text:
Items tagged with: inside
(inoffiziell) FC Bayern München 2 months ago from Feed
Ballon d'Or: Lewandowski unter den Top-10
Ballon d'Or: Bayern-Profi Robert Lewandowski belegte bei der Wahl der französischen Fachzeitschrift France Football den 8. Platz.
Ballon d'Or: Lewandowski in den Top-10
#Inside #FCBayern #RobertLewandowski #BallondOr #Auszeichnung
fcbayern.com
WDR (inoffiziell) 2 months ago from Feed
Sport Inside: WDR-Journalist Benjamin Best erhält Preis für "Gefangen in Katar"
Für die Sport-Inside-Produktion "Gefangen in Katar" ist WDR-Autor Benjamin Best mit dem "Georg-von-Holtzbrinck-Preis" für herausragende journalistische Leistungen ausgezeichnet worden.
#Benjamin #Best #Georg-von-Holtzbrinck-Preis #Inside #NRW
Für die Sport-Inside-Produktion "Gefangen in Katar" ist WDR-Autor Benjamin Best mit dem "Georg-von-Holtzbrinck-Preis für Wirtschaftspublizistik" ausgezeichnet worden.
www1.wdr.de
Twitter News 2 months ago from Mobile
Astronomers Look Inside Meteorites and Find the Sugars Needed for Life
#astronomers #find #inside #life #look #meteorites #needed #sugars
The discovery shows that the organic compounds needed for life can form in lifeless environments, like on asteroids and the early Earth.
feedproxy.google.com
Der Saisonguide 2019/20 ist da
Der Saisonguide 2019/20 des FC Bayern ist da
#Inside #Jahrbuch
Ab sofort ist der neue Saisonguide des FC Bayern für die Spielzeit 2019/20 erhältlich. Neu: Zweiseitige Spielerporträts, die als Autogrammkarten fungieren.
FC Bayern-Profi Robert Lewandowski für Ballon d'Or nominiert
https://fcbayern.com/de/news/2019/10/inside-lewandowski-fuer-ballon-d%E2%80%99or-nominiert
Bayern-Profi Robert Lewandowski hat es als einziger Bundesligaspieler in die Endauswahl um den Goldenen Ball für den weltbesten Fußballer geschafft. Der 31 Jahre alte Angreifer des deutschen Rekordmeisters steht auf der Liste der 30 Nominierten der französischen Fachzeitschrift "France Football".
giggles 108** 5 months ago
#inside #info
CIA #'Whistleblower Barbara Hartwell: Grandstanding, Disinfo, & Containment Ops in the TI Community
A no-holds barred conversation with CIA Whistleblower and Counterintelligence/Psychological Operations specialist Barbara Hartwell on the recent and current display of Disinfo-spreading, Containment operations, and support of agent provocateurs by TI groups Targeted Justice and Freedom for Targeted ...
#inside #info #'whistleblower
By Nicole Wolf
woman wearing black spaghetti strap top standing near parked car inside parking lot
Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/kfbV33nW77M
\#photography #CC0 #Unsplash #APIRandom #woman #wearing #black #spaghetti #strap #top #standing #near #parked #car #inside #parking #lot
Nicole Wolf (@joeel56) | Unsplash Photo Community
See the best free to download photos, images, and wallpapers by Nicole Wolf on Unsplash.
#photography #cc0 #unsplash #apirandom #woman #wearing #black #spaghetti #strap #top #standing #near #parked #car #inside #parking #lot
giggles 108** 10 months ago
#Inside The #Tunnels Of The Largest #Pyramid On #Earth: #Cholula In Mexico
#mexico #inside #tunnels #pyramid #earth #cholula
By karl S
gray stairs inside building
Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/TVkcsAQ-7fM
\#photography #CC0 #Unsplash #APIRandom #gray #stairs #inside #building
https://unsplash.com/@karlsaare_1101191_sink?amp;utm_medium=referral
#photography #cc0 #unsplash #apirandom #gray #stairs #inside #building
WiFi Hides Inside a USB Cable
If you weren't scared of USB cables before, you should be now. The O.MG cable (or Offensive MG kit) from [MG]hides a backdoor inside the shell of a USB connector. Plug this cable into your c…
Posted by glax (karma: 88)
\#HackerNews #cable #hides #inside #usb #... Show more...
\#HackerNews #cable #hides #inside #usb #wifi
If you weren't scared of USB cables before, you should be now. The O.MG cable (or Offensive MG kit) from [MG][1]hides a backdoor inside the shell of a USB connector. Plug this cable into your computer and you'll be the victim of remote attacks over WiFi.
You might be asking what's inside this tiny USB cable to make it susceptible to such attacks. That's the trick: inside the shell of the USB 'A' connector is a PCB loaded up with a WiFi microcontroller — the documentation doesn't say which one — that will send payloads over the USB device. Think of it as a BadUSB device, like the [2]USB Rubber Ducky from Hak5, but one that you can remote control. It is the ultimate way into a system, and all anyone has to do is plug a random USB cable into their computer.
In the years BadUSB — [3]an exploit hidden in a device's USB controller itself — was released upon the world, [MG]has been tirelessly working on making his own malicious USB device, and now it's finally ready. The O.MG cable hides a backdoor inside the shell of a standard, off-the-shelf USB cable.
The construction of this device is quite impressive, in that it fits entirely inside a USB plug. But this isn't a just a PCB from a random Chinese board house: [MG]spend 300 hours and $4000 in the last month putting this project together with a Bantam mill and [4]created his own PCBs, with silk screen. That's impressive no matter how you cut it.
Future updates to this cable that will hack any computer might include a port of [5]ESPloitV2, an Open Source WiFi controlled USB HID keyboard emulator. That will bring a lot of power to this device that's already extremely capable. In the video [6]attached to this tweet you can see the O.MG cable connected to a MacBook, with [MG]opening up a webpage remotely.
\* [7]
[IMG]\* [8]
[IMG]\* [10][IMG]
1. https://mg.lol/blog/omg-cable/
2. https://shop.hak5.org/collections/physical-access/products/usb-rubber-ducky-deluxe
3. https://hackaday.com/2014/10/05/badusb-means-were-all-screwed/
4. https://twitter.com/MG/status/1090486321456414725
5. https://github.com/exploitagency/ESPloitV2
7. https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fhackaday.com%2F2019%2F02%2F18%2Fwifi-hides-inside-a-usb-cable%2F
8. https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=WiFi+Hides+Inside+a+USB+Cable%20via%20@hackaday&url=https%3A%2F%2Fhackaday.com%2F2019%2F02%2F18%2Fwifi-hides-inside-a-usb-cable%2F
9. https://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhackaday.com%2F2019%2F02%2F18%2Fwifi-hides-inside-a-usb-cable%2F
10. mailto:?subject=WiFi+Hides+Inside+a+USB+Cable%20%7C%20Hackaday&body=https%3A%2F%2Fhackaday.com%2F2019%2F02%2F18%2Fwifi-hides-inside-a-usb-cable%2F
HackerNewsBot debug: Calculated post rank: 109 - Loop: 66 - Rank min: 100 - Author rank: 26
Hackaday: WiFi Hides Inside a USB Cable (Brian Benchoff)
#hackernews #cable #hides #inside #usb #wifi
Google Memo on Cost Cuts Sparks Heated Debate Inside Company
Posted by petethomas (karma: 30242)
Post stats: Points: 88 - Comments: 70 - 2019-01-26T05:20:18Z
\#HackerNews #company #cost #cuts #debate #google #heated #inside #memo #sparks
To continue, please click the box below to let us know you're not a robot.
Bloomberg - Are you a robot?
#hackernews #company #cost #cuts #debate #google #heated #inside #memo #sparks
By Yoav Aziz
vegetable salad inside bowl
Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/XHl9fPJ_AM8
\#photography #CC0 #Unsplash #APIRandom #vegetable #salad #inside #bowl
Yoav Aziz (@yoavaziz) | Unsplash Photo Community
See the best free to download photos, images, and wallpapers by Yoav Aziz on Unsplash.
#photography #cc0 #unsplash #apirandom #vegetable #salad #inside #bowl
Peering inside giant planets, and fighting Ebola in the face of fake news
#ebola #face #fake #fighting #giant #inside #news #peering #planets
On this week's show: Researchers combat conspiracy theories during Ebola outbreaks, and new data from Saturn's Cassini mission reveal how that planet's interior differs from fellow gas giant Jupiter's
www.sciencemag.org
CES 2019: AI startup Eyeris will know your car from the inside-out
#2019 #car #ces #eyeris #inside #know #out #startup #will
CES 2019: AI startup Eyeris will know your car from the inside-out | ZDNet
Cars on the road know little about drivers and passengers today -- except maybe whether the person at the wheel is drowsy. Tomorrow's vehicle will have a total awareness of the cabin, claims AI startup Eyeris, using multiple cameras and convolutional neural networks.
#ftag=rssbaffb68 #car #ces #eyeris #inside #know #out #startup #will
Inside Ubuntu's financials
#financials #inside #ubuntus
Inside Ubuntu's financials | ZDNet
Canonical, Ubuntu's parent company, is private, but it does share some of its financial results. Here's what they tell us about this leading Linux company.
#ftag=rssbaffb68 #financials #inside #ubuntus
Birding Like It's 1899: Inside a Blockbuster American West Video Game
In "Red Dead Redemption 2," a birder finds joy and despair in a realistic portrayal of wildlife in the pre-conservation era.
Article word count: 1581
Posted by alexlrobertson (karma: 108)
\#HackerNews #1899 #american #birding #blockbuster #game #... Show more...
\#HackerNews #1899 #american #birding #blockbuster #game #inside #its #like #video #west
The first time I see ravens, I flush them out of an alpine meadow carpeted with wildflowers. I pause to watch the flock fly off towards the distant, snow-capped peaks, trailed by their echoing croaks, when a man riding by on horseback bumps into me. Irritated, I shoot the man dead, and take his hat. So it goes in "Red Dead Redemption 2."
Available since October, "Red Dead Redemption 2" (RDR2) is a video game set in an imagined version of the American West in the year 1899. It's a massive release, both one of the [1]highest-selling video games of 2018 and one that sits at or near the top of many of the internet's [2]Best Of 2018 video game [3]lists. It's also unique in that the natural world—or, at least, a romanticized and heightened version of it—is one of the main characters.
You play as outlaw Arthur Morgan and can choose to spend your time marauding across the landscape, holding up wagons and evading lawmen—or you can play a gentler way, as a birder. Of sorts. Birding as a hobby was just getting underway in the late 1800s, and much of the population, especially those living off the land as Arthur Morgan does, still primarily viewed birds as resources for food, materials, and hunting sport. The [4]nation's landmark law protecting migratory birds was still two decades away.
Arthur Morgan, birder. Image: Courtesy of Rockstar Games
The gigantic RDR2 playable map is brimming with life. Hawks perch on exposed branches and ducks flush from riverbanks. Wolves chase deer through the woods, and vultures descend to feed on the carcasses. There are alligators, turtles, snakes, frogs, toads, bats, and dozens of species of fish. In all there are about 200 distinct, interactive species of animals in RDR2, and more than 40 different plant species.
I spent most of my time finding birds, and was impressed with the breadth and relative accuracy of the species represented. Birds change with habitat: Roseate Spoonbills and Great Egrets feed in the bayous of Saint Denis. Laughing Gulls and Red-footed Boobies roost along the coast, while eagles and condors soar over mountain peaks. Each of these are crafted with accurate field marks and habits. There are dozens of species I couldn't even find, including Carolina Parakeets, Ferruginous Hawks, and Pileated Woodpeckers. Like real life birding, you're never guaranteed to see anything.
The sound design, too, is impressive. The landscape is alive with birdsong, including many species not actually in the game, like Northern Flicker and Ruby-crowned Kinglet. I was riding through a wooded area one time as dusk turned to night, and whip-poor-wills began singing out all around me.
Arthur Morgan watching ravens flying overhead. Image: Courtesy of Rockstar Games
Those kinds of natural surprises are what I love most about the game, and they happen frequently. One time I had shot a Mallard and left its body on the lakeshore after taking its feathers and meat. I was nearby about 10 minutes later and noticed a Red Fox emerging from the grass and walking down towards the duck carcass, still on the shore. A pair of Turkey Vultures descended and the trio fed on the duck. I watched from afar through my binoculars (in-game binoculars!) and felt incredibly lucky to have caught such a spontaneous and real-feeling episode.
There are some minor errors I noticed, however, that as a birder and critic of these things I feel obligated to point out. In addition to the Snowy Egret, there are quite a few Little Egrets in Saint Denis, [5]which would have been a truly rare North America sighting. What's called a California Quail is actually a Northern Bobwhite. Tanagers are, for some reason, referred to as Scarlet Tanager Songbird and Western Tanager Songbird. But that's all. Overall, RDR2 is absolutely the best and boldest representation of American birdlife in any video game. It's not even close.
But that doesn't mean it's a game for birders. This game exists in a time where humans mainly viewed birds—and all of the natural world—as ripe for exploitation rather than appreciation. All animals in the game can be hunted, and either eaten or crafted into clothing or materials. Bird flight feathers are used to craft arrows that fly straighter. Special feathers, like those from hawks and eagles, are used to make clothing. All of these parts can be traded or sold.
Of course, unregulated hunting was a major, very real threat to birds at the time. The demand for egret plumes for fancy hats was driving several species toward extinction. (Snowy Egret plumes can be sold in-game for $2.50 apiece.) Habitat loss and overhunting contributed [6]to the extinction of the Carolina Parakeet soon after the game's timeframe, in the early 20th century. (Carolina Parakeet flight feathers can be used to make far-flying arrows in the game.) The type of wanton destruction encouraged in Red Dead Redemption 2 is what led the National Audubon Society to lobby for, and Congress to pass, the real [7]Migratory Bird Treaty Act [8][9]in 1918, and other environmental legislation in the following decades. But in the game, the player must kill to progress.
Thankfully, the game does not shy away from the realities of these interactions. An imprecise shot will wound an animal, leaving it to yelp and squirm before you finish your job. In order to receive meat or parts you need to skin or pluck the animal, a process that though superficial is clearly and gruesomely animated. Nor does RDR2 spare you the experience of the human impact on the land.
