatic.

Sure, the cost to remove it may not be that high. But the mindset of ruining something beautiful merely for your own enjoyment is barbarism on the most primitive level. It is deadweight loss for the sheer enjoyment of deadweight loss. And I hate, hate, hate deadweight loss. If there is one thing that unites economists, it is that.

To make things more galling, the people who deface property will mark it with their own tag, so that others can know who did it. They may be doing it pseudonymously, but they are proud of their destruction of other people's property. I simply cannot fathom that mindset.

Jason Lee Steorts said much the same thing:

Let me end on a personal note. I hate vandals. My friends ask what makes me a conservative, and sometimes I wonder myself, but there is an answer, and it’s that I hate vandals. The problem with vandals is not that they are wrong about a conceptual matter. The problem is that they smash beautiful things. They couldn’t care less about your rules or your God or your conception of the good. You have to stop them with tools that work.

Recently though, I found something that I didn't think possible - graffiti that didn't strike me as completely value destroying.

I'm not talking about political slogan protests, although that might qualify depending on your view of the NPV of various political causes.

The graffiti that I found interesting was a couple of cases where the spraypaint scrawl gave the URL of either a youtube channel, or a soundcloud link.

This is by far the most entrepreneurial use of graffiti that I've come across. At least the vandal is hoping to get something out of it - ad revenue, and perhaps new audience members. If their stuff is actually interesting, there may well be consumer surplus to the people watching the clips.

Looked at this way, it's far more akin to traditional advertising billboards, except a) they're not paying the property owner, and b) it's not as attractive.

Both of these are genuine problems, to be sure. Because the property rights aren't secure, you can't appeal to the Coase theorem. We can't determine whether the value to the property owner to not have the graffiti is higher than the value to the vandal of having it. Presumably, in fact, it's not, because otherwise the vandal would have negotiated with the city to put up their URL (yeah right). It's at least positive revenue, if not positive NPV. Most graffiti is just loss piled on loss.

Still, it inspired in me a curious grudging respect for the guerrilla marketing skills of whoever came up with it. If the counterfactual is more youtube graffiti, I would be unhappy about it. But if the counterfactual is that existing graffiti artists turn their hand to promoting social media channels instead of inane gang logos, moving from 4th best to 3rd best is still a change for the good.

Dredd

The new Judge Dredd movie is actually surprisingly good. It's at 76% on Rotten Tomatoes, which is unusually high for an action movie.

The line that stood out to me (and was repeated twice, once at the start and again at the end) was the following:

800 million people living in the ruin of the old world.

Only one thing fighting for order in the chaos - the men and women of the Hall of Justice.

This is a surprisingly reactionary concept of "the good". They are not fighting for justice. They are certainly not fighting for social justice. No, they are fighting for order, which is a good in itself.

This is not a common viewpoint. That's because we live in such a generally ordered world that we take it for granted. But you notice order when its not there - the London Riots, Hurricane Katrina, the LA riots etc.

Mencius Moldbug had an excellent article years ago talking about this point. The Dungeons and Dragons World classifies characters on a 3x3 scale of {Lawful, Neutral, Chaotic} x {Good, Neutral, Evil}. But Moldbug raises the question of whether there really is a Chaotic Good - whether the only real dimension is Lawful (and Good) vs Chaotic (and Evil). I'm not sure he's right, but it's an interesting perspective.

The world of Dredd is one in which Judges are fighting a rearguard action to preserve the minimum amount of social order. The movie also flirts with another reactionary theme about martial law that is surely true, but rarely acknowledged: that due process and compassion are luxury goods, relative to the basic good of maintaining a functioning civil society. Substantive fairness is a Louis Vuitton handbag. Procedural fairness is three square meals a day. Order is oxygen.

