Weekly Picks – July 28, 2024

Credit (left to right): Noma Bar; Abdullah Farouk/ Unsplash; David Bacon; Gent Shkullaku/ AFP/ Getty Images; Harol Bustos

This week’s collection:

Introductory excerpts quoted below. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.

1. Secrets of a ransomware negotiator

“Last autumn, somewhere in Europe, a security operations centre noticed something. This is the primary job of a security operations centre – to notice things. Its role is simple, protecting organisations by tracking the people using their computer networks. Its name is often abbreviated to a simple acronym, SOC (pronounced “sock”.) The people who work at a SOC are the cyber-security equivalent of night guards at the mall, sitting at a bank of television screens: watching, waiting, trying not to doze off.

In this case, what they noticed was someone trying to log in to a staff member’s account at one of the companies the SOC monitors, using a series of incorrect passwords. About a thousand times in one day. This seemed suspicious. Someone at the SOC sent someone at the company an email, letting them know about the failed logins.

The cyber-security industry exists to keep information secret and reputations intact. I am able to tell you this story only if I keep the company in question anonymous, though you might have heard of it. Picture a company that provides boring administrative services to thousands of organisations across the planet. The kind of company that your own employer subcontracts. A company everyone relies on but no one really bothers to think about.

Both the SOC and the company were certified as meeting “the world’s best-known standard for information security”. But when the SOC alerted the company’s staff to the failed logins, they did nothing. The SOC didn’t press the issue. No one noticed that the user was eventually able to log in. Or that the account belonged to an employee who no longer worked there. No one noticed that it was an administrator-level account, which provided access to the company’s entire network. No one noticed anything amiss – for about a month.

Then, one day, the company’s servers began malfunctioning. A series of alarming emails arrived. “We managed to obtain a lot of secret documents, internal documents classified as strictly confidential, personal data of current employees!” read one. There was a link to a private chat room, and a deadline for using it. The hackers wanted to talk.

. . .

Most people would call Shah a “ransomware negotiator”. It’s a job that has emerged in the past five years as the problem of online gangs holding data hostage has exploded. Specialists who know how to deal with these gangs are now in great demand. Shah prefers to describe his work as “threat actor engagement” — “threat actor” being the term cyber-intelligence people use for “mysterious bad guys on the internet”; and “engagement” because there’s less of an implication that his clients will need to send money to the crooks. Sure, Shah can haggle over the exact figure of a ransom if necessary. More often, he is able to use the information he and his colleagues extract to resolve the situation in a more agreeable way – only about a third of his firm’s cases end in payment. “It’s amazing what talking does,” he said. “You build a relationship.”

At 55, Shah may be one of the world’s most calculating conversationalists, though he hides it well. He has a pleasant, forgettable demeanour: soft face, average height, average build. You would think he was a hotel concierge, not the man who wrote the “Manual of Guidance for Countering Kidnapping and Extortion” for the United Nations Office of Counter-Terrorism.”

2. Who’s Afraid of the Student Intifada?

“”To be honest, I’ve felt very depressed over the past six months, because of the genocide, and the situation on campus. I felt unsafe as a Palestinian student,” Maryam Alwan, a Columbia University undergraduate, told me in late April as we sat in a tent on the campus’s Gaza solidarity encampment. Three days later, armed riot police would descend onto her campus with tasers, batons, flash-bang grenades, and live ammunition. Sitting in the tent, I could hear music by Palestinian pop singer Mohammed Assaf playing over the speakers and a drum circle in the distance. Alwan said, “But I feel safe again and happy again for the first time in this encampment,” and expressed hope that the administration wouldn’t shut the whole thing down.

Students at more than 125 universities and colleges where encampments were erected this past year have faced vilification, academic discipline, and police repression not seen on U.S. campuses in decades. With the war crimes in Gaza showing no signs of waning and students committed to escalating the movement through the fall, the repression will continue to tighten. I spoke to 50 students and faculty at a dozen universities over seven months, traveling to five encampments in the spring. I saw that the movement for Palestine will have to grapple with the collusion among the academic and political elite and law enforcement, and better understand the shared material and ideological stakes of a military-industrial-academic complex.

The encampments were so peaceful that even while calling students Hamas-loving terrorists, the media complained that they were too camp-like to be taken seriously. In fact, a study by Armed Conflict Location and Event Data of 553 campus demonstrations for Palestine held this spring found that fewer than 20 resulted in violence (defined as more than pushing or shoving) or property destruction (such as breaking a window), and almost half of those instances were the result of police intervention or counter protests.

Yet students at more than 70 universities were met with arrests and force: hundreds of riot cops, K-9s and mounted police, chemical weapons and batons. Administrators have subjected the young people ostensibly under their care to suspensions, arrests, injuries, and more.”