In fact, the disastrous intersection between humans and the environment is the game's major theme. A sense of foreboding follows me around the lush world, knowledge that humans were at work destroying it all. Much of that destruction is represented in-game, from the factory smokestacks of Saint Denis to the Owanjila Dam, but I could also feel it extended into real life. I couldn't help but envision the dirt paths becoming busy highways, and each green meadow converted into a housing development. RDR2 presents an idealized version of the natural world, but the loss feels very real.
Mountain vista. Image: Courtesy of Rockstar Games
The trouble is, as a birder, it's not a lesson I needed to learn. I know full well about the continued decline of bird populations, habitat loss, and environmental degradation. That the game could elicit such deep feelings of sadness and regret is to its credit, but I was often left feeling hopeless and wanting to get outside to enjoy real nature while I still could. My mom always used to tell me to stop playing video games and go outside, but this is the first game that made me want to.
FIELD LIST: BIRDS OF "RED DEAD REDEMPTION 2"
Each of these birds is a distinct species in the game. Names are as presented in-game, followed by their most likely locations. Does not count heard-only birds. Does not include domestic chickens. (Information derived directly from game, as well as from [10]Ranked Boost.)
___ Loon, Common; West Elizabeth, Ambarino, and New Hanover
___ Loon, Yellow-billed; West Elizabeth and Ambarino
___ Loon, Pacific; West Elizabeth, Ambarino, and New Hanover
___ Pelican, American White; West Elizabeth, New Hanover, and Lemoyne
___ Pelican, Brown; West Elizabeth, New Hanover, and Lemoyne
___ Booby, Red-footed; Guarma
___ Cormorant, Double-crested; Lemoyne, New Hanover, and West Elizabeth
___ Cormorant, Neotropic; New Hanover, Lemoyne, and West Elizabeth
EGRETS / HERONS
___ Egret, Little; Bayou Nwa
___ Egret, Snowy; Lemoyne
___ Egret, Reddish; Bayou Nwa
___ Heron, Great Blue; Lemoyne
___ Heron, Tricolored; Lemoyne
___ Spoonbill, Roseate; Bayou Nwa
___ Vulture, Eastern Turkey; New Hanover and Lemoyne
___ Vulture, Western Turkey; New Austin and West Elizabeth
GEESE / DUCKS
___ Mallard; West Elizabeth, New Hanover and Lemoyne
___ Duck, Pekin; West Elizabeth, New Hanover and Lemoyne
___ Goose, Canada; New Hanover and Lemoyne
GROUSE / TURKEY / QUAIL
___ Prairie Chicken, Greater; Great Plains
___ Pheasant, Ring-necked; New Hanover and West Elizabeth
___ Pheasant, Chinese Ring-necked; New Hanover and West Elizabeth
___ Turkey, Eastern Wild; West Elizabeth, New Hanover, and Lemoyne
___ Turkey, Rio Grande; New Austin
___ Quail, California; New Austin
___ Condor, California; New Austin
___ Hawk, Ferruginous; Widespread
___ Hawk, Red-tailed; New Austin, West Elizabeth, and New Hanover
___ Hawk, Rough-legged; Widespread
___ Eagle, Bald; Ambarino and West Elizabeth
___ Eagle, Golden; Ambarino and West Elizabeth
___ Crane, Sandhill; Lemoyne and New Hanover
___ Crane, Whooping; Lemoyne and New Hanover
___ Gull, Laughing; Lemoyne
___ Gull, Herring; Bluewater Marsh
___ Gull, Ring-billed; Saint Denis
PARROTS / PARAKEETS
___ Parakeet, Carolina; Lemoyne
___ Macaw, Scarlet; Guarma
___ Macaw, Great Green; Guarma
___ Macaw, Blue and Yellow; Guarma
___ Owl, Great Horned; Widespread
___ Owl, Coastal Horned; Widespread
___ Owl, California Horned; New Austin
___ Woodpecker, Pileated; New Hanover
___ Woodpecker, Red-bellied; Roanoke Ridge
JAYS / CROWS
___ Jay, Blue; Widespread
___ Crow, American; Widespread
___ Raven, Western; Widespread
___ Robin, American; Widespread
___ Waxwing, Cedar; Widespread
___ Songbird, Scarlet Tanager; Lemoyne, New Hanover, and West Elizabeth
___ Songbird, Western Tanager; New Austin, West Elizabeth, and New Hanover
NEW WORLD SPARROWS
___ Sparrow, Eurasian Tree; West Elizabeth, and New Hanover
___ Sparrow, American Tree; West Elizabeth, and New Hanover
___ Sparrow, Golden-crowned; West Elizabeth, and New Hanover
___ Cardinal, Northern; Widespread
ORIOLES AND BLACKBIRDS
___ Oriole, Baltimore; Roanoke Ridge
___ Oriole, Hooded; West Elizabeth
1. https://www.ign.com/articles/2018/12/11/amazons-best-selling-games-of-2018
2. https://www.polygon.com/2018/5/29/17386324/best-games-2018-ps4-pc-xbox-one
3. https://www.thrillist.com/entertainment/nation/best-video-games-2018
4. https://www.audubon.org/news/migratory-bird-treaty-act
5. https://www.audubon.org/field-guide/bird/little-egret
6. http://johnjames.audubon.org/last-carolina-parakeet
7. https://www.audubon.org/news/the-migratory-bird-treaty-act-explained
10. https://rankedboost.com/red-dead-redemption-2/hunting-wildlife-fishing/
www.audubon.org
#hackernews #american #birding #blockbuster #game #inside #its #like #video #west
By Ferdinand Stöhr
man standing inside building
Location: Gundelfingen an der Donau, Germany
Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/WuUk3MCdQOI
\#photography #CC0 #Unsplash #APIRandom #man #standing #inside #building #GundelfingenanderDonau #Germany
Ferdinand Stöhr (@fellowferdi) | Unsplash Photo Community
See the best free to download photos, images, and wallpapers by Ferdinand Stöhr on Unsplash.
#photography #cc0 #unsplash #apirandom #man #standing #inside #building #gundelfingenanderdonau #germany
Abusing Amazon's Look Inside feature to leak unreleased content
Want to read some spoilers for that book you've been waiting ages for? Here's how.
Posted by justMaku (karma: 56)
\#HackerNews #abusing #amazons #content #feature #inside #... Show more...
\#HackerNews #abusing #amazons #content #feature #inside #leak #look #unreleased
As a fan of everything Blizzard and World of Warcraft in particularity, I always try to be up to date with all the lore and content that Blizzard produces both in-game and external media such as books or movies. With the Battle for Azeroth expansion pack released earlier this year, Blizzard has also prepared a Before the Storm novel to introduce the fans to the story behind the events that were about to happen later in the game.
While the game was supposed to release on 15th of August, the book was made available two months earlier on 12th of June with a small preview being published through Amazon (and other partners) few weeks before that.
As the most devoted of the fans read and analyzed every page that was available in the preview, I've started searching for specific information regarding specific character using the built-in search functionality in the preview reader interface. Too my surprise I've noticed that some of the results were unavailable to be previewed (due to being located in the yet unreleased pages of the book) but the search engine still provided a small excerpt around the searched phrase.
Notice the yellow warning mentioning that pages 68-80 are not available for preview while the search result from the page 71 with a small excerpt is visible in the left sidebar.
Since this meant that the data is out there, just marked unavailable I decided to reverse-engineer the API calls the preview interface was making to the back-end service and found the culprit:
curl 'https://www.amazon.com/gp/search-inside/service-data' \
-XPOST \
-H 'Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded' \
-H 'Accept: application/json, text/javascript, /; q=0.01' \
-H 'Accept-Encoding: text' \
--data 'method=getSearchResults&asin=0399594094&buyingAsin=0399594094&query=sylvanas&pageSize=20&pageNumber=1'
This call returned a list of results within the book (including unreleased pages) as such:
{ "totalResults": 101, "results": [ [ "21", "much by betrayal from a supposed ally, Sylvanas Windrunner, as by the monstrous, fel-fueled", ], [ "28", "to fall into the wrong hands. \nInto Sylvanas's hands \nSo much power \n\tHe closed his", ], [ "30", "one reason he was the best bodyguard Sylvanas could possibly have. There were other", ], [ "31", "hazy. \nBut not all of it. \n\tAlthough Sylvanas had left behind most warmer emotions", ], [ "32", "stone floor outside the small room. Sylvanas closed her eyes, trying to gather patience", ] ]
Output simplified for readability.
With the above in mind, I have built a [1]simple ruby script to crawl the book starting with few generic keywords that I knew will be present in the book in several places and then continue in a divide-and-conquer fashion based on the results from the search API. One hour or so later, I had a json file with a list of search results associated with a page it was found on.
[ "commanded that she do the opposite. He had claimed he had been granted a vision by the loa he honored. You must step out of da shadows and lead. You must be warchief Vol'jin had", "that she do the opposite. He had claimed he had been granted a vision by the loa he honored. You must step out of da shadows and lead. You must be warchief Vol'jin had been", "she do the opposite. He had claimed he had been granted a vision by the loa he honored. You must step out of da shadows and lead. You must be warchief Vol'jin had been someone", "do the opposite. He had claimed he had been granted a vision by the loa he honored. You must step out of da shadows and lead. You must be warchief Vol'jin had been someone she respected"
I spent some time trying to figure out the best way to stitch the lines together and in the end decided to use a [2]crude longest common sequence algorithm that would compare two fragments from same page and if there was a long enough common substring it would combine them together. Rinse and repeat unless you have just one fragment per page and voilà.
But with quite literally his dying breath, Vollin, the Horde's leader, had commanded that she do the opposite. He had claimed he had been granted a vision by the loa he honored. You must step out of da shadows and lead. You must be warchief Vol'jin had been someone she respected, although they had clashed on occasion.
Obviously, since this is based on an OCRed text and an not-so-ideal method of stitching and dumping the resulting text while readable still contains several "typos" and few missing sections. I'm confident that with improved tools and proper manual review a 99% (not including images) extraction is possible. After the release of the book I have compared the content of my "leaked" copy and the final release and the accuracy was around 90%.
This vulnerability affected a quite narrow subset of content available through Amazon Book Store and only applies to publishers who have joined Amazon's [3]Search Inside program. Through this program, Amazon scans printed books and runs an OCR algorithm on the resulting images to build a database of searchable fragments within the book. This "feature" allows Amazon to provide their users with search results based not only on the title and small excerpt from the book but also on the whole content of the book.
This program is usually coupled with another product Amazon offers to the publishers - [4]Look Inside. Whereas Search Inside only provides better search results, Look Inside allows users to actually preview the previously mentioned scanned pages before purchasing the product. When both features have been enabled for a given book, the users are also able to search the book for any phrase from within the preview interface.
Both of these programs do apply for Books available through a pre-order and many publishers use those previews as one of the stages of the marketing campaign before the book's release. According to Amazon documentation there are several limitations implemented and the publishers have some level of control on which pages are available to preview (ie. to prevent spoilers). Unfortunately, as we have seen, some of the limitations have been implemented in the client-side code which is against the standard security practice.
17th May 2018 12:02 GMT+02 - Initial Report
17th May 2018 14:22 GMT+02 - Request for more information
18th May 2018 23:08 GMT+02 - Issue confirmed and triaged
22th May 2018 17:41 GMT+02 - Public API disabled
23th May 2018 23:26 GMT+02 - Hotfix deployed
31st May 2018 20:17 GMT+02 - Final fix deployed
Disclaimer: Amazon doesn't have a bug bounty program and didn't offer anything other than thanks and gratefulness for bringing the vulnerability to their attention. Blizzard Entertainment (as the copyright holder for the book I was testing with) has also been notified of this vulnerability and has offered a small gift but never fulfilled that promise.
1. https://gist.github.com/justMaku/7cd30695a8687e2aa471f1035a0339bf
2. https://gist.github.com/justMaku/ebb58348ef5763f5971d36157151b99c
3. https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=10197041
4. https://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1001119971
HackerNewsBot debug: Calculated post rank: 81 - Loop: 332 - Rank min: 80 - Author rank: 140
Abusing Amazon Look Inside feature to leak unreleased content.
justmaku.org
#hackernews #abusing #amazons #content #feature #inside #leak #look #unreleased
tftsr_bot 1 year ago from TFTSR Social
Sources describe DOD's plan to win "hearts and minds" in Silicon Valley, amid frustration and anger inside the Pentagon after Google pulled out of Project Maven (Zachary Fryer-Biggs/Wired)
#after #amid #anger #biggs #describe #dods #frustration #fryer #google #hearts #inside #maven #minds #out #pentagon #plan #project #pulled #silicon #sources #valley #win #wired #zachary
Zachary Fryer-Biggs / Wired:
Sources describe DOD's plan to win "hearts and minds" in Silicon Valley, amid frustration and anger inside the Pentagon after Google pulled out of Project Maven — THE AMERICAN MILITARY is desperately trying to get a leg up in the field of artificial intelligence …
Sources describe DOD's plan to win "hearts and minds" in Silicon Valley, amid frustration and anger inside the Pentagon after Google pulled out of Project Maven
By Zachary Fryer-Biggs / Wired. View the full context on Techmeme.
www.techmeme.com
By The Ride Academy
people gathered inside Honda venue
Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/IzdkOMvyZAk
\#photography #CC0 #Unsplash #APIRandom #people #gathered #inside #Honda #venue
The Ride Academy (@therideacademy) | Unsplash Photo Community
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Inside Elon Musk's Production Hell and More This Week in Cars
#cars #elon #hell #inside #more #musk #production #transportation #week
We go deep into the Tesla CEO's very difficult past few years, hop aboard a self-driving truck, ogle Aston Martin's hypercar, and more.