When the world gets sufficiently violent and crime-ridden, the first priority is to put a stop to the violence and crime. Indeed, when things get bad enough, ideas like martial law may actually become very popular. This seems like a strange possibility, because the average westerner today is perhaps more worried about police brutality and abuses of power. But if citizens start to feel that they have much more to fear from thugs than the police, you might be surprised what a change that produces. Sending in the marines to finally stop the LA riots was a highly popular decision.

Dredd is the ultimate personification of the idealised policeman in this framework - tough, and absolutely fearless in his fight on crime. There is one interesting scene early on where you see that he also does not mechanically apply the rules in every single case - there is a homeless guy at the start that Dredd warns to not be there when he gets back, after quoting what penalty he is guilty of. He has more important things to deal with than minor infractions that don't threaten social stability.

In the Dredd universe, the law's main function is as a tool for maintaining the peace. This is the context in which Dredd's catchline, 'I am the Law', need not be ironic. What stands between society and chaos is ultimately a small number of individuals.

Or, as Orwell said about Kipling:

He sees clearly that men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them

I imagine a lot of cops would agree.

You'd think they'd learn...

I keep telling 'em, but they just don't listen.

Not a Shylock Holmes reader, clearly.

Drugs Are Perfectly Safe, Unless TMZ Has Ever Written About You

The whole furore (mercifully dying down now) over Whitney Houston’s death gave me cause to reflect on the odd way that the average person of Intelligent Socially Acceptable Opinion tends to hold two fairly contradictory ideas about drugs in their head at the same time.

The first idea is that drugs are basically not harmful on their own – the main ill effects are actually just results of prohibition. Overdoses typically tend to be related to questions of uncertainty about the purity of the drug, which is a natural consequence of the market being unregulated and illegal, since drug dealers will cut the drugs with all sorts of nasty chemicals. If we made drugs legal, people could take them in a controlled environment with known purity, thus eliminating most of the bad side effects.

The second idea is that celebrities tend to die younger than the average person, often because of the effects of extended drug use – Whitney Houston, Amy Winehouse, Michael Jackson, Heath Ledger, etc. etc. Sometimes this was related to illegal drugs (Houston, Winehouse), sometimes prescription (Jackson, Ledger). But the effects of long term drug use made Amy Winehouse (and to a lesser extent, Whitney Houston) look like a walking corpse even before she died, just like Lindsey Lohan has started to age really badly.

It should be obvious to you by my juxtaposing the two that these arguments cannot both be right. Personally I think it is the first one that is faulty. I’m a supporter of quite a lot of drug legalization, and it’s true that there are a bunch of problems that come about mainly through prohibition (crime, wasted police and prison resources, instability in Latin America, erosion of civil liberties) and a bunch more that are exacerbated by prohibition (drug deaths). These provide a totally sufficient reason to legalise drugs.

But that’s a far cry from saying that drugs (with the arguable exception of pot) are free from significant long term health and mortality risks. People kill themselves deliberately and accidently from all sorts of drugs – alcohol, painkillers, diet drugs, heroin, meth, and all the rest. Not to mention combinations of all these, or combinations of these with cars/bathtubs/heavy machinery/the ocean/busy highways. I imagine that the problems of purity are significantly overstated – people know exactly what the purity of a vodka bottle is, but it doesn’t stop people drinking themselves to death one way or another. It’s entirely unclear how legalizing Cocaine would have had the slightest effect on the likelihood of Houston accidentally drowning in a drugged out haze.

Not everything that we make legal is necessarily desirable. The mistake of the liberal consensus opinion is that a lot of liberals have little intrinsic concept of the idea of letting people freely choose things that may be costly mistakes. Libertarians (and some Conservatives ) tend to be open about giving people the freedom to make bad decisions, partly as a matter of liberty, partly as a reflection on the futility of trying to do otherwise. But since the nanny-state types (mostly liberal) tend to be uncomfortable with the idea of letting people make bad choices, they need to convince themselves that the drugs themselves must be good or at least neutral, and all the problems due to government action.

