Category Archives: Technology

Britain, Government, Internet, National Security, Politics, Society, Technology

Put social media bosses in the dock

INTERNET AND SOCIAL MEDIA

Intro: Lies and disinformation on social media is fuelling violence and the breakdown of society

The violent thugs and bigots rampaging through the streets of UK towns and cities in the dreadful days since the Southport killing of three young children deserve severe punishment for their appalling crimes.

The giant businesses that enable the lies and exaggerations that fuel the riots should also be in the dock – as should the people who own them.

For the online anonymity they facilitate allows anyone in the world the chance to say anything they want, however incendiary, and to escape responsibility.

Built into the internet from its inception decades ago, anonymity is hugely profitable for tech billionaires, but the horrendous price for this free-for-all is paid by the rest of us: mostly law-abiding, peaceful people who respect the truth. Internet anonymity is the default setting when you set up an email address or a social media account. You can pretend to be anyone, anywhere.

The anarchy and chaos unleashed after Southport highlights the danger. An anonymous account on X (formerly Twitter) called Europe Invasion first spread the incendiary lie that the suspect in the stabbing case was a Muslim immigrant. That post – completely invented – was viewed a staggering six million times.

We have no idea who is behind Europe Invasion, with its relentless and misleading crimes, and doom-laden commentary about ethnic strife. It gives no contact details or any other explicit clues about its funding, staff, location, or aims.

For those who have spent decades dealing with Russian disinformation, it may well smell and look like a Kremlin propaganda outlet in an attempt to sow dissension and mistrust in Western societies – a Russian tactic for many years.

Moscow has unwitting accomplices. Look at the man in charge of X, Elon Musk. A self-declared “free speech absolutist”, Musk closed the departments responsible for dealing with disinformation when he first acquired Twitter. And he has made it far harder to report abuse. The result has been to intensify the toxic mischief coursing through the veins of our democracy.

When Musk took-over the ailing Twitter platform two years ago, accounts with verifiable owners still benefited from a “blue tick” – an award which prevented pranksters and fraudsters impersonating public figures, mainstream media outlets, and businesses. Not any more.

One of Musk’s first moves was to offer blue ticks to anyone willing to pay for them.

That’s why, at a cursory glance, Europe Invasion looks like a regular media outlet – with the “blue tick” stamp of authenticity for which someone, somewhere, has presumably paid. Musk has also lifted the ban Twitter had imposed on such divisive figures as the far-Right firebrand Tommy Robinson who has been blamed for helping fuel violent disorder with his social media posts.

Musk contributes directly to the toxic atmosphere he has helped create. Adding insult to injury he is now embroiled in a war of words with Sir Keir Starmer saying that “civil war is inevitable” in Britain.

The sensible citizens of our land will conclude Musk is not just the wealthiest man in the world, but also the silliest. He knows nothing about this country – and is not ashamed to show it. But among his 200 million followers there will be many who believe him, with untold consequences for this country’s image abroad, and stability at home.

There is even a greater danger to our national security. The internet is the central nervous system of our civilisation, used in everything from finance to health care and transport.

It is horribly susceptible and vulnerable to carelessness (as we saw recently in the massive global disruption from a faulty software update). Yet it is being attacked by malevolent state actors such as Russia and China.

The reason for our plight is simple: greed. Checking identities costs money. So too does nailing lies, running a proper complaints system, and installing proper security.

For the tech giants, it is far simpler to let chaos rip, and watch the profits roll in.

Yet the answer lies in our own hands – and those of our elected politicians in parliament.

As a first step, our regulators and lawmakers should demand that tech bosses immediately remove material that constitutes incitement to riot. Unless they do that, they are aiding and abetting serious crimes.

The tech giants’ titanic lobbying efforts have cowed politicians for years. Curb the internet and you hamper innovation, the argument goes.

But the price now is too high. An American court has just handed down a landmark ruling that the online search giant Google is a monopoly that systematically crushes its rivals.

We need the same spirit here in the UK, with the media regulator OFCOM and the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) working together to curb the power of these monstrous companies.

They behave like medieval monarchs, treating us as their digital serfs. It is high time to remove their neo-feudal protections and privileges and make them legally liable for the extraordinary harm they do.

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Cyber security, Economic, Government, Internet, Society, Technology

CrowdStrike: The risk is ours

INTERNET SECURITY

THE bleak lesson from the devastating global computer breakdown on Friday 19 July – which grounded flights, crashed payment systems, crippled NHS surgeries and hospitals, disconnected phone lines, and knocked media outlets off air – could have been even worse. With no end in sight, this malfunctioning has been dubbed the “digital pandemic” and has already incurred colossal costs in time and money.

To those unversed in the intricacies of computer technology, the speed and extent of the disaster are almost incomprehensible. Surely, many will say, computer systems should be designed to avoid crashes on this scale at all costs. We would not accept planes, trains, or automobiles that dysfunction so badly.

