The Bluestocking, vol 185
Donald, where's your trousers?
Happy Friday!
This week I’ve spent a little time in 1975, and I’m still recovering from the fact that a few days before the vote on whether Britain should stay in the EC, the televised debate was held at … the Oxford Union. (Here’s some of the debate on YouTube. Come for Barbara Castle talking about Filipino tinned pineapple while dressed as Edwardian hotelkeeper, stay for random cameos from Ted Heath and Jeremy Thorpe, whose hair gel makes me feel faintly queasy.)
And here is a Barbara Castle clip which would have made me spit tea on my screen if I’d been drinking:
One last one: Barbara Castle meets Tony Blair for the first time and tells him about her “foxy cunning”.
See you next time!
Helen
The Incredible Rise of North Korea’s Hacking Army (New Yorker)
By the time of North Korea’s third major attack, nobody found the regime’s cyber threat funny anymore. A 2017 ransomware scheme known as Wannacry 2.0 crippled networks in America, Europe, and Asia—including the computer systems of Boeing, Britain’s National Health Service, and Germany’s federal railway. The hackers encrypted computer after computer, then demanded payment, in bitcoin, to unfreeze the systems. North Koreans tailored some ransomware code and then propagated it from one device to the next by appropriating a dangerous piece of American code, known as EternalBlue, that a criminal group calling itself the Shadow Brokers had stolen from the N.S.A. and then posted online.
A twenty-two-year-old hacker and malware expert from England named Marcus Hutchins, who worked out of a bedroom in his parents’ house, analyzed the Wannacry code and figured out how to direct much of the traffic that it was generating into a “sinkhole”—a Web address where the malware would do no harm. After Hutchins realized that he had upended the hack, Wired reported, he went upstairs to tell his family. His mother, a nurse, was chopping onions. “Well done, sweetheart,” she said, before returning to her cooking.
North Korea keeps all but a fraction of 1 percent of its citizens offline. But among that fraction of a percent are some of the world’s best hackers. And their main task is to steal shitloads of money.
The Binface Manifesto
Finally, a candidate I can feel 100% percent happy voting for in the London mayoral elections.
Why Do We Let Corporations Profit From Rape Videos? (New York Times)
Heather Legarde, a young woman in Alberta, felt the world crashing down on her last August. She had discovered that her ex-husband had posted intimate videos of her online, she told me, and people around the world were gazing at her naked body.
“I’m all over the internet,” she told me sadly. “Not what I wanted to be famous for.”
Worst of all, in one video her former husband sexually assaulted her as she lay unconscious in their bed. Legarde has no recollection of the assault and no idea how the video was made. One clue: It was tagged “sleeping pills.”
Some 200,000 people had watched her being assaulted while she was drugged and unconscious. So on that day in August, mortified and dizzied by her discovery of the betrayal, Legarde prepared to tie a noose.
Another Nick Kristof dive into the world of aggregator sites. Includes the useful phrase: “We can be sex positive and exploitation negative.”
Substack Revealed the Real Value of Writers’ Unfiltered Thoughts (Politico)
Besides displacing editors, the rise of such non-conformist Substack writers as [Andrew] Sullivan, [Bari] Weiss, [Glenn] Greenwald, John McWhorter, Jesse Singal and Yascha Mounk indicates that the editors working in conventional media may have drastically underserved unwoke readers. While Substack is much more than a hangout for political apostates, running writers who cover the espionage beat, Indiana politics, progressive politics, financial tech, humor, history and more, the popularity of the heterodox writers implies a hunger for the kinds of journalism most editors would rather not print.
Obviously I have a personal interest in this subject (several, I guess) but this piece did remind me of the recent conversation between Samira Ahmed and Ian Hislop about putting Nigel Farage on Question Time, and whether that contributed to the rise of Ukip. Hizza replies: “There is a problem — and this is the same problem as giving people the vote I’m afraid — that if you allow people airtime, which they probably are allowed, people might like them.”
It took me some time to accept that this was real
Quick Links
“I’ve had the same supper for 10 years, even on Christmas Day: two pieces of fish, one big onion, an egg, baked beans and a few biscuits at the end.” (Guardian)
“At the moment there is a lot of emphasis placed on ‘Red Wall’ constituencies – left-wing but more socially conservative seats long held by Labour but won by the Tories in 2017 and 2019. There’s no doubt these matter. But there’s also another set of seats likely to be important next time which get less attention than they deserve. There are what I’ll tongue-in-cheek call ‘Blue Wall’ seats: rapidly liberalising suburbs which the Tories have long held, but which are fast trending away from them.” (Strong Message Here, Substack)
“The absence of future Okwongas from Eton’s list of alumni is a bigger loss for the school than either it or, at times, Okwonga himself appears to realise. One of Them is such a good advert for the place that, at one point, I paused to look up the fees, momentarily forgetting that I don’t have a spare £14,000 to burn every term or, for that matter, a child.” Stephen Bush reviews Musa Okwonga’s memoir of his time at Eton. (New Statesman)
“Lazy people work the hardest, I’ve always said, to make time to make themselves happy just lying on the sofa, eating chocolate, and reading novels.” (Nigella Lawson interviewed in the New Yorker)
“Sometimes I think about the guy I lost my virginity to, and I think about telling him how much money I have. I think it would feel wonderful.” Confessions of a newly minted tech millionaire. (NY Mag)
“[Shirley Williams] understood from her earliest years that she came third in her mother’s [Vera Brittain’s] list of priorities, after writing and Shirley’s brother, John, who was two years older and bore a striking resemblance as a child to Vera’s brother, Edward, who had been killed in the trenches.” (Guardian)
I watch wayyyyy too much TikTok and this is the best of the meme songs. If I ever die in a tragic but also hilarious accident, play this over the footage. (The second best meme song is Iko Iko.)
“The politics of cultural despair is not based on ideological precepts but is primarily a matter of disposition—a mood, an aesthetic sensibility—a reaction to the state of the world. It provides a dramatic backdrop to inaction or to a kind of pseudo-action, a politics histrionic display or violent lashing out. It allows heroic airs and irresponsibility to co-exist: the world cannot really be changed and so that justifies any action.” (John Ganz, Substack)