They’re wrong. Unless you’re willing to make the strong form argument that Winehouse wanted to inject herself to death, having more people using meth or heroin is a clear cost to both society and themselves. And a support for legalization does not require a blindness to this fact.

Judgment Jerry, Judgment!

The worst mistakes are the ones you don't realise you're making. The most poignant mistakes are the ones that you don't realise you're making, but everyone else does realise, even though they're unable to help you.

It's time for some Tarantino-style non-sequential narratives about what happens when Silicon Valley co-founders get jilted. The Hacker News discussion is interesting, but I want to focus on another lesson that can't be repeated often enough.

Let's start with the cut-scene at the end, featuring YouSendIt co-founder Khalid Shaikh:

Shaikh agreed to pay $48,194 in restitution to YouSendIt. His sentencing hearing is scheduled for April 30, 2012. The sentencing guidelines recommend six to 12 months of imprisonment, but under the terms of the plea agreement, that may be reduced to house arrest.

Hmmm. How did this happen? Time to cut back to the narrator and where it began:

Ranjith Kumaran didn't found YouSendIt on his own, though. Another man, one whom YouSendIt doesn't like to talk about, wrote the original code, built the first servers by hand, and served as the first president. His name is Khalid Shaikh, and he's 34. He was a computer-engineering student at McGill University and a former intern at Microsoft, and he once worked at Hewlett-Packard and Intel. More recently, he has been living in a Motel 6 outside Denver, awaiting sentencing for launching a cyberattack three years ago that crippled YouSendIt's servers.

There's more details at inc.com, but the story is a common one in Silicon Valley - a bunch of guys start a company, big-time investors come on board, the investors plus one guy feel that the other guy isn't pulling his weight, other guy gets booted. Think the Facebook story, as told in The Social Network. Or Steve Jobs (although there it wasn't Wozniak that booted him).

Except this time the guy who got booted ended up bitter and launched a bunch of denial of service attacks on his former company, and (apparently) added to the poor decisions by messing with their wikipedia page. (Fire the passive-aggressive ion cannon!).

So, on a chilly Tuesday morning in December, Shaikh ran a piece of testing software, called ApacheBench, that flooded YouSendIt's servers with traffic. The servers keeled over immediately. Later that day, a sentence appeared on YouSendIt's Wikipedia page: "Looks like the company may be out of business, their site is down." (Shaikh says he didn't write it.)

Okay, so while I have sympathy with what it must be like to get booted from a company that you start, this guy has some pretty serious judgment issues. Apparently the FBI takes computer crime pretty seriously! Who knew?

So they started nosing around after Shaikh's former co-workers trying to find out what was going on. Shaikh got wind of this. Like a slow motion car crash that you can see coming, which of the following alternatives do you think Shaikh did?

a) Called around to find the best criminal defense lawyer he could

b) Cross his fingers and hope that the whole thing would blow over.

c) Decide to head down to talk to the FBI to straighten the whole thing out himself.

Yeah, no prizes for guessing the outcome:

That night, the couple returned to the FBI office. [Shaikh's wife] Saroash was told to wait in the lobby while her husband was interviewed in an adjoining room. Because it was late on a Friday, and almost everyone at the FBI office had gone home, no one noticed when she got up and listened at the door. Inside, the agents asked Shaikh about his background. He told them about going to McGill, moving to the Valley, founding YouSendIt.

They're just asking about my background! What harm could it do?

The agents began asking Shaikh about buying and selling websites with the teenager. They asked him about a site called e.tv. It had been stolen, they said. They asked Shaikh if he knew anything about the sale of that site. Shaikh wouldn't say. Then they showed him documentation that the money for the sale, about $18,000, had been transferred online using Shaikh's IP address.

Oh. Ooooohhhhh.

Hmm, that's quite a pickle, no?

"That puts me in a very negative light," Shaikh said, according to the FBI report.