Rixty Dixet 1 year ago
An #Autonomous #Car #Learned How to #Drive #IRL #Inside a #Simulation
So far, most testing has taken place on real-world streets, which has led to accidents and even deaths. Now Wayve — a team of researchers from Cambridge University developing artificial intelligence software for AVs — might have a much safer approach: they successfully taught a self-driving car how to drive exclusively using a simulation.
https://futurism.com/wayve-sim2real-autonomous-car-teach-simulation/
#autonomous #car #learned #drive #irl #inside #simulation
- #Bluetooth #Smart #Pill #Pairs With Your #Phone From #Inside Your #Stomach
A team from MIT, Draper, and Brigham and Women's Hospital has created a 3D-printed smart pill that can release medications in the stomach and monitor temperature for up to a month at a time — and they believe they've only scratched the surface of its capabilities.
https://futurism.com/smart-pill-3d-printed-bluetooth/
#bluetooth #smart #pill #pairs #phone #inside #stomach
Dr. Elon and Mr. Musk: Life Inside Tesla's Production Hell
Unfettered genius. Unpredictable rages. Here's what it was like to work at Tesla as Model 3 manufacturing ramped up and the company's leader melted down.
Article word count: 73
Posted by nem000 (karma: 77)
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The young Tesla engineer was excited. Ecstatic, in fact. It was a Saturday in October 2017, and he was working at the Gigafactory, Tesla's enormous battery manufacturing plant in Nevada. Over the previous year, he had been living out of a suitcase, putting in 13-hour days, seven days a week. This was his first real job. And now a colleague had tracked him down to say that Elon Musk—[1]Elon Musk!—needed his personal help.
The previous year, Musk had made an audacious announcement: His company, which was known—fetishized, actually—for its luxurious electric vehicles, would soon begin manufacturing a new sedan that it planned to sell for just $35,000, putting it within reach of the middle class. The [2]Model 3, Tesla hoped, would transform the auto industry by proving that a mass-produced, emissions-free vehicle was not only feasible but profitable. If successful, the vehicle would help end humanity's addiction to fossil fuels, slow climate change, and show that ingenuity and ambition could accomplish nearly anything. Within a year of that announcement, however, work on the car was behind schedule. There were problems in battery manufacturing, parts construction, development of assembly lines. Tesla's goal was to build 5,000 vehicles a week; recently the company had been producing roughly three cars a day. Many inside the [3]Gigafactory—not to mention at the Tesla headquarters in Palo Alto and the assembly factory in Fremont, California—had been working hard for months, trying to get things on track.
Musk was spending the weekend in the Gigafactory, attempting to discover why machines weren't functioning, why parts kept misaligning, why the software was crashing. Musk had demanded that his factories be automated as much as possible. But among the consequences of this extreme roboticization were delays and malfunctions. [4]Tesla had spent more than $1 billion building the Gigafactory, and almost nothing was going as planned.
At about 10 o'clock on Saturday evening, an angry Musk was examining one of the production line's mechanized modules, trying to figure out what was wrong, when the young, excited engineer was brought over to assist him.
"Hey, buddy, this doesn't work!" Musk shouted at the engineer, according to someone who heard the conversation. "Did you do this?"
The engineer was taken aback. He had never met Musk before. Musk didn't even know the engineer's name. The young man wasn't certain what, exactly, Musk was asking him, or why he sounded so angry.
"You mean, program the robot?" the engineer said. "Or design that tool?"
"Did you fucking do this?" Musk asked him.
"I'm not sure what you're referring to?" the engineer replied apologetically.
"You're a fucking idiot!" Musk shouted back. "Get the fuck out and don't come back!"
The young engineer climbed over a low safety barrier and walked away. He was bewildered by what had just happened. The entire conversation had lasted less than a minute. A few moments later, his manager came over to say that he had been fired on Musk's orders, according to two people with knowledge of the situation. The engineer was shocked. He'd been working so hard. He was set to get a review from his manager the next week, and had been hearing only positive things. Instead, two days later, he signed his separation papers.
On a Wednesday morning a few weeks later, Musk returned to the Gigafactory on his private plane. Tesla had started firing hundreds of other employees for performance reasons—more than 700 would eventually be let go. Musk was scheduled to talk to the plant's workers, to inspire them to push through what Musk had forecast would be a "manufacturing hell." The Gigafactory needed widespread fixes; there was no way the plant would produce 5,000 batteries a week anytime soon.
When he arrived, Musk began marching through the factory. He walked along the assembly line, red-faced and urgent, interrogating workers he encountered, telling them that at Tesla excellence was a passing grade, and they were failing; that they weren't smart enough to be working on these problems; that they were endangering the company, according to someone who observed him.
Employees knew about such rampages. Sometimes Musk would terminate people; other times he would simply intimidate them. One manager had a name for these outbursts—Elon's rage firings—and had forbidden subordinates from walking too close to Musk's desk at the Gigafactory out of concern that a chance encounter, an unexpected question answered incorrectly, might endanger a career.
After Musk had patrolled the factory floor for a while, executives pulled him into a conference room. "I think we can fix this," one of his top lieutenants, Jon McNeill, told him, according to someone who heard the conversation. McNeill tried to calm Musk down, and repeated a proverb he had once heard: No man comes up with a good idea when being chased by a tiger. At that moment, Musk was the tiger. (A spokesperson for McNeill said he did not want to participate in this story.)
Musk, though, had other concerns. "What's that smell?" he asked. Everyone went silent. They knew Musk was so sensitive to odors that job candidates were told not to wear cologne or perfume when they met him. They had seen him become upset over small issues like this, had observed him attack executives for their incompetence and inabilities. One person explained that there were vats of liquid silicon nearby. When heated, it sometimes smelled like burning plastic.
These vapors were going to kill people, Musk said. They were going to kill him.
The group got back to solving the Gigafactory's problems. Eventually it was time for Musk to give his speech. He left the room and walked onto a makeshift stage. The Model 3 was always going to be difficult, he told workers. But it was turning out to be even harder than anyone anticipated. He thanked employees for their work—and then warned them that more was coming. Tesla had to have high standards to succeed. It was not a 9 to 5 company. People were already working hard; now Musk was implying they needed to do more. He was at turns complimentary, awkward, and intense. The Model 3 was a bet-the-company decision, he said. Everybody needed to work hard and smarter.
Then Musk walked off the stage. The remaining executives decamped to a conference room to continue working through a list of the Gigafactory's problems. Musk, according to one participant, was gone—on to the next task.
Eight months later, Tesla would announce that it had managed to hit its target and [5]produce 5,000 Model 3s in one week. Three months after that, it would report profits of $312 million, well beyond Wall Street's expectations. Musk seemed, once again, to have snatched victory from the maw of catastrophe, proving his critics wrong through ambition and sheer force of will. But the path to that triumph would be more turbulent than almost anyone anticipated. Over the past year, Musk has fascinated, delighted, and horrified his fans and detractors alike by attacking strangers [6]on Twitter, [7]berating analysts on earnings calls, calling a man he had never met a pedophile, and, most consequentially, tweeting that he was considering taking Tesla private at $420 a share with "[8]funding secured," when in fact there was no such funding secured. That tweet would cause the Securities and Exchange Commission to sue Musk [9]for securities fraud and, in a settlement, to compel him to pay $20 million and abandon his company's chairmanship. None of that, however, has chastened Musk, who tweeted in October that the tweet that cost him $20 million was "worth it." The tiger was on the loose.
If it has been strange to watch Musk's wild ride via news reports and social media, it's been even weirder inside the company. Over the past six months I've communicated with dozens of current and former Tesla employees, from nearly every division. They describe a thrilling and tumultuous workplace, where talented engineers and designers have done some of their proudest work but where, as one former executive put it, "everyone in Tesla is in an abusive relationship with Elon." Almost all these employees spoke on the condition of anonymity because of nondisclosure agreements or fears of being sued or fired by Musk. (Even those with positive things to say asked for anonymity.) Most wanted the best for Tesla and said the recent profit report made them hopeful that the company is finally climbing onto firmer ground.
"I think we can fix this," one of musk's top lieutenants, Jon McNeill, told him. McNeill tried to calm him down and repeated a proverb he had once heard: No man comes up with a good idea when being chased by a tiger.
But experience gives them pause. A large number of high-ranking executives have left in the past two years, and Tesla has stumbled over basic tasks like delivering its cars. Working at the firm has been an agony and ecstasy, some say—sometimes toggling between both extremes in a single day.
Tesla, which was given extensive summaries of the reporting in this article, including what took place during Musk's Gigafactory visits and the engineer's dismissal, said through a spokesperson that some aspects were "overly dramatized," "abbreviated," and "ultimately misleading anecdotes that completely lack essential context." The company added that "Elon cares very deeply about the people who work at his companies. That is why, although it is painful, he sometimes takes the difficult step of firing people who are underperforming and putting the success of the entire company" at risk. Tesla also noted that Musk was worried about the comfort and safety of workers when he complained about the vapors in the Gigafactory.
Tesla declined to make Musk, any board members, or any executives except the company's general counsel available for on-the-record interviews. WIRED did hear from an outside law firm representing Tesla and Musk, which objected to the reporting and how questions were being asked, and suggested that WIRED might be sued.
On the day in 2017 that Musk gave his speech at the Gigafactory, he was both despot and savior. There were grand pronouncements, searing interrogations, and a laserlike focus on doing what no one had accomplished before. His speech deflated some and inspired others. "That was a pretty typical Wednesday, actually," one senior executive told me. "That's what it was like until I quit."
Elon Musk didn't start Tesla. But he did, in the most important ways, create it. When Musk invested $6.3 million in Tesla in 2004 and became the firm's chairman, he found a pulpit worthy of his ambitions. Soon he would become chief executive and turn Tesla as much into a cause as a company. "The overarching purpose of Tesla Motors (and the reason I am funding the company) is to help expedite the move from a mine-and-burn hydrocarbon economy toward a solar electric economy," Musk wrote in a 2006 document he called "The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan." "We will not stop until every car on the road is electric," he said at one point. It was a lesson in his approach to life. "Optimism, pessimism, fuck that," he once told WIRED about [10]his other company, SpaceX. "We're going to make it happen. As God is my bloody witness, I'm hell-bent on making it work."
Silicon Valley was built on such audaciousness. Musk's story, in particular, has been embraced as proof that believing in the impossible can sometimes make it real. He was born in South Africa in 1971 and moved to Canada as soon as he completed high school. He didn't have much of a plan—he had only $2,000 when he arrived—but after working odd jobs and enrolling in a local college he eventually made it to the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied economics and physics. After graduating, he founded a company with his brother and a friend and worked constantly, sometimes sleeping under his desk and showering at a local YMCA. They eventually sold their company, earning Musk $22 million. That funded his next startup, which became [11]PayPal, a venture eBay bought for $1.5 billion in 2002. Musk was fantastically rich at the age of 31. Such good fortune wasn't all that unusual in Silicon Valley in the late 1990s. "I could go and buy one of the islands in the Bahamas and, uh, turn it into my personal fiefdom," he told reporters in 1999 as they observed him taking delivery of a $1 million McLaren F1 sports car. "But I'm much more interested in trying to build and create a new company." (Musk later crashed the car.)
These new companies of Musk's imagination would not make ephemeral, digital chaff but, rather, reshape the physical world through struts, thrusters, rocket engines, and steel. Musk started SpaceX; bought Solar City, an alternative energy company; and created the Boring Company to dig a network of [12]high-speed transportation tunnels. But it was Tesla that first demonstrated his world-changing ambitions.
As a leader, Musk managed by example—by working hard, demanding perfection, thinking in unconventional ways, and insisting the inconceivable could be accomplished if it was simply reduced to logical steps. "He's someone who empowers you to be better than you think you can be," said Todd Maron, who was Tesla's general counsel for five years until the company said earlier this month that he would be leaving. "He has extraordinarily high standards, and so he pushes you to be your absolute best." Similar sentiments were expressed by other executives and managers. "He is the smartest person I have ever met," said a former executive at Solar City. "I can't tell you how many times I prepared a report for him and he asked a question that made us realize we were looking at the problem completely wrong."
Many Tesla executives have stories about how Musk reset their concept of the possible, but the classic tale is about retractable door handles. In the mid-2000s, the company was designing the [13]luxury Model S when Musk insisted the car needed handles that would lie flush against its body. They would glide out, as if by magic, just as the owner reached the vehicle, by responding to a signal from an electronic key. "It was unanimous among the executive staff that the complex door handle idea was crazy," said a former executive. It required incredibly complicated engineering, and it solved a problem that no one else thought was actually a problem. But no matter how forcefully executives objected, Musk wouldn't yield. Even once the car was released, the handles sometimes proved troublesome. When Consumer Reports wanted to review a Model S in 2015, it had to postpone the analysis because "the fancy retractable door handles refused to let us in."
But Musk was right. Those door handles quickly became a signature feature. A flush handle is now standard on every new Tesla. "It creates this almost emotional connection with the car, this sense that you're part of the future," the former executive said. "And that's Elon's genius. He knows what people want before they know." This is the familiar pattern: Musk demands something impossible. Colleagues push back. Musk insists. And then innovation occurs at a speed hardly anyone thought possible. When Consumer Reports reviewed the Model S, it said the sedan "performed better in our tests than any other car ever has." More important, Tesla helped prod the rest of the auto industry to begin developing electric cars of their own. Today BMW, General Motors, Jaguar, and Nissan sell fully electric vehicles, and Audi, Mercedes-Benz, and Volkswagen, among others, say they'll soon release their own.
As CEO, Musk was often an emotional leader, colleagues say, sometimes tearing up in front of employees when overcome by frustrations or the importance of the firm's mission. He could also be socially awkward, prickly when others failed to show deference, defensive when corrected. To some he seemed to have a robotic lack of empathy and odd interpersonal mannerisms. "People used to tell me to hunch down lower in my seat during meetings," one former high-ranking executive told me. "Elon reacted better to people when he was sitting higher than them."
In Silicon Valley, people are allowed to be strange. In fact, they are often celebrated for it. At Tesla, Musk's oddness was accepted. He was, after all, the leader, the biggest stockholder, the visionary. But sometimes his impatience would turn into tirades. "We called it 'the idiot bit,' " a senior engineering executive told me. "If you said something wrong or made one mistake or rubbed him the wrong way, he would decide you're an idiot and there was nothing that could change his mind." Musk would openly deride employees in meetings, according to numerous sources, insulting their competence, bullying those who had failed to perform, demoting people on the spot. Musk could afford to fire, because a long list of qualified people wanted to work at Tesla. "It's one of the few companies that is genuinely changing the world," a former executive said. "And everyone was so smart."