But the truth is when it comes to computers, we accept inherent levels of risk that would be utterly intolerable elsewhere. The technology companies’ profits soar and, when things go wrong, we – the digital serfs of this brave new world – must humbly accept the cost and inconvenience that our masters inflict on us.

To appreciate the scale and complexity of the problem, consider this thought experiment.

Imagine if we allowed almost every traffic light in the world to be made by the same manufacturer. Worse, imagine that all of them were made with a remote-controlled switch that turned them to red. And – catastrophically – that a simple error at the manufacturer or one of its suppliers could trigger this switch all over the world.

Traffic would be instantly gridlocked on every continent. To repair these traffic lights, technicians would in many cases have to dismantle them and fiddle around in the works.

That, in crude terms, is the story of CrowdStrike in this computer breakdown and collapse. Most computers in the world use Microsoft – which makes the ubiquitous Windows operating platform, as well as Word, Excel, and the Teams video-calling system. Many Microsoft customers also rely on other software – in this case the Falcon Sensor program provided by the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.

Security software protects computers from attack, typically by screening incoming data to ensure that it does not include “malware” – malevolent programs that steal data, freeze computers, or scramble their contents.

To work properly, these programs must operate unhindered on our computers, phones, and tablets. And to protect against new threats, they must update regularly – and automatically. In this current incident, one of the automatic software updates from CrowdStrike contained a simple, devastating error. Automatically installing on computers that run Windows, it crashed affected devices, triggering a page containing Windows’s error message – the so-called “blue screen of death”.

The result: the world suddenly had to switch to cash payments and handwritten boarding passes, while shops were forced to shut, medical appointments cancelled, and aircraft at airports grounded.

It is little comfort that George Kurtz, the co-founder and chief executive of CrowdStrike, says he is “deeply sorry”. Fixing the problem will not just take hours, but days or even weeks. At best, computers will need to be switched on and off again, allowing a new update to install. At worst, affected machines will need hours of specialist attention.

Nor will it be any comfort to furious customers around the world that CrowdStrike’s share price has crashed, knocking £10billion off its £65billion capitalised market value.

It could have been far worse.

This does not appear to have been a cyber-attack by a foreign power. Microsoft systems in countries all over the world, including Russia and China, were affected.

Nor was it the work of cyber-criminals. The faulty update did not scramble our databases, leaving us open to ransom demands from crime gangs in return for a key to recover our information.

Nor – unlike many recent cyber-attacks – did it whisk our most precious private information away to the Chinese Communist Party’s spy services in Beijing.

A far worse – and narrowly avoided – cyber-attack earlier this year could have given our enemies the master key to hundreds of millions of computers around the world, enabling them to wreak deadly havoc. Known in tech circles as the “xy” attack, it involved a little-known but ubiquitous program that compresses data to improve efficiency.

This attack, probably the work of Russian spies, was uncovered and stopped by chance at the last minute. And because in the end the damage was minimal, it attracted almost no public attention.

That was a near-miss. Far worse was the SolarWinds attack, exposed in 2021. Hackers – almost certainly Russian – bugged an update issued by Microsoft for a widely used program. The targets were Western (chiefly American) defence and other government networks. The cyber raid also exposed data from the U.S. Treasury, Justice, and Commerce departments, and thousands of Wall Street’s top companies.

The internet has become the central nervous system of our civilisation. Yet it was never designed or intended for this. It was built to promote academic cooperation and technological innovation, not global security. It is wide open to abuse by pranksters, fraudsters, and rogue states.

A handful of operating systems and software that updates remotely and automatically create a sitting target.

We would hardly accept such a concentration of risk in other walks of life, especially if we had no control over the decision-makers in such systems, and almost no redress if they made mistakes. With most other products and services, you can sue the provider if there’s a malfunction – and gain additional compensation for any damage caused. Not computers.

Unlike other parts of our technological universe, computers, phones, and software are not sold with proper guarantees. The manufacturers can shrug at their products’ shortcomings.

Buried in the terms and conditions are clauses that exempt the manufacturer from almost all liabilities.

One might well ask how on earth we got to such a parlous state of affairs.

One reason is greed: tech giants like their profits. They lobby hard for their privileged status, just as they do for the right to sell our attention to online advertisers – and to resist demands for proper age verification on social media platforms like TikTok.

But a deeper reason is that we have been naïve and complacent in our headlong embrace of new but untrusted technology. We have prized innovation and convenience ahead of security.

These risks, we were told, were the price of admission to the brave new world of computer wizardry. Maybe. But we are paying heavily for it.

In the case of this cyber meltdown, the culprit was carelessness. But suppose the perpetrator had been some rogue regime, perhaps distracting us at a moment of geopolitical tension?

Imagine that this outage had stopped the trains running, frozen all cash machines and, for that matter, turned all our traffic lights to red – or worse, green.

We would have nobody to blame but ourselves.

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Arts, Culture, History, Society, Technology

Deepfake technology and the rewriting of history

SOCIETY

THE PRACTICE of doctoring photographs can be a very wicked thing, as we shall see. But it can also be trivial. Many of us must wish that various pictures of us did not exist. That awful school photo from primary school, or other disastrous snaps from our early childhood.