1. You don't say!

2. You're going to enjoy hearing that quoted back at you at trial.

"Where do we go from here?" He asked the agents if they knew of any "FBI-friendly attorneys."

Now I'm just feeling sorry for the guy. He's so clueless that he's asking the guys whose job it is to put him in the hole with help on how to get himself out of the hole. Good luck with that.

The couple hired a criminal defense attorney and prepared for the worst.

Like buying a fire extinguisher after you just burned down your house by trying to deep fry a frozen turkey.

About a week after Shaikh's wife gave birth to a girl, their lawyer received discovery documents that included FBI reports. Shaikh had said enough during that meeting to give the FBI plenty of evidence to work with.

No kidding! *facepalm*.

Red hot tip - when the interview is over, you'll always have given the FBI plenty of evidence to work with. Trust me.

In this case, the FBI had already gotten a former friend to wear a wire and record a conversation, so he may have been boned anyway.

BUT WHY WOULD YOU GO TALK TO THE FBI BEFORE YOU'VE HIRED A LAWYER??? Especially when you know you're guilty!!

Remember, these investigators are seasoned professionals whose sole job it is to get you to incriminate yourself. They've done this thousands of times. You've done this... never. Who do you think is going to win?

Like a lamb to the slaughter. 

Suppose that you're too broke to hire a lawyer. What can you do then?

I recommend you follow this 24-carat gold advice from Penn Jillette on what you should do when the FBI wants to talk to you.



Speak to the cops in haste, repent at leisure.

(subject line reference)

On Police Brutality

A long-ish quote, but I thought this summary of the broad issues of police brutality from Taki's Magazine was interesting:

Dark decades of direct experience with human beings have given us reason to operate from an ecumenical distrust of human nature. ...

Since there’s literally no “government” beyond the humans authorized to run it, our distrust of human nature leads us to a special wariness of those who possess the legally sanctioned power to harm and extort others. Without ways to keep government power in check, the whole world would devolve into the Stanford Prison Experiment within a week. Then again, since the “governed” are also human beings, we also greet their every word and deed with suspicion—if not outright disdain.

So when someone complains about police brutality, our default presumption is that both sides are at least guilty of something and that we’d need clear evidence of innocence to exonerate anyone. Yes, sure, some police officers are sadistic rageballs who take out their castration fears on the skulls of hapless citizens they’d stopped for minor moving violations. But flipping the flapjack over, many citizens are irredeemably unhinged drunken lunatics who endanger everything in their path and aren’t above lying to score a huge civil-rights judgment that the taxpayers, not the “state,” are obliged to pay. Faced with such a dismal choice, why should we even pick sides?

Sadly, not everyone is so evenhanded. Opinions about police mostly fall into two rigid camps: “Shoot the scum pigs” or “Shoot the scum criminals.

It's a good point - it's rare to find any kind of nuance in reporting about allegations of police brutality.

Then again, I'm not sure that this leads to an equal presumption against both parties. The level of relative disdain will vary a lot with the facts of the case, something which the Taki editorial recognises. My general feeling is not that police are insufficiently punished for incorrect judgment calls, but more that they're insufficiently punished for egregious bad behaviour, when it's clear they're in the wrong. The city gets a civil lawsuit, the cop gets a slap on the wrist.

Sometimes you are faced with cases where things do seem strongly leaning one way rather than the other. Radley Balko describes how the NYPD recently shot dead an unarmed man who was in the process of trying to flush marijuana down the toilet.

The question is, of course, how reasonable were the police actions ex-ante, rather than ex-post? How often do suspected armed drug dealers have guns? How often do they shoot at police? How frequently do the cops get this wrong, and what are the consequences? You can't know the answers to all these things just by looking at the cases where they get it wrong.

Balko's remarks I think focus correctly on what's worst about this whole event, and they are searingly bitter:

But let’s not lose sight of what’s important, here. Thanks to the good work of these undercover narcotics cops, the pot Ramarley Graham allegedly flushed down the toilet just before he was killed is no longer on the streets of New York. No children will get high on that pot. And that’s really all that matters.