"He is the smartest person I have ever met," said a former executive. "I can't tell you how many times … he asked a question that made us realize we were looking at the problem completely wrong."
If Tesla executives weren't exactly giddy, they were at least proud. Tesla sold 50,000 Model S cars in 2015, even as the price started at $76,000. That same year, Tesla introduced [14]the Model X, an SUV with upward-folding falcon-wing doors. The company's revenues soared to $7 billion the next year, and its workforce expanded to nearly 18,000. As Tesla's cars grew in popularity, so did Musk's fame. He played himself in episodes of The Simpsons and The Big Bang Theory and began appearing on red carpets. Millions of people started following him on Twitter, where he would post photos of spacecraft built by his rocket company, spark dialogs with strangers, and produce the occasional technologist's koan. "The rumor that I'm building a spaceship to get back to my home planet Mars is totally untrue," he tweeted in 2015.
"He went from nerd famous to Hollywood famous," said a former longtime executive. "It changes you when you suddenly become a celebrity." Musk bought five different mansions in one Bel Air neighborhood, at a total cost of $72 million. One was a ranch-style house with 16,251 square feet and a screening room for videogames. As Musk's public profile grew, his life became more complicated. After he was divorced from his first wife, with whom he has five children, in 2008, he started dating celebrities (including actress Talulah Riley, whom he married and divorced twice). Some company executives say they began reading celebrity tabloids. If the magazines reported turmoil in Musk's love life, they knew to wait to deliver bad news. And executives followed his tweets and retweets closely. "We called it management by Twitter," a former Solar City employee said. "Some customer would tweet some random complaint, and then we would be ordered to drop everything and spend a week on some problem affecting one loudmouth in Pasadena, rather than all the work we're supposed to do to support the thousands of customers who didn't tweet that day."
Still, Musk's storms were relatively easy to navigate. "He was surrounded by people he knew and trusted, who had been there for a while, who knew how to push back on him," said a former executive who spoke to Musk regularly over much of the past decade. "He listened to us when we said he needed to dial it down. But then the Model 3 happened and everyone started leaving, and then everything started falling apart."
On the morning of March 31, 2016, Musk left one of his Los Angeles homes and drove to a Tesla store in nearby Century City. It was the first day that customers could make reservations for the Model 3. If Musk's plans worked, the midpriced vehicle would sell by the millions and revolutionize transportation. Manufacturing wasn't scheduled to start for at least another year, but buyers who were willing to put down $1,000 could reserve a car.
For weeks, some Tesla executives had wagered among themselves how many people would preorder a Model 3. Some optimists guessed more than 50,000, which would be close to an industry record. When Musk arrived in Century City, though, he saw something amazing. Nearly 2,000 people were standing in a line that wrapped around the building and into the parking lot. Musk began walking in the crowd, slapping hands while his bodyguard occasionally yelled "no selfies, just high-fives." Musk phoned other executives. Tesla stores elsewhere were similarly mobbed. By the end of the day, Tesla had accepted 180,000 reservations. By the end of the week, 325,000 people had ordered a Model 3. Tesla's stock price began to soar. The company had sold fewer than 150,000 cars in its entire history, but within a little over a year it was worth more than General Motors, a company that sold more than 150,000 cars, on average, every week.
Soon after reservations opened, Doug Field, Tesla's senior vice president of engineering, called a meeting of his staff. "You are now working at a different company," he told them. Tesla had to go from a small manufacturer to a mass producer. "Everything has changed," Field said. Field was a critical cog in making sure that change occurred smoothly. Musk had increasingly come to rely on Field and Jon McNeill, Tesla's president of sales, marketing, delivery, and service, to oversee the company's rapidly growing workforce. Both Field and McNeill were seasoned managers, respected in Silicon Valley and by Tesla's staff. They and others had been recruited for their expertise and because running a company with tens of thousands of employees—from hourly workers to PhD scientists—required more than just genius and willpower.
Field was known to be methodical and disciplined. He had received degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and had helped build automobiles at Ford Motor Company. He came to Tesla in 2013 after working at Apple. Leaving Apple "was the hardest career decision I've made," Field said in a 2015 interview. "But it came down to the mission. It felt like a convergence of everything I had done in my career." (A spokesperson for Field declined to discuss his time at Tesla.)
McNeill, a former Bain consultant who had started four companies, joined Tesla in 2015. He was known as a generous mentor who had built a reputation for creating happy workplaces. "The awards that bring me the most satisfaction are the Best Places to Work awards," he told an interviewer in 2012. "Do these awards help us get business? I do not know." But they attracted talent.
Tesla didn't have a chief operating officer, so over time Field and McNeill became de facto daily managers, recruiting or overseeing dozens of vice presidents and other executives. By the time Tesla started taking reservations for the Model 3, that staff had already spent many months planning how it would build the car. The strategy was to start vehicle assembly at the Fremont plant in October 2017, according to a former engineering executive. Initially the factory would start small, giving employees time to smooth out assembly-line kinks and refine work processes. Then Tesla would start ramping up to 5,000 cars a week, the benchmark Musk had said the company needed to achieve.
In the summer of 2016, however—soon after customers began reserving Model 3s—Musk called a meeting that changed everything, according to multiple people who attended or were briefed on the gathering. The company had to move faster, Musk told his senior executives. He wanted to start production in July 2017, almost four months ahead of plan. Musk was excited by a particular notion: He had recently had a dream, people in the room recall him saying, in which he had seen the factory of the future, a fully automated manufacturing plant where robots built everything at high speed and parts moved along conveyor belts that delivered each piece, just in time, to exactly the right place. He said he had been working on such ideas for a while. "This thing will be an unstoppable alien dreadnought," he told his colleagues, causing some of them to pull out their phones and Google the phrase. (It returned disturbing images of sci-fi armored spaceships that looked like copulating squids.)
To make the dreadnought a reality, Musk said, departments would need to redesign their manufacturing plans. The familiar pattern kicked in: Executives told Musk what he was proposing was unrealistic. Tesla was already building the most advanced factory in auto manufacturing, and there would be plenty of time to make incremental improvements and add automation once everything was running smoothly. Overhauling all the lines would cost so much time and money that it might be impossible to meet his expectations.
Musk has said that nearly anything is possible unless it violates the laws of physics. We're going to build the machine that builds the machine, he told the room. But they had to move fast. A fully automated factory, he said, was an investment in Tesla's future that would help the company compete in the coming decades. Over the next few weeks, executives kept arguing with Musk. A steady stream of engineers began giving notice. And a troubling trend emerged, according to former executives: If someone raised concerns or objections, Musk would sometimes pull the person's manager aside and order that the offender be reassigned, or potentially terminated, or no longer invited to meetings. Some executives began excluding skeptics out of self-preservation. "If you were the kind of person who was likely to push back, you got disinvited, because VPs didn't want anyone pissing off Elon," one former executive who reported to Musk told me. "People were scared that someone would question something."
Musk himself would later estimate that Tesla was burning though up to $100 million a week as thousands of employees tried to build Musk's dreadnought. The threat of firing became a drumbeat. One former employee recalled hearing about a colleague who was eating breakfast at his desk when he was called away. His banana went brown and the milk in the cereal bowl formed a film before his officemates realized he'd been fired and cleaned up the mess. Musk "would say 'I've got to fire someone today,' and I'd say, 'No you don't,' and he'd say, 'No, no, I just do. I've got to fire somebody,' " one former high-ranking executive told me. (A Tesla spokesperson disputed this but added that Musk makes "difficult but necessary decisions.") At one meeting Musk, agitated, broke a phone. During another, he noticed that an executive was missing and called him. The man's wife had recently given birth, and he explained that he was taking time off as she recuperated. Musk was angry. At a minimum, you should be on phone calls, Musk told the man. Having a kid doesn't prevent you from being on the phone. (A Tesla spokesperson said that while Musk "was once upset that a particular executive did not dial into an important conference call several days after his child was born," the company would not penalize an employee for taking paternity leave.)
"Everyone came to work each day wondering if that was going to be their last day," another former executive told me. A previous employee remembered Musk saying that Tesla's goal was to save the world. "He would get really emotional," this person told me—and that's why he sometimes seemed callous, "because what's one person's feelings compared to the fate of billions? Elon cares a lot about humanity, but he doesn't really care about individual people all that much." (A Tesla spokesperson said Musk "very much cares about individual people.")
By the summer of 2017, more than a year had passed since Tesla had started taking reservations for the Model 3, but the company was still nowhere near ready to make the car in volume. Engineers were still trying to figure out how to get robots to recognize and reliably grasp different colored wires, how to get parts where they were needed via a maze of conveyor belts. The company was far behind schedule, and some customers were [15]starting to ask for their deposits back. On July 28, the firm hosted a huge press conference and celebration called the Model 3 Handover Party at the Fremont factory. Events like this were important, because Tesla does not spend money on advertising. Instead, it relies on glowing press coverage and ecstatic reviews to help sell cars.
At the party, Musk was scheduled to give the first 30 Model 3 customers—most of them employees—their automobiles. Because the assembly line was not fully functioning, those vehicles had been painstakingly built. Nevertheless, Musk, with a showman's zeal, had tweeted earlier that month that Tesla would be making 20,000 cars a month by year's end.
Once the event started, though, executives became worried. Musk, sitting in a room with his colleagues waiting for the press conference to start, seemed unresponsive, almost dead to the world. He had been dating the actress Amber Heard, but recently they had broken up. Now there was a vacant look on Musk's face.
Executives squatted next to their boss and delivered pep talks. They told Musk he ought to enjoy this moment, when his dream of changing the world was finally becoming real. Musk stared ahead, silent. Eventually he walked into the room where journalists were waiting. His comments started off oddly dark. "We're going to go through [16]six months of manufacturing hell," he said. "It's going to be pretty great, but it's going to be quite a challenge to build this car." He began listing all the things that might go wrong. "Floods, fires, tornadoes, ships sink, if anything interrupts one of our supply chains, that will interrupt the production ramp." Musk answered a few questions. "Sorry for being a little dry," he said. "Got a lot on my mind right now." To some, he appeared irritated to be there.
By that evening, Musk seemed more at ease when he unveiled 30 cars before an audience of hundreds. But the relief was short-lived, according to colleagues. The event marked the start of "a downward spiral," said a former high-ranking executive who was with Musk that day. "He was always a mad genius, but he was about 95 percent genius and 5 percent mad." That summer, possibly due to the breakup with Heard and the stress from the Model 3, the "ratio started to shift, and by the fall it was totally inverted."
Over the next few months, what had once been a tense situation inside Tesla became, as Musk had prophesied, hellish. He did little to mask his angst. One Sunday morning a few days after the Model 3 event, as Musk was scrolling through Twitter on his iPhone, he saw a question posed by a game developer: "Following @elonmusk on Instagram shows an amazing life. I wonder if the ups and down he had make for a more enjoyable life?"
Musk began typing. "The reality is great highs, terrible lows and unrelenting stress. Don't think people want to hear about the last two," he replied. As others chimed in, one asked if Musk thought he suffered from bipolar depression. "Yeah," Musk tweeted back. "Maybe not medically tho. Dunno. Bad feelings correlate to bad events, so maybe real problem is getting carried away in what I sign up for."
At work, Musk sometimes seemed almost giddy, occasionally interrupting meetings to insist that his colleagues watch clips of Monty Python episodes on his computer, according to several people. A particular favorite was a skit of aristocrats debating the virtues of words like antelope versus sausage. He would play it more than once, laughing uproariously each time, as his colleagues waited to return to the issues at hand.
More concerning to executives were Musk's low periods, particularly in the wake of his split from Amber Heard. In the weeks after the first Model 3 handovers, Musk occasionally didn't show up for meetings, or they would be canceled at the last minute, former employees say. Colleagues say they would call him on his cell phone in the morning, to make sure he had started the day. Musk gave bizarre interviews: He described being in "[17]severe emotional pain" to a writer from Rolling Stone and then asked for dating advice. "I will never be happy without having someone," he said. "Going to sleep alone kills me."
In the months after the handover party, Musk seemed angrier than before, according to multiple people. "It started to feel like every day you expected to be fired," said one executive who says he had three supervisors in three days. "There was this constant feeling of dread."
Some managers feared that by taking on more prominent roles they increased their risk of termination or public humiliation. One former executive described Musk shaming her in front of colleagues. "He was shouting that I didn't know what I was doing, that I was an idiot, that he's never worked with someone so incompetent," she told me. In a company with so many male employees, "as a woman it was particularly humiliating," she said.
Musk "puts a lot of effort into forcing himself to be fully honest," says Todd Maron, Tesla's general counsel, "and when he genuinely thinks someone has failed at something, he will let you know."
Todd Maron, Tesla's general counsel, said in defense of Musk that "there's a lot of people outside Tesla who will sort of sugarcoat what they actually think of your performance, or of an issue, because they don't really want to have the hard conversation." Musk, however, "is someone who, I think, puts a lot of effort into forcing himself to be fully honest, and when he genuinely thinks someone has failed at something, he will let you know that he thinks you have failed at that and that the company requires that you do better so that we can achieve our mission and succeed." (A month after I spoke to Maron, Tesla made the announcement that he would be leaving in January, one in a string of recent executive departures, which includes the company's chief information officer, chief people officer, chief accounting officer, and vice presidents of manufacturing, worldwide finance, and engineering.)
Whether it was because of Musk's management style or in spite of it, progress continued. "And that was the weird part," a high-ranking engineering executive said, "because we were doing amazing work. I don't want it to seem like the whole experience was negative, because when people were shielded from Elon, Tesla was amazing. We did incredible things."