3. Adventures Close to Home

“Travel is one of those things one generally doesn’t attack in polite company, the world of letters excepted. Its wholesomeness is assumed. It broadens the mind. It makes us empathetic and, by rewarding our curiosity, encourages it to develop further. It teaches people the just-right amount of relativism —the amount that makes them easygoing in company, perhaps usefully pliable in exigencies, but not nihilistic. Only a fool or a misanthrope would criticize travel. Emerson famously did, in his essay “Self-Reliance,” but Emerson is Emerson, and any case he makes for or against anything is arguably negated by at least one of his other essays. That other essay in this case, as in every case, is “Circles,” in which he posits that any truth, as well as its opposite, are both contained on the single line that describes a circle.

Given travel’s salutary reputation, it is no wonder that I am biased against the whole topic. A writer is someone who resents being told that something is good for him, and that this is therefore why he must do it. It’s no wonder, either, if such people repeatedly fling themselves against this broad, smiling enemy, hoping to smite it.

. . .

For example: It is definitely true, as many writers have argued, that the way many people travel is ecologically destructive. But these same travelers could go to different places, and use different, less carbon-intensive forms of transit to get to those places. They could take the no-fly pledge. They could, if they wanted, simply walk for weeks along a picturesque road. They could even write a good book about it, as W.G. Sebald did after his walking tour of Suffolk—The Rings of Saturn (1995). That’s still traveling, and only a curmudgeon would complain about it. Certainly, no writer should.

Or, again: Many tourists are disrespectful of or even racist in their attitudes toward their hosts, and thus, tourism as such is questionable. But these same tourists could, if they chose, be humble, curious, and empathetic instead. They could tip better. They could stay away from places where a solid majority of the community has made clear that outsiders aren’t wanted (though such clear-cut cases are rarer than you’d think). They could avoid asking rude questions, keep the staring to a minimum, describe the people they meet in terms that respect their individuality instead of agglutinating them. All of this is perfectly doable, which is different from being easy.

Some tourists, notoriously, go to countries with lax legal systems or differing mores so that they can enjoy antisocial pleasures at other, poorer people’s expense. This is bad, but in the same way that all exploitation of the disadvantaged is bad. Sex tourists are creepy, but that’s because they’re sex pests who have gotten on a plane at some point. The touring isn’t the problem.

And so on. But “The Case Against Doing This Ethically Neutral or Good Thing in a Bad Way” doesn’t tempt as many fingers to click the repost button.”

4. Should We Abolish Prisons?

“Every age treats its penal system as natural, inevitable, and regrettable. When men were hanged in the public square, intellectuals explained that the practice was as helpful to the hanged as it was instructive for the audience. Samuel Johnson, as instinctively humane a man as might ever be found, was indignant when, in mid-eighteenth-century London, hangings—often for crimes as petty as pickpocketing—were moved from Tyburn, today’s Marble Arch, to more discreet premises inside Newgate Prison. “Sir, executions are intended to draw spectators,” he said. “If they do not draw spectators, they don’t answer their purpose. The old method was most satisfactory to all parties; the publick was gratified by a procession; the criminal was supported by it.” Public hangings were simply part of street life. Pickpockets attended the hangings of other pickpockets in order to pick pockets.

In retrospect, the hangings are only very partially described as justice done, and much more accurately described as power and class hierarchy enforced. To those born poor, a life of thievery seemed as rational as any other; if it led to the gallows, this was, as horrible as it sounds, a reasonable risk. There were men of the cloth and higher ranks executed—the famous Dr. William Dodd, a friend of Johnson’s and a confidant of the King’s, was hanged for forgery, in 1777—but mostly just to décourager les autres.

Yet the spirit of abolition eventually grew to the point that in the West we now have zero public executions—even prison hangings have been replaced by pseudo-medical procedures—and we are appalled when we learn of them taking place as an instrument of political persecution in Iran. What we do have, however, is incarceration on a scale that, despite recent efforts at reform, boggles the mind and shivers the heart. More people are under “correctional supervision” in the United States today than were in the Stalinist Gulag at its height.

In response, a movement has begun for the abolition of prisons—not for prison reform, with fewer inmates in better institutions, but for the outright elimination of incarceration, on the implicit model of the earlier abolition of such things as public hangings, torture, and slavery. Championed most effectively by Angela Y. Davis’s “Are Prisons Obsolete?” (2003), the cause may seem no more realistic than the defund-the-police movement that sang so loudly four years ago, at a cost to progressive candidates. Indeed, in a political moment like this one, worrying about the niceties of progressive reform at all may appear as self-distracting as a beachgoer worrying about sandcastle architecture as the sea pulls back on the brink of a tsunami.