The whole damn raid shouldn't have happened in the first place. If the cops had been assigned to some task that was actually improving welfare ex-ante, we'd be much more willing to tolerate mistakes in judgment.

Brutal actions in furtherance of astonishingly bad policy - that's what really stings.

A Snapshot of Modern Britain

Article 1 - British Police spring into action to arrest woman for saying nasty racist things on a train:

A woman has been arrested after an online video apparently showed a woman abusing ethnic minority passengers on a packed south London tram.
...
British Transport Police said a woman, 34, had been arrested on suspicion of a racially-aggravated offence.
...
In the online clip, the woman confronts several passengers, saying: "You are not British". She then starts swearing. 

A British Transport Police spokesman said: "The video posted on YouTube and Twitter has been brought to our attention and our officers have launched an investigation. ....We will not tolerate racism in any form on the rail network and will do everything in our power to locate the person responsible."

Article 2 - Theodore Dalrymple recounting how the British legal system doesn't give a rat's @** about burglary:

While on the subject, let me just recount one story to illustrate how seriously the British state takes the defense of the property of its citizens. I was looking through the criminal record of one of my patients in the prison and discovered that he had not long before been convicted for the fifty-seventh time for burglary. Since most criminals will happily admit, in confidence, that they have actually committed between five and fifteen times as many crimes as they have ever been caught for, it was quite possible that this man had committed more than five hundred burglaries. And what was his terrible punishment for his fifty-seventh conviction for burglary? A fine of $85, presumably paid for from the proceeds of his activities.

Now that's a society with its priorities set straight! Get your feelings hurt by racist white trash assholes? Leave no stone unturned to arrest them! The same racist white trash assholes are breaking into your home right this second while you're on the phone? Sorry, we're very busy. Stop by the office later and we'll give you a useless police report so you can file an insurance claim.

It's also refreshing to see that the British Police have also taken a leaf out of Ken at Popehat's "Chicago Manual of Style For Censorious Dipshits":

The obligatory “we believe in freedom of expression” paragraph in the standard defend-our-censorship communique is simply embarrassing. That’s why the Chicago Manual of Style For Censorious Dipshits (“CMSCD”) recommends eschewing it and launching straight into the meat of your uninformed and conclusory stomping on First Amendment law.

Yes indeed, the British Police are admirably straightforward - they don't believe in freedom of expression, and don't care if you know it.

Great Moments in Computer Security and Public Relations

First State Superannuation is a company in Australia that provides superannuation funds (the equivalent of America's 401K-type plans for retirement accounts).

First State Super, it seems are complete imbeciles when it comes to their members' security. Let Techdirt tell the story:

[A]security professional found a big and ridiculously obvious bug in the website of an Australian investment fund, First State Superannuation. Apparently you could see other people's accounts by merely changing the account numbers in the URL. Increase the number by one, and see the next user in line. This is the kind of extraordinarily basic mistake that I thought had been eradicated a decade ago. Apparently not.

That's right, just change the account number in the URL and you get to see someone else's details. Okay, but presumably it's just some random person - who could be bothered?

Patrick Webster found he was able to access electronic superannuation notices of any customer by changing numerical values in URLs used to issue statements to clients.
Webster, a customer of First State Superannuation and consultant at OSI Security, increased the URL number value by one and was granted access to a former colleagues' super statement.

 Hmm, that's awkward. How much detail could he see?

He was shown information such as name, address, date of birth, next of kin and superannuation payments.

Oooh. That's worse.

Apparently their website was designed by someone drunk or still in high school. Or both.

This is strike one.

So Patrick Webster, model citizen, reported this gaping flaw to First State Superannuation. How did they respond? I like to imagine the following conversation took place

Underling: Some IT guy reported that it's simplicity itself to hack our website and our users' details are at risk. In fact, the method was so basic that it doesn't even really qualify as 'hacking' - he just typed in a different URL.