Is it wicked for us to do what we can to keep other people from seeing them? The fashion desert of the 1970s, for instance, where countless couples were married, do not display their wedding photographs. And who can blame them?

And to the Royal Family. Many of us still have no idea what the Princess of Wales was up to in her recent family snapshot, and outrage should be far from our minds.

The public demands a lot of photographs of the Royal Family, and why not? Half its power comes from the fact that it is a family, rather than a gang, cabinet, or a board of directors.

But families, even Royal ones, are not always as cheerful, contented, or well behaved, as we wish they were. It would have been a cleverer thing not to have done whatever it was that they did.

Far worse, and much fishier, was the curious case of the Bullingdon Club images of David Cameron, Al “Boris” Johnson, and George Osborne, from their Oxford days.

David Cameron obviously detested these records of debauchery, not wanting the public to be reminded of his time in this alcohol-fuelled society of well-heeled brutes. Was it a mere coincidence that they were mysteriously withdrawn by the company which owned them in 2008, so newspapers had to stop using them?

As it happens, Coincidence Theory (the idea that things happen by accident far more often than by design) is often believable. But not in this instance.

Odd was the obviously doctored 1992 Bullingdon pictures, featuring, among others, George Osborne and his (now former) friend Nat Rothschild. At first glance, it appears normal, but look carefully, and you will see it is full of suspicious peculiarities.

To the left of the middle, there’s a mysterious gap where somebody ought to be standing but isn’t. Weirder still, there’s a patch of shirt-front and waistcoat there, with no person attached. The right trouser leg of Mr Rothschild has a white lapel on it, not usual even under the bizarre dress code of the Bullingdon.

On close examination, the three seated figures at the front appear to have been stuck in place after being moved from somewhere else.

But again, these are tiny things compared with the monstrous crimes which the truly powerful commit with photographs, when they can. In pre-internet days, they simply hacked up the old pictures and replaced them with new items. Only the tiny few with access to original archives could ever be sure that what they were seeing was true.

TWO

THOUSANDS of images of the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, sometimes standing near the Soviet demi-god, Vladimir Lenin, were wiped from Soviet history books, magazines, newspapers, and encyclopaedias, after Trotsky fell from favour.

In 1997, David King chronicled the photographic murder of the past, in his book “The Commissar Vanishes”. And it was murder. Those whose pictures were removed usually became dead soon afterwards.

The most poignant story of this kind is told by Milan Kundera in his Book of Laughter and Forgetting. It concerns the Czech Communist Vladimir Clementis. Clementis was standing beside the Czech Communist leader, Klement Gottwald, at a huge public meeting in Prague to mark their takeover of the country. It was snowing heavily, so Clementis lent his fur hat to the bare-headed Gottwald. Pictures recorded the comradely scene.

But four years later Clementis was purged for having the wrong view of Marx. He was hanged, cremated, and abused still further after death on the streets of Prague in a most barbaric way. And he was wiped from the images of 1948, leaving only his hat behind.

THREE

WHO knows what a future totalitarian regime might do, with the limitless powers provided by modern technology? This cannot only erase the past but can, through deepfake methods, create a wholly different past so convincing that only those who were actually there would be sure it was not a lie.

If human gullibility is anything to go by, even eyewitnesses of the truth might eventually fall in with the new altered version.

This was prefigured, as are so many evils of today, in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. The central character, Winston Smith, has the highly responsible job of cleaning up the paper archives of The Times, to make sure they do not clash with official lies. His discovery of a photograph, of three leaders of the ruling party – Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford – fills him with terror. Its obvious location and stated date show that official history is false.

He sends it swirling into the “memory hole” which leads to the great furnace where all inconvenient facts are burned to ashes.

But he is still not safe. What if someone else saw him as he looked at it? What if the surveillance cameras picked it up (as we learn later, they did)?

The mere fact that he has seen this picture puts him in danger. He knows what nobody should know. He can never forget it. He cannot unsee it. His actual existence is a peril to his totalitarian chiefs.

Orwell writes: “It was curious that the fact of having held it in his fingers seemed to him to make a difference even now, when the photograph itself, as well as the event it recorded, was only memory. Was the Party’s hold upon the past less strong, he wondered, because a piece of evidence which existed no longer had once existed?”

As it turns out, in the torture cellars of the Ministry of Love, Winston, amongst other humiliations of the mind, is compelled to affirm that the photograph never existed.

In the end, with tears in his eyes, he joins the great deceived multitudes who believe what the authorities tell them and who have no idea what the past was really like, even if – especially if – they lived through it.

It is that sort of thing, not a mildly doctored family snapshot trying to provide some cheer and happiness, that we need to be worrying about. Useful as it is to know that the technology exists to turn anyone with the right equipment into a potential liar and fraud, and to make us all open to monstrous deceit, of a kind that even Stalin never dreamed of.

The truth needs to be told.

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