. . .

There is no plausible world without sanctions for violations of the social covenant. Public order can be, as the abolitionists warn, a form of class policing; it is also a necessity for civil peace. Finding the honest space between these two truths is the key to opening prison doors. If we are to plant human beings in places where they might blossom again, we need to build better gardens.”

5. Who Owns Garbage? – Understanding Illegal Recycling Workers

“One afternoon on my way home from work in Tirana, Albania, I came across a Romani boy dragging his feet and complaining to his family walking in front of him. At first sight, it could have seemed like a normal occurrence—a teenager being forced into a family activity. Except this family was headed to pick through the trash.

“Nuk dua të mbledh kanoçe!” the boy said. (I don’t want to pick up cans.)

The interaction made me turn my head. The family’s home at the end of a barely noticeable alley looked like a make-do assemblage of brick walls and roofing sheets. But the boy would clearly rather be there. It felt unjust to see a teenager pressured into labor and a family forced into illegal work. Yet this work provides a valuable service in a country that lacks adequate recycling infrastructure.

In Albania, picking up cans is the daily reality for many Romani and Egyptian people. These communities are among the only minorities of color in a country whose borders were closed for more than 40 years, only opening to outsiders in the 1990s. Facing constant discrimination, Romani and Egyptians have few employment opportunities outside of picking through the trash for recyclables.

But in 2011, Albania passed a law deeming all garbage thrown into collection bins to be the property of each local municipality. This made it illegal for Romani and Egyptians to sort through the trash.

The plight of Romani and Egyptians in Albania provides a window into the lives of the estimated 20 million to 56 million waste pickers around the world. These informal workers are responsible for more than half of plastic recycling globally, helping to curb greenhouse gases and reduce plastic pollution in oceans. Yet in most countries, these essential workers operate in a legal gray area, and in some places their labor is illegal.”

6. US Corporations Pump Aquifers Dry as Police Kill Water Defenders in Rural Mexico

“On June 20, more than 200 angry farmers pulled their tractors into the highway outside the Carroll Farms feed plant in the Mexican town of Totalco, Veracruz, blocking traffic. Highway blockades are a traditional form of protest in Mexico. Every year, poor communities mount dozens, seeing them as their only way to get powerful elites to hear their demands.

At first, the Totalco blockade was no different. Farmers yelled at the guards behind the feed plant gates, as they protested extreme water use by Carroll Farms and its contamination of the water table. Then the police arrived in pickup trucks. They began grabbing people they thought were the leaders. One was Don Guadalupe Serrano, an old man who’d led earlier protests going back more than a decade. After he was put in handcuffs and shoved into a police car, farmers surrounded it and rescued him.

“Then four police grabbed me,” recalls Renato Romero, a farmer from nearby Ocotepec and a protest leader. “I was rescued too. But then more police arrived and began beating people. We put our bodies in front of their guns and said, ‘Shoot us!’ And they began shooting.”

Two young brothers, Jorge and Alberto Cortina Vázquez, were killed, their bodies found beside their family’s tractor used in the demonstration. Each had been shot several times, one of their widows said. Others were wounded by gunfire. The farmers had no weapons. As they fled back into town, the police chased them, Romero says. “They followed people in the streets, and went into homes, shooting. Afterwards you could see the high caliber shells on the floors of the houses. They didn’t try to talk. They just wanted to terrorize us.”

This bitter confrontation and the death of two campesinos is more than simply a bloody tragedy south of the border. It is one more example of the impact U.S. food corporations have had on local farm communities as they’ve expanded in Mexico. That process is felt north of the border as well, in the spread of disease, the displacement of local communities and resulting migration, and even in the national politics of both countries.”

7. The dangerous effects of rising sea temperatures

“In 30 years of studying the oceans, Matthew England has learnt to understand their irregular yet constant rhythms — the cycles of wind, temperature and atmospheric changes that interact with the masses of water covering most of the Earth’s surface.

But what he has seen in the past 15 months has shocked him. Global sea surface temperatures have reached and stayed at record levels, fuelling heatwaves and melting sea ice. Temperatures in the north Atlantic waters he has been studying, including around the UK and Ireland, were described last year as “beyond extreme” by the EU’s Earth observation service.

“I was stressed by the amount of climate change, to see the pace of change, to see these marine heatwaves, the loss of sea ice,” says England, who is Scientia professor of ocean and climate dynamics at the University of New South Wales in Australia. The rate of warming went “beyond what you would typically see from steady global warming”.