CEO: Holy Smoke! How do I choose between the following important priorities:

1. Fix the website to make sure this doesn't happen again
2. Work out how to explain this breach to our members and the press
3. Send a thank you card to the guy who reported the breach
4. Call the cops on the guy who reported the breach.

 Ha ha! #4 is surely a joke, right?

No. No it isn't.

I would love to know how that phone call went.

CEO: Hello, is this the Police? I need to report a potential crime: our website is completely insecure, and I need the guy who told us this to be arrested immediately!

Operator: No really, who is this?

Kidding! The cops of course turned up at the guy's house.

That's strike two.

Okay, so maybe this was just a rush of blood to the head when they didn't know what was happening. Surely after a few days, they came to their senses?

Bwa ha ha! Of course not. They threatened to sue the guy.

Whilst you have indicated that your actions were motivated by an attempt to show that it is possible for a wrongdoer to obtain unauthorised access to Pillar's systems, you actions may themselves be considered a breach of section 308H of the Crimes Act 1900 (NSW) and section 478.1 of the Criminal Code Act 1995 (Cth). You should be aware that due to the serious nature of your actions, this matter has been reported to the NSW Police.

Further, as a member of the Fund, your online access is subject to the terms and conditions of use which are outlined on the Fund's website. Your unauthorised access also constitutes a breach of those terms and has caused the Trustee to expend member funds in dealing with this matter. Please note the Trustee has the right to seek recovery from you for the costs incurred in accordance with those terms. 

This was their considered response. That's strike three.

Minter Ellison, the lawyers who wrote this embarrassing letter, have covered themselves in shame.

So here is my question:

Why on earth would any right-thinking person leave a red cent of their retirement savings with these ungrateful buffoons? Why would you leave your hard-earned cash in the hands of people that cannot design an even minimally secure website, and think that the appropriate response to people trying to help them fix this is to call the cops and threaten lawsuits?

Personally, I would sooner set my money on fire than give it First State Superannuation.

I would, however, gladly hire OSI Security and Patrick Webster to help diagnose security flaws in my website.

Eating Humble Pie

This was the prediction, regarding the leaked nude photos of Scarlett Johansson:

I'm going to go out on a limb here, and make a wild prediction - no 'hacker' will be found.

The prediction, it turns out, was completely wrong.

The benefit of running regressions is similar to the benefit of publicly committing your predictions to writing - you get to find out just how often your intuitions about the world are incorrect.

Those Hackers!

(image credit)

So it turns out that Scarlett Johansson is the latest celebrity to have nude photos of her leaked onto the internet. (A little googling will easily turn them up, should you be interested, although I've got no idea why you would be).  Apparently the FBI is investigating whether this may have been the work of a hacker.

I'm going to go out on a limb here, and make a wild prediction - no 'hacker' will be found. Not because the FBI will be unable to track them down (although, should they exist, that may well be true as well), but because I'm skeptical that any such hacker exists.

The problem is that this whole thing fails Hanlon's razor : Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

What would need to happen for this to be the work of hackers?

Well, first they'd need to know Scarlett Johansson's phone number or IP address.

You may have noticed that these things aren't exactly floating around the internet.

Then you'd need some sort of way to hack into the device. This is possible, but requires a fairly large skillset in computers. A skillset that might be able to pull you down a six figure salary doing a real job, rather than spending months trying to hack celebrities' phones and computers.

Now, people like this do actually exist. But this kind of job requires a lot of work, and runs the risk of serious jail time. That's a lot of effort just to look at some breasts. And sure enough, in the previous cases where people have been caught doing this kind of thing, there have been very big conventional incentives to justify their behavior.

In the News of the World phone hacking scandal, the incentive was that the newspaper was able to get big scoops about celebrities and politicians, and thereby sell a ton more papers and make lots of money. So they paid big bucks for phone hacking.