By the fall of 2017, parts of the Model 3 assembly line were starting to function smoothly. Production was beginning to pick up. Advances sometimes felt Pyrrhic, though, given Musk's tendency to announce ambitious milestones. (Shareholders have sued the company over such announcements, and the Department of Justice has opened a probe into whether Tesla misled the public about Model 3 projections and production. Tesla, in a statement, said it was cooperating with the Department of Justice and that "Tesla's philosophy has always been to set truthful targets.")
Then, one evening in late October of that year, as things were still going badly inside the Gigafactory, Musk climbed onto the facility's roof and posted a video on Instagram of himself and a few others roasting marshmallows, drinking whiskey, and singing a Johnny Cash song. "That did not go over well," said a former high-ranking engineering executive. "All these people are working super hard, and he's drinking and having a campfire." Soon afterward, the company revealed that it had lost $671 million in the previous quarter and had built only 222 Model 3s; it had lost $1.5 billion in the first nine months of the year. During a November conference call with Wall Street analysts, as his colleagues listened apprehensively, Musk declared: "I have to tell you, I was really depressed about three or four weeks ago." But he had become optimistic. "Now I can see sort of a clear path to sunshine," he said. He had been working nonstop, sleeping in the factory, personally diagnosing robot calibration problems. "We are on it," he added. "We've got it covered."
Some of Musk's colleagues cringed at these statements. Among the biggest obstacles, they believed, was Musk himself. There was disarray at Tesla because Musk kept insisting on automation, because so many people were leaving, because subordinates were terrified that challenging Musk could cost them their jobs.
Some executives felt something more was needed. At least two senior executives approached some of Tesla's board members and said they were worried about Musk, according to people with knowledge of those conversations. Everyone wanted Musk to succeed but he needed help, one executive told them. (Board members Antonio Gracias, Ira Ehrenpreis, and Robyn Denholm, in a statement, said that it "is not true" that they were asked to speak to Musk about his behavior. The board members declined to be interviewed and declined to answer questions about whether they had or sought out conversations about Musk's behavior.)
One person who tried to share concerns with Musk himself was his personal assistant. She approached him one day in private, according to people who later heard about the conversation. Executives are struggling, she told Musk. (In an email, she objected to any suggestion of tension with Musk and declined interview requests.)
Colleagues say the assistant was a gentle, calming presence in Musk's life. It was her job to give him feedback, even if it was sometimes hard to hear. She was beloved by other executives, who often asked her to help them gauge Musk's moods.
A few months later, she left the company.
By early February 2018, top executives were leaving. McNeill told Musk he was quitting, and would go on to become the chief operating officer at Lyft. This was a huge loss—with the possibility of inflaming anxieties among employees and stockholders—and so there were discussions about how to handle disclosing the departure. But after the news leaked, Musk announced the exit as almost an afterthought during a conference call with Wall Street analysts. "Actually, one thing we forgot to mention is Jon McNeill, who is heading up our sales and service group, is departing the company." Musk said. "Going forward, I will be having the sales and service report directly to me."
A few months later, Doug Field indicated he wanted to take a leave of absence, which one person described to The Wall Street Journal as a "six-week sabbatical." Field never returned to Tesla; instead he took a job back at Apple. All told, more than 36 Tesla vice presidents or higher-ranking staffers had left the company in the previous two years. Some of them weren't replaced. Soon, according to various sources, there were 19 people directly reporting to Musk and another 11 executives who did not have superiors. (Tesla disputes those numbers.) Musk had enormous oversight responsibilities, particularly as he was running other companies at the same time. "It felt like the adults were leaving the building," one senior finance person told me. "There was really no one left who could push back on Elon anymore."
By then, even Musk had conceded that the company's fully automated factory vision, the "alien dreadnought," wasn't working. Workers ripped out conveyor belts inside the Fremont plant. Employees began carrying car parts to their workstations by hand or forklift and stacking boxes in messy piles. In April, Musk halted production for an entire week to make repairs. On some level, Musk seemed to recognize that he was undermining Tesla. "Excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake," Musk tweeted. "To be precise, my mistake." He once told a colleague: "We just have to stop punching ourselves in the head."
But the punches kept coming. Musk's Twitter habits accelerated—and sometimes veered out of control. On average, he had tweeted 94 times a month in 2016 and 2017. But after Field and McNeill left, he seemed to get sucked into a social media vortex. He sent 421 messages in May 2018, 414 in June, and 310 in July. The content of the messages was as unrestrained as the frequency. He posted bits of poems, derided journalists, and taunted short-sellers who were betting that Tesla's stock price would fall. "You're an idiot," he tweeted in 2017 at a transit expert who criticized him. "Sorry," he clarified. "Meant to say 'sanctimonious idiot.' " He also sent insults via other means. "You're a horrible human being," he emailed a former employee who had spoken out about Tesla, according to The Washington Post. He sent a BuzzFeed reporter an email calling him a "fucking asshole."
In May, Musk announced the company's latest earnings in a conference call. He made no effort at civility and no one held him back. When a Wall Street analyst asked Tesla's chief financial officer about capital expenditures, Musk responded: "Boring. Bonehead questions are not cool. Next?" With the next question, he erupted again. "These questions are so dry. They're killing me!" and called upon a YouTube video blogger with an enormous enthusiasm for Tesla to ask questions for the next 20 minutes. (The company's stock price dropped more than 5 percent after the call.)
Come summer, news coverage of Tesla was lurching from disaster to disaster. "For a long time, Elon would say or do something kind of wacky, and I would get up in front of my team and explain, this is why you shouldn't worry about it," said one executive who had been with Tesla for some years. "But eventually it got to where I couldn't apologize anymore."
"For a long time, Elon would say or do something kind of wacky, and I would get up in front of my team and explain, this is why you shouldn't worry about it," said a former executive. "But eventually, it got to the point where I couldn't apologize anymore."
Rumors of Musk's behavior made their way to potential hires. One story that numerous people recounted involved a candidate for a retail development position. When he came to his interview with Musk, he wore blue shoes. Musk turned to a colleague and said he didn't like the candidate's shoes. The colleague explained the candidate's qualifications. But Musk was unmoved; he rejected the candidate. (In a statement, a Tesla spokesperson said that Musk rejected the candidate because his experience wasn't right for Tesla, and "the fact that Elon also mentioned in passing that he didn't like the candidate's shoes had nothing at all to do with why he wasn't hired.")
The story, however, came to be seen as an example of Musk's impulsiveness. "After hearing about that, you stop recommending to friends they should apply," a former executive told me. "You don't want to put friends through that."
In June, at Tesla's annual shareholders meeting, Musk seemed sometimes near tears. "This is like—I tell you—the most excruciating, hellish several months that I have maybe ever had," he said. It would eventually come out in Tesla's financial filings that almost 20 percent of customers who had put down a deposit for the Model 3 had asked for refunds.
Musk soon announced Tesla had built a [18]tent in the parking lot of the Fremont factory, where a new assembly line had been constructed. Musk spent his 47th birthday inside the factory, working nonstop. "All night—no friends, nothing," he later told The New York Times.
"The Model 3 production ramp was excruciatingly difficult for everyone at Tesla," a company spokesperson said in a statement to WIRED. "In order for Tesla to succeed, we must have extremely high standards and work harder and smarter than everyone else. Sometimes, when we feel it's important to the success of our mission, that means people are let go. Those decisions are never easy and they are not made lightly, but hard decisions need to be made if we are to succeed. The alternative is the death of sustainable transportation, which is something we simply cannot accept."
On July 1—more than two years after opening reservations for the Model 3—Musk finally sent the jubilant email many employees had been waiting for. "I think we just became a real car company," he wrote. Tesla had manufactured 5,031 Model 3 vehicles during a seven-day period. They had hit their goal, six months late, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars and dozens of executive departures. "What an incredible job by an amazing team," Musk wrote. "Couldn't be more proud to work with you."
Employees inside the company also thought it was amazing, though some cite different reasons.
"For me, the fact that we were able to build at scale, amid all that craziness, that's the real accomplishment," one former engineering executive told me. "Just think about it: We designed a car that is so simple and elegant you can build it in a tent. You can build it when your CEO is melting down. You can build it when everyone is quitting or getting fired. That's a real accomplishment. That's amazing."
It was amazing. But, as everyone knows, after that moment things got, in some ways, even stranger. When a Thai boys' soccer team was trapped in a flooded cave in June, Musk offered to [19]build a submarine to rescue them. But after his assistance was partially rebuffed, he tweeted an accusation that one of the rescuers was a pedophile. (There is no evidence this claim is true, and the rescuer has filed a defamation lawsuit, which is still pending.) Then news broke that, with debts of more than $900 million coming due in March, Tesla had asked suppliers to give back money the company had already paid them. In August, Musk sent the now infamous tweet: "Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured." Tesla's stock soared. It quickly became apparent, though, that Musk had neither nailed down the money to take Tesla private nor had he done the basic groundwork for such an announcement, such as determining what regulatory approvals were necessary, according to a complaint against him by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Musk and Tesla eventually settled the SEC charges for $20 million apiece, and Musk was forced to relinquish his chairmanship of the board. He remains chief executive. (In November, Tesla named board member Robyn Denholm as chair.)
There were other dramas as well. As part of its settlement with the SEC, Tesla is supposed to set up controls and procedures for Musk's communications. A week later, he sarcastically tweeted that the agency had been renamed the "Shortseller Enrichment Commission." In response to a question on Twitter about cosplay, he posted pictures of manga women with captions like "im actually catgirl here's selfie" and solicitations to buy bitcoin. Twitter shut down his account, assuming it had been hacked, until Musk confirmed the posts were his.
Then, in September, on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, [20]Musk smoked marijuana. The video of the moment went viral, and while some people mocked Musk for appearing not to inhale, others raised more serious questions. The show was recorded in California, where recreational cannabis use is legal, but Musk is chief executive of SpaceX—a government contractor that works on national security projects. Musk has received security clearance, according to the Department of Defense, and "individuals with federal security clearances have to abide by federal laws, period. You are not allowed to smoke marijuana, regardless of state law," said Department of Defense spokesperson Audricia Harris. A few weeks before the Rogan podcast, The New York Times reported that "some board members are also aware that Mr. Musk has on occasion used recreational drugs, according to people familiar with the matter."
Tesla, in a statement to WIRED, wrote that the "employees and executives who work with Elon day in and day out, and who know him best, can and do attest to the fact that they have never observed Elon to be under the influence of anything that could affect his judgment at work." The company continued: "SpaceX conducts random drug testing, administered by an independent laboratory, on its employees in a sensitive position—including Elon. Such testing never has shown even trace quantities of drugs in Elon's system." In November, NASA announced it would be conducting a "cultural assessment study" of SpaceX and Boeing to ensure the companies were meeting NASA's requirements of "adherence to a drug-free environment." The Washington Post reported that officials had indicated "the review was prompted by the recent behavior of SpaceX's founder, Elon Musk."
Throughout the summer and into the fall, Musk's public behavior lurched from feisty to angry to almost pitiably distraught. As the weather grew colder, however, Musk seemed to emerge from his gloom. Musk gave interviews to Kara Swisher's Recode Decode podcast, Axios on HBO, and 60 Minutes. He has talked about a range of subjects: how he's been misunderstood and mistreated by journalists, his hope of merging the human brain with machines so we can download our consciousness, his enthusiasm for competition in the electric car business. He also declared to 60 Minutes that he has "no idea how to smoke pot" and said, "I do not respect the SEC." In the Axios interview he said, not for the first time, that the experience of ramping up the Model 3 was among the most difficult of his life. "Seven days a week, sleeping at the factory," he said. "No one should put this many hours into work." Musk looked tired and uncomfortable as he said the company had come within weeks of death, and described how the experience "hurts my brain and my heart." He didn't mention in that interview what his demands had meant to those who worked for him—to the people who had been fired, those who had been screamed at, or those who'd worked long weekends at the Gigafactory.
Musk's odd behavior isn't unique or even extreme in the annals of inventors. Howard Hughes lived like a hermit in hotels, watching movies in the nude and refusing to cut his fingernails. Nikola Tesla, who pioneered alternating current electricity delivery—and who is honored in the name of Musk's company—died destitute, convinced he had invented a motor that could run on "cosmic rays" and obsessed with caring for sick pigeons. (He is reputed to have said of one, "I loved that pigeon as a man loves a woman, and she loved me.")
There's a sense of tragedy in such stories because these men seemed, at one point, to rise above the masses and suggest that genius is possible. Silicon Valley in particular reveres these kind of heroes—and the more willful and ornery they are, the better. Technologists are often called upon to do things that seem impossible, and so they celebrate when doubters are proven wrong—when dismissal of an idea becomes evidence of its visionary reach. The idea of the odd genius is afforded a special status within technology. People lionize inventors who listen to their intuition and ignore naysayers, who hold themselves and everyone else to a standard of perfection, regardless of what it costs those around them. Steve Jobs is gone; now we have Elon Musk.
Throughout the turmoil, workers at Tesla have continued building Model 3s, getting better and faster each day. They still don't sell the car for $35,000—the least expensive version costs at least $10,000 more—but someday, who knows? The large quarterly profit the company announced in October provided the firm with a moment of relief. Some former executives say what concerns them now is whether other car companies—the big ones with well-honed manufacturing systems, steady executives, and functioning bureaucracies—will start making electric cars that are just as good as Tesla's, erasing the company's head start and cachet.
After Musk abandoned his brash proposal to take Tesla private, some on Wall Street argued that the company would benefit from a leadership change. "We are hopeful that … the past 17 days will lead the board down the path to bringing on a more operational CEO, or at a minimum a COO," Cowen and Company analysts wrote after Musk tweeted and then dropped his suggestion about going private. "Now, more than ever, a solid number 2—someone with strong operational background that can help Tesla move from ideas to execution—is crucial," RBC Capital Markets wrote to clients. Some have proposed that Musk might become Tesla's chief design officer—a wizard and motivational force.
"The fact that we were able to build at scale, amid all that craziness, that's the real accomplishment," one former executive said. "We designed a car that is so simple and elegant you can build it in a tent. You can build it when your CEO is melting down."