And the heat has not gone away. June was the 15th consecutive month that global sea temperatures were at a record high. Forecasters fear the warm waters will fuel a historically intense hurricane season this year. Hurricane Beryl, which hit the Caribbean, coast of Mexico and Texas this month, was the earliest maximum-severity storm on record.

Scientists are now trying to understand what has driven the rapid anomalous rise in sea temperatures, why that heat has lingered and whether the world’s seas will cool again.

At the heart of these questions is a concern that the oceans may be reaching their limits in the vital role they play in protecting the planet against the worst extremes of climate change. They have absorbed 90 per cent of excess heat and about a quarter of human-caused carbon dioxide emitted during the industrial era.

“All that heat that’s going into the ocean is not going into the land surface or into the atmosphere, or into the ice caps,” says Michael Meredith, oceanographer and science leader at the British Antarctic Survey. “The ocean has been doing this huge climate favour for us for decades.””

8. Not only kafala

“On a flight from Kampala to Dubai, I found myself surrounded by lines of young Ugandan women, all wearing the same uniform. I couldn’t help but notice the excitement and happiness on their faces. As the plane departed, I overheard some of their hopes and dreams and wondered how many of them would go back home carrying the same smiles. Statistics from the Ugandan government indicate that about 2,000 citizens leave monthly for domestic work in the Middle East, with a majority working in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. This statistic does not account for the migrants who travel illegally or irregularly through other countries. They also do not reflect the percentage of these women who come back with kidney, lung, chest, and skin health conditions and mental health issues, and the others who never come back.

This story is not new. Out of the 11.5 million migrant domestic workers worldwide, 27.4% are in the Arab states. With estimates that the Gulf countries host almost 14% of global labor migrants, labor abuses in the region have been reported for years. While some countries, like The Philippines, have been enforcing better migration conditions for their citizens, most African countries still lag behind. Moreover, black African women migrants often find themselves facing extremely harsh living conditions that are shaped by prejudice and racist discriminatory practices that are socially accepted, and often legally sanctioned or ignored by both the sending and receiving countries.

The Gulf States are known for their unique growth model. The oil-sector boom was, and remains, the main catalyst behind the region’s economic expansion. In the past years, the region has also been exerting its political power and influence, and some of its cities, like Dubai, have become famous destinations for business and tourism alike. Celebrities, influencers, and mega football stars speak fondly of the region, and are charmed by its perfection of “modernity.” Clean streets, low tax rates, safety, and great locations that enable fast and cheap traveling are all reasons why many are choosing to move their lives and business to the Gulf.

A closer look at this vast wealth, security, and stability shows a picture of exclusion as millions of migrant workers live in slavery-like conditions that are either overlooked, under-reported, or solely blamed on the abuses of illegal contractors and labor agencies. This labor model is not exclusive to the Gulf: rapid capitalist development has a high human cost and its sustainability is tied to the continuation of exploitative work conditions. Yet the region offers a unique example of social reproduction which allowed it to become a labor-importing hub that outsources various forms of socialized care almost entirely to non-locals.”

9. The Physics of Cold Water May Have Jump-Started Complex Life

“Once upon a time, long ago, the world was encased in ice. That’s the tale told by sedimentary rock in the tropics, many geologists believe. Hundreds of millions of years ago, glaciers and sea ice covered the globe. The most extreme scenarios suggest a layer of ice several meters thick even at the equator.

This event has been called “Snowball Earth,” and you’d think it would be a terrible time to be alive — and maybe, for some organisms, it was. However, in a warmer period between glaciations, the first evidence of multicellular animals appears, according to some interpretations of the geological record. Life had taken a leap. How could the seeming desolation of a Snowball Earth line up with this burst of biological innovation?

A series of papers from the lab of Carl Simpson proposes an answer linked to a fundamental physical fact: As seawater gets colder, it gets more viscous, and therefore more difficult for very small organisms to navigate. Imagine swimming through honey rather than water. If microscopic organisms struggled to get enough food to survive under these conditions, as Simpson’s modeling work has implied, they would be placed under pressure to change — perhaps by developing ways to hang on to each other, form larger groups, and move through the water with greater force. Maybe some of these changes contributed to the beginning of multicellular animal life.

To test the idea, Simpson, a paleobiologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and his team conducted an experiment designed to see what a modern single-celled organism does when confronted with higher viscosity. Over the course of a month, he and his graduate student Andrea Halling watched how a type of green algae — members of a lab-friendly species that swims with a tail-like flagellum — formed larger, more coordinated groups as they encountered thicker gel. The algae collectively motored through the fluid to keep up their feeding pace. And, intriguingly, the groups of cells remained stuck together for 100 generations after the experiment ended.

The research offers a novel take on the emergence of multicellular life.”