Anthony Pellicano was paid a lot by Hollywood celebrities to eavesdrop on other Hollywood celebrities.

But what happened here? The photos were leaked on the internet, so nobody made any money out of them. So far, nobody has claimed credit either, so there's no public props for being the hacker in question.

The incentives just don't make sense. It all sounds a little far-fetched.

Now, to motivate an alternative hypothesis, let me begin with a question.

Who do you think is going to be more enamored of naked photos of Scarlett Johansson to the point of keeping them on their phone?

a) Scarlett Johansson herself, or

b) Some dude that Scarlett Johansson sent the photos to.

Call me crazy, but I'm going with option b).

So consider the following alternative scenario.

Scarlett Johansson sent the pictures to former husband Ryan Reynolds, or some boyfriend before/since.

Said male keeps pictures on phone, because it's cool to have naked photos of Scarlett Johansson. Phone is left accidentally in a bar one night / left unattended and gone through by a friend / insert mishap here, and the interloper sends the photo to themselves. They then show it to their friends, and someone posts it on the internet, and it goes public.

Or how about 'Scarlett Johansson accidentally sends the photos to the wrong number in her phone book, and to hide her shame, invents a story about her phone being hacked and wastes the FBI's time as a face-saving measure'.

It happened to both Anthony Weiner and Hayley Williams, who were using twitter to try to send naked photos to someone privately, and managed to send them out as public tweets instead. Both claimed they'd been hacked, even though amazingly there was no evidence of any hacking that investigators could uncover.

Now, dear reader, ask yourself this - does it really seem likely that the leaking of these photos involved any 'hacking' more complicated than just sending a normal text message?

Let's just put it this way - I'm not holding my breath waiting for any arrests.

From the Department of Inconvenient Correlations

The Uber Blog has this hilarious post on prostitution arrest data:

Apparently prostitution arrests in San Francisco go up on Wednesdays. Weird, huh?



Apparently, they go up significantly more on the second Wednesday of the month than the first. Even weirder, huh?



What happens on the second, third and fourth Wednesday of each month?

Social Security benefits are paid each month. ...Generally, your benefit will arrive on the second, third or fourth Wednesday of the month, depending on the birthday of the worker on whose records you receive benefits.
Birth date on 1st - 10th, Benefits paid on Second Wednesday
Birth date on 11th - 20th, Benefits paid on Third Wednesday
Birth date on 21st - 31st, Benefits paid on Fourth Wednesday

Oh.. Ooohhhh.

Hmm.

The guys at Uber Blog try to put the best gloss on this that they can.

Keep in mind we’re only talking about 4-5 prostitution crimes each Wednesday. This is pretty low considering the cities we’re talking about have populations in the hundreds of thousands to millions. So before you go running off screaming about how the welfare state is subsidizing sexy times for retirees, chill out and keep that in mind.

Firstly, 4-5 arrests != 4-5 crimes. Not by a long shot.

Secondly, erectile disfunction being what it is, my mind wasn't turning to retirees, but people (some fraudulently) claiming social security disability benefits, which get paid on the same time line.

But it's the obligation of all right-thinking people to test their hunches against data. Thankfully (for this specific task, if not in general), the Megan's Law database lets you easily look up all the sex offenders in San Francscio.

As it turns out, there are a lot more retiree-age sex offenders than I would have guessed. Since few of them seem to have the year of conviction listed, it's hard to tell whether they actually committed their crimes when retiree age (as the authors seem to claim), or it happened years ago. I would guess the latter, but it's hard to know. Maybe it is retirees going to the hookers.

Also, very few of them seemed to be for prostitution offenses specifically. It's amazing how many of them are listed for 'Lewd or Lascivious Acts with a Child Under 14 Years of Age'. Yeesh.

Either way, we'll file this under the category of 'awkward data points for fans of the welfare state'. Which, given the proclivities of the mainstream media, means it gets flushed down the memory hole.