Others, though, are skeptical. "A strong executive isn't going to come in with him hovering over their shoulder," a former senior executive told me. It is unlikely Musk will give up power, former colleagues say. In January 2018, shareholders agreed to compensate Musk as much as $55 billion over the next 10 years, but only if the Musk continues to lead the company and hits 12 milestones, including a market capitalization of $650 billion, roughly 10 times what it's worth today. (Musk, who is worth more than $20 billion and already owns a great deal of Tesla stock, won't be paid anything at all if Tesla doesn't grow to the targets.) "He's got 55 billion reasons to never let anybody run that company," one executive said.
A Tesla spokesperson said that Musk has proven himself. "The fact that under Elon's leadership we have successfully ramped Model 3 production and just had our most successful quarter in the company's history suggests he was not an obstacle to Tesla's success."
Eric Larkin, who helped oversee factory software until he was fired in April, still feels a strong emotional and financial attachment to Tesla. He'd worked there for three years and was proud to be part of something that could reduce carbon in the atmosphere and "accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy," as the company's mission statement puts it. "Tesla is the only company positioned to make this world a better place, to really improve the world right now," Larkin told me. "And Tesla is Elon. How can you be bitter about humanity's best hope?"
Many I spoke to agreed that Tesla and Musk, for the time being, are inseparable. Which is why they are so bewildered by his behavior and so disappointed that his strengths are accompanied by such curious faults. A few years ago, two Tesla workers were having drinks at a hotel bar across from the Fremont factory when Musk walked in. He was alone except for a bodyguard. They asked Musk if he would like to join their table. Musk sat, and after a few uncomfortable moments started talking about the TV shows he liked, cartoons like South Park and Family Guy. Everyone ordered expensive Scotch and began recounting their favorite episodes from The Simpsons. It was fun. They laughed a lot. It didn't feel normal, exactly. But it also didn't feel scary or bad, as it so often did inside the factory. They could have been anyone, just ordinary friends catching up. Then, after a few hours, Musk paid the bill and walked away, back into his chaotic, frenzied, tigerlike life.
Source photos: Nhat V. Meyer/Bay Area News/Getty Images (Musk); Tom Brakefield/Getty Images (Tiger)
Jason Henry/The New York Times/Redux (Gigafactory)
Mark Brake/Getty Images (Musk); Justin Kaneps/The New York Times/Redux (Car)
Charles Duhigg 21 was part of a team that won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting, writing about Apple for The New York Times. He is the author of best sellers The Power of Habit and Smarter Faster Better.
Correction appended (12-13-2018, 1:00 pm EST): Elon Musk's "horrible human being" email was first reported by The Washington Post, not Business Insider.
This article appears in the February issue. [22]Subscribe now.
Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at [23]mail@wired.com.
1. https://www.wired.com/tag/elon-musk/
2. https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-mid-range-model-3-apple-iphone-xr/
3. https://www.wired.com/2016/07/tesla-gigafactory-elon-musk/
4. https://www.wired.com/tag/tesla/
5. https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-model-3-production-goals/
6. https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-twitter-stock-tweets-libel-suit/
7. https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-model-3-production-profitability/
8. https://www.wired.com/story/can-elon-musk-really-take-tesla-private/
9. https://www.wired.com/story/sec-is-suing-elon-musk/
10. https://www.wired.com/tag/spacex/
11. https://www.wired.com/tag/paypal/
12. https://www.wired.com/story/guide-hyperloop/
13. https://www.wired.com/2009/03/first-look-of-t/
14. https://www.wired.com/2015/09/tesla-model-x-suv-reveal-specs-price/
15. https://www.wired.com/story/canceling-your-model-3-deposit-dont-count-on-a-timely-refund/
16. https://www.wired.com/story/i-drove-a-tesla-model-3/
17. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/elon-musk-the-architect-of-tomorrow-120850/
18. https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-fremont-factory-model-3-production-tent-parking-lot-structure/
19. https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-thailand-cave-boys-rescue-engineering/
20. https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-weed-toke-tesla/
21. http://www.twitter.com/cduhigg
22. https://subscribe.wired.com/subscribe/splits/wired/WIR_Edit_Hardcoded?source=ArticleEnd_CMlink
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Dr. Elon & Mr. Musk: Life Inside Tesla's Production Hell
#hackernews #and #elon #hell #inside #life #musk #production #teslas
Terres Émergées 1 year ago
Photographie de Simon Bezzi Batani
#photo #photographie #photography #argentique #analog #bw #blackandwhite #noiretblanc #hotel #motel #intérieur #inside #halo #art #simonbezzibatani #reve #dream #usa #amerique #fantome #ghost
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Inside Rust's Async Transform
Update: Clarified that C# and JavaScript can be understood as similar to a CPS transform, not that they are actually implemented as one. As you likely know if you're reading this post Rust has an…
Posted by Nemo157 (karma: 132)
\#HackerNews #async #inside #rusts #transform
Article con... Show more...
Update: Clarified that C# and JavaScript can be understood as similar to a CPS transform, not that they are actually implemented as one.
As you likely know if you're reading this post Rust has an upcoming async/await feature being tested in nightly. Because of Rust's unique features and positioning fully understanding the implementation powering this syntax is very different to understanding other well-known implementations (C# and JavaScript's being the ones I am familiar with). Instead of thinking of a [1]CPS-like transform where an async function is split into a series of continuations that are chained together via a Future::then method, Rust instead uses a generator/coroutine transform to turn the function into a state machine (C# and probably most JavaScript implementations use a similar transform under the hood, but as far as I'm aware because of the garbage collector these are indistinguishable from the naive CPS transform they are normally described as). For more detail on why Rust is taking this approach you should read [2]eRFC 2033: Experimental Coroutines, that lays out the why's much better than I could here.
What I'm going to try and provide instead, is a look into how this actually works today. What steps the compiler takes to turn an async fn into a normal function returning a state machine that you could write if you wanted to (but you definitely don't).
First, to provide a nice self-contained example I need to get some setup out of the way. In normal async/await in Rust you will bring in the [3]futures library to handle most of the pieces I'm about to mention; but to be able to provide links to running playgrounds of these examples (and so that you can see all the gristle in these here sausages) I'm going to avoid that.
Also, I'm going to assume complete knowledge of soon to be stable Rust 2018 and the basic futures API (including pinning). I will endeavour to explain all the other nightly features being used, but I have been living in nightly-only for far too long now and may forget some.
Nightly Features
There are only three nightly features needed for the basic setup here, these are what I'm assuming complete knowledge of:
\* async_await to allow using async functions and blocks
\* futures_api to allow using the basic core::future and core::task APIs
\* pin to allow using the basic core::pin APIs
The "Async IO"
To provide a slightly more realistic example I will use the following "trait" for reading in data:
pub struct AsyncRead(Vec); impl AsyncRead { pub fn new(data: Vec) -> AsyncRead { AsyncRead(data) } pub fn read_to_end(&mut self) -> impl Future> + '_ { async move { self.0.clone() } }
This can't be a real trait because it requires generic associated types to declare the return value of read_to_end, so wherever you see AsyncRead in the later function signatures just imagine impl AsyncRead.
You may also note a lack of errors. This is because adding in the additional error handling paths in the last step is a lot of work and I'm lazy. They don't really show anything new either, just more matching and more states to implement to handle the different execution paths.
The "Executor"
To run a Future to completion you require an executor to run it on. First there is the most basic API for an executor that can run a single future to completion:
pub fn block_on
Then, this is the simplest implementation of that executor that simply spins polling the future until it completes (there is an equivalent executor that requires less lines of code, and no unsafety, but it does require use of std::sync::Arc and I'm attempting to use the least powerful implementation of everything here):
The async/await! implementation
Now that we have the setup out of the way, here's the super simple async fn we're going to be expanding. This function takes in a reference to some async IO, constructs a handle to some "random" one-time-pad, waits for both to complete, then XORs the data and pad together to secure the data. It may seem simple here, but once we get to the final stage you're going to be glad I chose something so simple.
pub async fn quote_encrypt_unquote(data: &mut AsyncRead) -> Vec { // one-time-pad chosen by fair dice roll let mut pad = AsyncRead::new(vec![4; 32]); await!(data.read_to_end()) .into_iter() .zip(await!(pad.read_to_end())) .map(|(a, b)| a ^ b) .collect()
Expanding async/await!
The first step on our journey into madness is to simply expand the async fn into a normal function. This has three parts to it:
1. Expanding the await! macro
2. Rewriting the function signature
3. Expanding the body
But first
Before doing the actual async/await! expansion I want to slightly rewrite the function from before. This will be a functionally equivalent function, but by pulling out a few temporary variables the control flow between the different transforms will be easier to follow. Mostly, having await! inside other expressions will greatly complicate the upcoming generator transform.
pub async fn quote_encrypt_unquote(data: &mut AsyncRead) -> Vec { // one-time-pad chosen by fair dice roll let mut pad = AsyncRead::new(vec![4; 32]); let data = await!(data.read_to_end()); let pad = await!(pad.read_to_end()); data.into_iter().zip(pad).map(|(a, b)| a ^ b).collect()
Expanding the await! macro
Currently await! is simply a normal macro [4]defined in std. This is unlikely to last, there are some requirements on it that I believe will necessitate it moving into the compiler, but it makes things slightly simpler here for now. We can expand this macro while still leaving the rest of the async fn alone and still get something that compiles. Note the poll_with_tls_waker function introduced here, I'll come back to it later.
pub async fn quote_encrypt_unquote(data: &mut AsyncRead) -> Vec { use core::{pin::Pin, task::Poll}; use std::future::poll_with_tls_waker; // one-time-pad chosen by fair dice roll let mut pad = AsyncRead::new(vec![4; 32]); let data = { let mut pinned = data.read_to_end(); loop { if let Poll::Ready(x) = poll_with_tls_waker(unsafe { Pin::new_unchecked(&mut pinned) }) { break x; } yield } }; let pad = { let mut pinned = pad.read_to_end(); loop { if let Poll::Ready(x) = poll_with_tls_waker(unsafe { Pin::new_unchecked(&mut pinned) }) { break x; } yield } }; data.into_iter().zip(pad).map(|(a, b)| a ^ b).collect()
Rewriting the function signature
async fn does some slightly funky things to the function signature. The main thing is just taking the return value (R) and wrapping it into impl Future, then the lifetime of the returned future is bound by the lifetimes of all arguments. Currently if you have a function taking multiple references you have to give it a single named lifetime for all those references to use, but I believe the intention is for this to automatically work in the future.
After re-writing the signature the body of the function can be wrapped in an async move { ... } block to keep everything compiling with the exact same semantics as before:
pub fn quote_encrypt_unquote( data: &mut AsyncRead,
) -> impl Future> + '_ { use core::{pin::Pin, task::Poll}; use std::future::poll_with_tls_waker; async move { // one-time-pad chosen by fair dice roll let mut pad = AsyncRead::new(vec![4; 32]); let data = { let mut pinned = data.read_to_end(); loop { if let Poll::Ready(x) = poll_with_tls_waker(unsafe { Pin::new_unchecked(&mut pinned) }) { break x; } yield } }; let pad = { let mut pinned = pad.read_to_end(); loop { if let Poll::Ready(x) = poll_with_tls_waker(unsafe { Pin::new_unchecked(&mut pinned) }) { break x; } yield } }; data.into_iter().zip(pad).map(|(a, b)| a ^ b).collect() }
Expanding the body
Finally to remove all async syntax from the function we can expand the async move { ... } block into a generator and package this into a wrapper Future with from_generator from std::future.
std::future::from_generator is a counterpart to the poll_with_tls_waker function mentioned earlier, these must be used together, the Future created by from_generator will place the &LocalWaker passed in to Future::poll into thread local storage, poll_with_tls_waker will then retrieve this to pass in to sub-futures that are being await!ed on.
) -> impl Future> + '_ { use core::{pin::Pin, task::Poll}; use std::future::{from_generator, poll_with_tls_waker}; from_generator(static move || { // one-time-pad chosen by fair dice roll let mut pad = AsyncRead::new(vec![4; 32]); let data = { let mut pinned = data.read_to_end(); loop { if let Poll::Ready(x) = poll_with_tls_waker(unsafe { Pin::new_unchecked(&mut pinned) }) { break x; } yield } }; let pad = { let mut pinned = pad.read_to_end(); loop { if let Poll::Ready(x) = poll_with_tls_waker(unsafe { Pin::new_unchecked(&mut pinned) }) { break x; } yield } }; data.into_iter().zip(pad).map(|(a, b)| a ^ b).collect() })
Expanding the generator
Now that we have finished the async transform we have the much more complicated generator transform to apply. This transform is implemented in rustc's MIR layer, so has much less direct equivalence to anything we can implement manually in Rust's surface language. I'm going to present a manual implementation of a Generator that does the same thing as the one from the previous snippet, using a sort of similar layout to what rustc would generate, but since this is all very much unstable internals there's no guarantee that rustc will continue to generate something similar to this.
Also, rather than attempting to transform piece by piece like the last section I'm going to first present the entire transformed generator, then pull out pieces to explain from it. The following code block simply replaces everything inside the from_generator call in the previous block.
existential type ReadToEnd<'a>: Future> + 'a; fn read_to_end(read: &mut AsyncRead) -> ReadToEnd<'_> { read.read_to_end()
} struct ManualGenerator<'a> { state: i32, data_1: MaybeUninit<&'a mut AsyncRead>, pad_1: MaybeUninit, pinned_1: MaybeUninit<ReadToEnd<'a>>, data_2: MaybeUninit<Vec>, pinned_2: MaybeUninit<ReadToEnd<'a>>,
} impl<'a> Generator for ManualGenerator<'a> { type Yield = (); type Return = Vec; unsafe fn resume(&mut self) -> GeneratorState<Self::Yield, Self::Return> { match self.state { 0 => { // one-time-pad chosen by fair dice roll self.pad_1.set(AsyncRead::new(vec![4; 32])); self.pinned_1 .set(read_to_end(&mut *self.data_1.as_mut_ptr())); self.state = 1; self.resume() } 1 => { self.data_2.set(loop { if let Poll::Ready(x) = poll_with_tls_waker( Pin::new_unchecked(self.pinned_1.get_mut()), ) { break x; } return GeneratorState::Yielded(()); }); self.pinned_2 .set(read_to_end(&mut *self.pad_1.as_mut_ptr())); ptr::drop_in_place(self.pinned_1.as_mut_ptr()); self.state = 2; self.resume() } 2 => { let pad_2 = loop { if let Poll::Ready(x) = poll_with_tls_waker( Pin::new_unchecked(self.pinned_2.get_mut()), ) { break x; } return GeneratorState::Yielded(()); }; let result = ptr::read(self.data_2.as_mut_ptr()) .into_iter() .zip(pad_2) .map(|(a, b)| a ^ b) .collect(); ptr::drop_in_place(self.pinned_2.as_mut_ptr()); ptr::drop_in_place(self.pad_1.as_mut_ptr()); ptr::drop_in_place(self.data_1.as_mut_ptr()); self.state = -1; GeneratorState::Complete(result) } -1 => panic!("ManualGenerator polled after completion"), -2 => panic!("ManualGenerator polled after dropped"), _ => panic!("ManualGenerator polled with invalid state"), } }
} impl<'a> Drop for ManualGenerator<'a> { fn drop(&mut self) { match self.state { 0 => unsafe { ptr::drop_in_place(self.data_1.as_mut_ptr()); }, 1 => unsafe { ptr::drop_in_place(self.pinned_1.as_mut_ptr()); ptr::drop_in_place(self.pad_1.as_mut_ptr()); ptr::drop_in_place(self.data_1.as_mut_ptr()); }, 2 => unsafe { ptr::drop_in_place(self.pinned_2.as_mut_ptr()); ptr::drop_in_place(self.data_2.as_mut_ptr()); ptr::drop_in_place(self.pad_1.as_mut_ptr()); ptr::drop_in_place(self.data_1.as_mut_ptr()); }, -1 => { /* Everything already dropped in resume */ } -2 => panic!("ManualGenerator dropped twice"), _ => panic!("ManualGenerator dropped with invalid state"), } self.state = -2; }
} impl<'a> ManualGenerator<'a> { fn new(data: &'a mut AsyncRead) -> Self { ManualGenerator { state: 0, data_1: MaybeUninit::new(data), pad_1: MaybeUninit::uninitialized(), pinned_1: MaybeUninit::uninitialized(), data_2: MaybeUninit::uninitialized(), pinned_2: MaybeUninit::uninitialized(), } }
(Unfortunately this playground is too large to be opened via URI, you can find the fully running example for this [5]on GitHub.)
ReadToEnd
The very first part of this code block is a little hack to give a name to an unnameable type. If you look back at AsyncRead::read_to_end you'll see that the return type was declared as impl Future> + '_. Unfortunately we cannot easily store this type into the fields of a struct, so we have this little hack using the existential_type feature to give ourselves a name for the type.
struct ManualGenerator
struct ManualGenerator<'a> { state: i32, data_1: MaybeUninit<&'a mut AsyncRead>, pad_1: MaybeUninit, pinned_1: MaybeUninit<ReadToEnd<'a>>, data_2: MaybeUninit<Vec>, pinned_2: MaybeUninit<ReadToEnd<'a>>,
Next we have the environment definition for the generator. This includes a state variable to keep track of which yield point we are currently at, along with fields for the upvars that were moved into the environment (data_1) and the variables that live across yield points (pad_1, pinned_1, data_2 and pinned_2). Note that any variables that are only alive between yield points are not stored in the environment, these will be normal variables on the stack of the resume function (the final pad result variable, and the temporaries used during polling and the final line).
Each of the fields are stored as MaybeUninit as some of them start uninitialized and others will be dropped before the generator finishes. You might already be able to notice one potential optimization here, pinned_1 and pinned_2 contain the same type but have non-overlapping lifetimes. To keep closer to the real transform I have kept these as separate fields, see [6]rust-lang/rust#52924 for more details.
State 0
0 => { // one-time-pad chosen by fair dice roll self.pad_1.set(AsyncRead::new(vec![4; 32])); self.pinned_1 .set(read_to_end(&mut *self.data_1.as_mut_ptr())); self.state = 1; self.resume()
Now we get into the meat of the generator. First we have the code running from the start of the closure until the beginning of the first loop. We don't go all the way to the yield point because it is a yield point at the end of a loop, we need a state number representing the start of the loop so we can resume there after yielding. In the real transform this would end with a goto to the start of the loop, but it's easier in the Rust surface syntax to just recurse into resume again (we can't stack overflow as we guarantee moving to a new state before recursing and have a limited number of states).
This is a pretty straight-forward transform from the original code, just note that we use MaybeUninit::set to store the variables into the environment instead of = and call our hacky AsyncRead::read_to_end wrapper so that we know the type of the result.
1 => { self.data_2.set(loop { if let Poll::Ready(x) = poll_with_tls_waker( Pin::new_unchecked(self.pinned_1.get_mut()), ) { break x; } return GeneratorState::Yielded(()); }); self.pinned_2 .set(read_to_end(&mut *self.pad_1.as_mut_ptr())); ptr::drop_in_place(self.pinned_1.as_mut_ptr()); self.state = 2; self.resume()
State 1 covers the body of the first loop and the small bit of code between it and the start of the second loop. Here we can see the same sort of straightforward transform as the initial state, with two new things to highlight:
1. The yield; statement is simply replaced with return GeneratorState::Yielded(());. Because the yield is at the end of the loop the next statement to execute after resuming is the start of the loop again so this is relatively simple. In a more complicated generator where there is a yield in the middle of a loop you would need to split the body across multiple states and bounce between them until complete.
2. The pinned variable is dropped at the end of its containing block. We have to use drop_in_place here to avoid moving it before dropping, it doesn't matter for this variable but if we were awaiting some !Unpin futures here then we would cause unsoundness if they were moved before Drop::drop was called.
2 => { let pad_2 = loop { if let Poll::Ready(x) = poll_with_tls_waker( Pin::new_unchecked(self.pinned_2.get_mut()), ) { break x; } return GeneratorState::Yielded(()); }; let result = ptr::read(self.data_2.as_mut_ptr()) .into_iter() .zip(pad_2) .map(|(a, b)| a ^ b) .collect(); ptr::drop_in_place(self.pinned_2.as_mut_ptr()); ptr::drop_in_place(self.pad_1.as_mut_ptr()); ptr::drop_in_place(self.data_1.as_mut_ptr()); self.state = -1; GeneratorState::Complete(result)
Another straightforward transform for the body of the second loop, final statement, and implicit drops of all the closure variables. This is the first time we use a variable by value, we have to use ptr::read to move the final data variable out to call into_iter on it, since we have passed ownership of it off to Vec::into_iter we don't drop this variable, but do drop everything else remaining alive before returning the final result.
Error states
-1 => panic!("ManualGenerator polled after completion"),
-2 => panic!("ManualGenerator polled after dropped"),
_ => panic!("ManualGenerator polled with invalid state"),
We reserve two states for all generators: the generator has completed successfully and the generator has been dropped. A generator should never be polled after either of these states is reached, and should never be able to get into any state we aren't otherwise handling, so we panic if these are reached.
impl<'a> Drop for ManualGenerator<'a> { fn drop(&mut self) { match self.state { 0 => unsafe { ptr::drop_in_place(self.data_1.as_mut_ptr()); }, 1 => unsafe { ptr::drop_in_place(self.pinned_1.as_mut_ptr()); ptr::drop_in_place(self.pad_1.as_mut_ptr()); ptr::drop_in_place(self.data_1.as_mut_ptr()); }, 2 => unsafe { ptr::drop_in_place(self.pinned_2.as_mut_ptr()); ptr::drop_in_place(self.data_2.as_mut_ptr()); ptr::drop_in_place(self.pad_1.as_mut_ptr()); ptr::drop_in_place(self.data_1.as_mut_ptr()); }, -1 => { /* Everything already dropped in resume */ } -2 => panic!("ManualGenerator dropped twice"), _ => panic!("ManualGenerator dropped with invalid state"), } self.state = -2; }
Since we are using MaybeUninit for the fields we also need to implement Drop for our generator manually, the compiler generated drop glue will not do anything. We need to then check what state we are in and drop all the variables that are still alive, before finally marking ourselves as dropped.
ManualGenerator::new
impl<'a> ManualGenerator<'a> { fn new(data: &'a mut AsyncRead) -> Self { ManualGenerator { state: 0, data_1: MaybeUninit::new(data), pad_1: MaybeUninit::uninitialized(), pinned_1: MaybeUninit::uninitialized(), data_2: MaybeUninit::uninitialized(), pinned_2: MaybeUninit::uninitialized(), } }
Finally we need a way to construct the generator from the upvars, this doesn't really get pulled out to a function in the real transform, but it's easier to see what's happening if it is here.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuation-passing_style
2. https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/blob/master/text/2033-experimental-coroutines.md
3. https://github.com/rust-lang-nursery/futures-rs
4. https://doc.rust-lang.org/nightly/std/macro.await.html
5. https://github.com/Nemo157/blag.nemo157.com/blob/master/_posts/_async-transform/playgrounds/manual-generator.rs
6. https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/52924
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Inside China's audacious global propaganda campaign
The long read: Beijing is buying up media outlets and training scores of foreign journalists to 'tell China's story well' – as part of a worldwide influence campaign of astonishing scope and ambition
Posted by Lio (karma: 2182)
\#HackerNews #audacious #campaign #chinas #... Show more...
\#HackerNews #audacious #campaign #chinas #global #inside #propaganda
As they sifted through resumes, the team recruiting for the new London hub of China's state-run broadcaster had an enviable problem: far, far too many candidates. Almost 6,000 people were applying for just 90 jobs "reporting the news from a Chinese perspective". Even the simple task of reading through the heap of applications would take almost two months.
For western journalists, demoralised by endless budget cuts, China Global Television Network presents an enticing prospect, offering competitive salaries to work in state-of-the-art purpose-built studios in Chiswick, west London. CGTN – as the international arm of China Central Television (CCTV) was rebranded in 2016 – is the most high-profile component of China's rapid media expansion across the world, whose goal, in the words of President Xi Jinping, is to "[1]tell China's story well". In practice, telling China's story well looks a lot like serving the ideological aims of the state.
For decades, Beijing's approach to shaping its image has been defensive, reactive and largely aimed at a domestic audience. The most visible manifestation of these efforts was the literal disappearance of content inside China: foreign magazines with pages ripped out, or the BBC news flickering to black when it aired stories on sensitive issues such as Tibet, Taiwan or the Tiananmen killings of 1989. Beijing's crude tools were domestic censorship, official complaints to news organisations' headquarters and expelling correspondents from [2]China.
But over the past decade or so, China has rolled out a more sophisticated and assertive strategy, which is increasingly aimed at international audiences. China is trying to reshape the global information environment with massive infusions of money – funding paid-for advertorials, sponsored journalistic coverage and heavily massaged positive messages from boosters. While within China the press is increasingly tightly controlled, abroad Beijing has sought to exploit the vulnerabilities of the free press to its advantage.
In its simplest form, this involves paying for Chinese propaganda supplements to appear in dozens of respected international publications such as the Washington Post. The strategy can also take more insidious forms, such as planting content from the state-run radio station, China Radio International (CRI), on to the airwaves of ostensibly independent broadcasters across the world, from Australia to Turkey.
Meanwhile, in the US, lobbyists paid by Chinese-backed institutions are cultivating vocal supporters known as "third-party spokespeople" to deliver Beijing's message, and working to sway popular perceptions of Chinese rule in Tibet. China is also wooing journalists from around the world with all-expenses-paid tours and, perhaps most ambitiously of all, free graduate degrees in communication, training scores of foreign reporters each year to "tell China's story well".
Since 2003, when revisions were made to an official document outlining the political goals of the People's Liberation Army, so-called "media warfare" has been an explicit part of Beijing's military strategy. The aim is to influence public opinion overseas in order to nudge foreign governments into making policies favourable towards China's Communist party. "Their view of national security involves pre-emption in the world of ideas," says former CIA analyst Peter Mattis, who is now a fellow in the China programme at the Jamestown Foundation, a security-focused Washington thinktank. "The whole point of pushing that kind of propaganda out is to preclude or preempt decisions that would go against the People's Republic of China."
Sometimes this involves traditional censorship: intimidating those with dissenting opinions, cracking down on platforms that might carry them, or simply acquiring those outlets. Beijing has also been patiently increasing its control over the global digital infrastructure through private Chinese companies, which are dominating the switchover from analogue to digital television in parts of Africa, launching television satellites and building networks of fibre-optic cables and data centres – a "digital silk road" – to carry information around the world. In this way, Beijing is increasing its grip, not only over news producers and the means of production of the news, but also over the means of transmission.
Though Beijing's propaganda offensive is often shrugged off as clumsy and downright dull, our five-month investigation underlines the granular nature and ambitious scale of its aggressive drive to redraw the global information order. This is not just a battle for clicks. It is above all an ideological and political struggle, with China determined to increase its "discourse power" to combat what it sees as decades of unchallenged western media imperialism.
At the same time, Beijing is also seeking to shift the global centre of gravity eastwards, propagating the idea of a new world order with a resurgent China at its centre. Of course, influence campaigns are nothing new; the US and the UK, among others, have aggressively courted journalists, offering enticements such as freebie trips and privileged access to senior officials. But unlike those countries, China's Communist party does not accept a plurality of views. Instead, for China's leaders, who regard the press as the "eyes, ears, tongue and throat" of the Communist party, the idea of journalism depends upon a narrative discipline that precludes all but the party-approved version of events. For China, the media has become both the battlefield on which this "global information war" is being waged, and the weapon of attack.
Nigerian investigative journalist Dayo Aiyetan still remembers the phone call he received a few years after CCTV opened its African hub in Kenya in 2012. Aiyetan had set up Nigeria's premier investigative journalism centre, and he had [3]exposed Chinese businessmen for illegally logging forests in Nigeria. The caller had a tempting offer: take a job working for the Chinese state-run broadcaster's new office, he was told, and you'll earn at least twice your current salary. Aiyetan was tempted by the money and the job security, but ultimately decided against, having only just launched his centre.
As the location of the Chinese media's first big international expansion, Africa has been a testbed. These efforts intensified after the 2008 Olympics, when Chinese leaders were frustrated with a tide of critical reporting, in particular the international coverage of the human rights and pro-Tibet protests that accompanied the torch relay around the world. The following year China announced it would spend $6.6bn strengthening its global media presence. Its first major international foray was CCTV Africa, which immediately tried to recruit highly-respected figures such as Aiyetan.
For local journalists, CCTV promised good money and the chance to "tell the story of Africa" to a global audience, without having to hew to western narratives. "The thing I like is we are telling the story from our perspective," Kenyan journalist Beatrice Marshall said, after being poached from KTN, one of Kenya's leading television stations. Her presence strengthened the station's credibility, and she has continued to stress the editorial independence of the journalists themselves.
[4]China Central Television's headquarters (right) in Beijing.
China Central Television's headquarters (right) in Beijing. Photograph: Ed Jones/AFP/Getty Images
Vivien Marsh, a visiting scholar at the University of Westminster, who has studied CCTV Africa's coverage, is sceptical about such claims. Analysing CCTV's coverage of the 2014 Ebola outbreak in west Africa, Marsh found that 17% of stories on Ebola mentioned China, generally emphasising its role in providing doctors and medical aid. "They were trying to do positive reporting," says Marsh. "But they lost journalistic credibility to me in the portrayal of China as a benevolent parent." Far from telling Africa's story, the overriding aim appeared to be emphasising Chinese power, generosity and centrality to global affairs. (As well as its English-language channel, CGTN now runs Spanish, French, Arabic and Russian channels.)
Over the past six years, CGTN has steadily increased its reach across Africa. It is displayed on televisions in the corridors of power at the African Union, in Addis Ababa, and beamed for free to thousands of rural villages in a number of African countries, including Rwanda and Ghana, courtesy of StarTimes, a Chinese media company with strong ties to the state. StarTimes' cheapest packages bundle together Chinese and African channels, whereas access to the BBC or al-Jazeera costs more, putting it beyond the means of most viewers. In this way, their impact is to [5]expand access to Chinese propaganda to their audience, which they claim accounts for 10m of Africa's 24m pay-TV subscribers. Though industry analysts believe that these numbers are likely to be inflated, broadcasters are already concerned that StarTimes is edging local companies out of some African media markets. In September, the Ghana Independent Broadcasters Association warned that "If StarTimes is allowed to control Ghana's digital transmission infrastructure and the satellite space … Ghana would have virtually submitted its broadcast space to Chinese control and content."
For non-Chinese journalists, in Africa and elsewhere, working for Chinese state-run media offers generous remuneration and new opportunities. When CCTV launched its Washington headquarters in 2012, no fewer than five former or current BBC correspondents based in Latin America joined the broadcaster. One of them, Daniel Schweimler, who is now at al-Jazeera, said his experience there was fun and relatively trouble-free, though he didn't think many people actually saw his stories.
But foreign journalists working at Xinhua, the state-run news agency, see their stories reaching much larger audiences. Government subsidies cover around 40% of Xinhua's costs, and it generates income – like other news agencies, such as the Associated Press – by selling stories to newspapers around the world. "My stories were not seen by 1 million people. They were seen by 100 million people," boasted one former Xinhua employee. (Like most of the dozens of people we interviewed, he requested anonymity to speak freely, citing fear of retribution.) Xinhua was set up in 1931, well before the Communists took power in China, and as the party mouthpiece, its jargon-laden articles are used to propagate new directives and explain shifts in party policy. Many column inches are also spent on the ponderous speeches and daily movements of Xi Jinping, whether he is meeting the Togolese president, examining oversized vegetables or casually [6]chatting to workers at a toy-mouse factory.
Describing his work at Xinhua, the former employee said: "You've got to think it's like creative writing. You're combining journalism with a kind of creative writing." Another former employee, Christian Claye Edwards, who worked for Xinhua news agency in Sydney between 2010 and 2014, says: "Their objectives were loud and clear, to push a distinctly Chinese agenda." He continued: "There's no clear goal other than to identify cracks in a system and exploit them." One example would be highlighting the chaotic and unpredictable nature of Australian politics – which has seen six prime ministers in eight years – as a way of undermining faith in liberal democracy. "Part of my brief was to find ways to exert that influence. It was never written down, I was never given orders," he said.
Edwards, [7]like other former employees of China's state-media companies, felt that the vast majority of his work was about domestic signalling, or telegraphing messages that demonstrated loyalty to the party line in order to curry favour with senior officials. Any thoughts of how his work was furthering China's international soft power goals came a distant second. But since Edwards left in 2014, Xinhua has begun looking outwards; one sign of this is the existence of its Twitter account – followed by 11.7 million people – even though Twitter is banned in China.
Outright censorship is generally unnecessary at China's state-run media organisations, since most journalists quickly gain a sense of which stories are deemed appropriate and what kind of spin is needed. "I recognised that we were soft propaganda tools – but not to any greater extent than for the BBC or al-Jazeera, and certainly nothing like RT," said Daniel Schweimler, who worked for CCTV in South America for two years. "We always joked that we'd have no interference from Beijing or DC so long as the Dalai Lama never came to visit."
When the Dalai Lama did come to visit Canada in 2012, one journalist in Xinhua's Ottawa bureau, Mark Bourrie, was placed in a compromising position. On the day of the visit, Bourrie was told to use his parliamentary press credentials to attend the Tibetan spiritual leader's press conference, and to find out what had happened in a closed-door meeting with the then prime minister, Stephen Harper. When Bourrie asked whether the information would be used in a piece, his boss replied that it would not. "That day I felt that we were spies," [8]he later wrote. "It was time to draw the line." He returned to his office and resigned. Now a lawyer, Bourrie declined to comment for this story.
His experience is not unusual. Three separate sources who used to work at Chinese state media said that they sometimes wrote confidential reports, knowing that they would not be published on the newswire and were solely for the eyes of senior officials. Edwards – who wrote one such report on Adelaide's urban planning – saw it as "the lowest level of research reporting for Chinese officials", essentially providing very low-level intelligence for a government client.
That vanishingly thin line between China's journalism, propaganda work, influence projection and intelligence-gathering is a concern to Washington. In mid-September this year, the US ordered CGTN and Xinhua to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (Fara), which compels agents representing the interests of foreign powers in a political or quasi-political capacity to log their relationship, as well as their activities and payments. Recently Donald Trump's campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was charged for violating this act by failing to register as a foreign lobbyist in relation to his work in Ukraine. "Chinese intelligence gathering and information warfare efforts are known to involve staff of Chinese state-run media organisations," a congressional commission noted last year.
"Making the Foreign Serve China" was one of Chairman Mao's favoured strategies, as epitomised by his decision to grant access in the 1930s to the American journalist Edgar Snow. The resulting book, Red Star Over China, was instrumental in winning western sympathy for the Communists, whom it depicted as progressive and anti-fascist.
Eight decades on, "making the foreign serve China" is not just a case of offering insider access in return for favourable coverage, but also of using media companies staffed with foreign employees to serve the party's interests. In 2012, during a series of press conferences in Beijing at the annual legislature, the National People's Congress, government officials repeatedly invited questions from a young Australian woman unfamiliar to the local foreign correspondents. She was notable for her fluent Chinese and her assiduously softball questions.
It turned out that the young woman, whose name was Andrea Yu, was working for a media outlet called Global CAMG Media Group, which is headquartered in Melbourne. Set up by a local businessman, Tommy Jiang, Global CAMG's ownership structure obscures the company's connection to the Chinese state: it is 60% owned by a Beijing-based group called Guoguang Century Media Consultancy, which in turn is owned by the state broadcaster, China Radio International (CRI). Global CAMG, and another of Jiang's companies, Ostar, run at least 11 radio stations in Australia, carrying CRI content and producing their own Beijing-friendly shows to sell to other community radio stations aimed at Australia's large population of Mandarin-speakers.
After the Beijing press pack accused Yu of being a "[9]fake foreign reporter", who was effectively working for the Chinese government, she told an interviewer: "When I first entered my company, there's only a certain amount of understanding I have about its connections to the government. I didn't know it had any, for example." She left CAMG shortly after, but the same performance was repeated at the National People's Congress two years later with a different Chinese-speaking Australian working for CAMG, Louise Kenney, who publicly [10]pushed back against accusations of being a shill.
The use of foreign radio stations to deliver government-approved content is a strategy the CRI president has called jie chuan chu hai, "borrowing a boat to go out to the ocean". In 2015, [11]Reuters reported that Global CAMG was one of three companies running a covert network of 33 radio stations broadcasting CRI content in 14 countries. Three years on, those networks – including Ostar – now operate 58 stations in 35 countries, according to information from their websites. In the US alone, CRI content is broadcast by more than 30 outlets, according to a combative [12]recent speech by the US vice president, Mike Pence, though it's difficult to know who is listening or how much influence this content really has.
Beijing has also taken a similar "borrowed boats" approach to print publications. The state-run English-language newspaper China Daily has struck deals with at least 30 foreign newspapers – including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and the UK Telegraph – to carry four- or eight-page inserts called China Watch, which can appear as often as monthly. The supplements take a didactic, old-school approach to propaganda; recent headlines include "Tibet has seen 40 years of shining success", "Xi unveils opening-up measures" and – least surprisingly of all – "Xi praises Communist party of China members."
[13]'China Watch' supplement data graphic
Figures are hard to come by, but according to [14]one report, the Daily Telegraph is paid £750,000 annually to carry the China Watch insert once a month. Even the Daily Mail [15]has an agreement with the government's Chinese-language mouthpiece, the People's Daily, which provides China-themed clickbait such as tales of bridesmaids on fatal drinking sprees and a young mother who sold her toddler to human traffickers to buy cosmetics. Such content-sharing deals are one factor behind China Daily's astonishing expenditures in the US; it has spent $20.8m on US influence since 2017, making it the highest registered spender that is not a foreign government.
The purpose of this "borrowed boats" strategy may also be to lend credibility to the content, since it's not clear how many readers actually bother to open these turgid, propaganda-heavy supplements. "Part of it really is about legitimation," argues Peter Mattis. "If it's appearing in the Washington Post, if it's appearing in a number of other papers worldwide, then in a sense it's giving credibility to those views."
In September, Donald Trump [16]criticised this practice, claiming China was pushing "false messages" intended to damage his prospects in the midterm elections. His wrath was directed at a China Watch supplement in the Iowa-based Des Moines Register, designed to undermine farm-country support for a trade war. He tweeted: "China is actually placing propaganda ads in the Des Moines Register and other papers, made to look like news. That's because we are beating them on Trade, opening markets, and the farmers will make a fortune when this is over!"
In the Xi Jinping era, propaganda has become a business. In a 2014 speech, propaganda tsar Liu Qibao endorsed this approach, stating that other countries have successfully used market forces to export their cultural products. The push to monetise propaganda provides canny businesspeople with opportunities to curry favour at high levels, either through partnering with state-run media companies or bankrolling Chinese proxies overseas. The favoured strategy now is not just "borrowing foreign boats" but buying them outright, as the University of Canterbury's Anne-Marie Brady [17]has written.
The most visible example of this came in 2015, when China's richest man acquired the South China Morning Post (SCMP), a 115-year-old Hong Kong paper once known for its editorial independence and tough reporting. Jack Ma, whose Alibaba e-commerce empire is valued at $420bn, has not denied suggestions that he was asked by mainland authorities to make the purchase. "If I had to bother about what other people speculated about, how would I get anything done?" he said in December 2015. Around the same time, Alibaba's executive vice-chairman Joseph Tsai made clear that under new ownership, the SCMP would provide an alternative view of China to the one found in western media: "A lot of journalists working with these western media organisations may not agree with the system of governance in China and that taints their view of coverage. We see things differently, we believe things should be presented as they are," Tsai [18]told an interviewer.
[19]Jack Ma, CEO of the Alibaba group and owner of the South China Morning Post.
Jack Ma, CEO of the Alibaba group and owner of the South China Morning Post. Photograph: STR/AFP/Getty
The task of executing that mission has fallen to 35-year-old CEO Gary Liu, a Mandarin-speaking California native with a Harvard degree, who had previously worked as chief executive of the digital news aggregator Digg and before that, on the business side of the music streaming company Spotify. When we spoke via Skype, Liu sounded a little bit uncomfortable when asked how well the SCMP is fulfilling Tsai's vision. "The owners have their set of language, and the newspaper has our convictions," he said. "And our conviction is that our job is to cover China with objectivity, and to do our best to show both sides of a very, very complicated story." The paper's role, as he sees it, is "to lead the global conversation about China." And to achieve that goal, Liu is being given significant resources. Staffers talk of "staggering" expenditures, with one employee describing the number of new hires "like the cast of Ben Hur".
Even under new ownership, the SCMP treads a delicate line on China, continuing to run granular political analysis and original reporting on sensitive issues such as human rights lawyers and religious crackdowns. Though pages are free from Xinhua copy, cynics joke the paper itself is transmogrifying into a kind of China Daily-lite, with increasing prominence given to stories about Xi Jinping, pro-Beijing editorials and politically on-message opinion pieces. All this is combined with constant, fawning coverage of owner Jack Ma, memorably described by the paper as a "modern-day Confucius".
Two stories in particular have been heavily criticised. First, in 2016, it published [20]an interview with a young human rights activist named Zhao Wei, who had disappeared into police custody a year before. In the interview, the activist's quotes, recanting her past behaviour, were reminiscent of Mao-era "self-criticism". Fears she had spoken under duress were confirmed a year later, when she admitted she'd given her "candid confession" after being held in a heavily monitored cell for a year – "No talking. No walking. Our hands, feet, our posture … every body movement was strictly limited," [21]she wrote.
Then, earlier this year, the SCMP accepted a "[22]government-arranged interview" with bookseller Gui Minhai. Gui, a Swedish citizen, was one of five sellers of politically sensational books who [23]disappeared in [24]2015 – in his case from his home in Thailand – and then reappeared in police custody in China in 2016. The SCMP interview was conducted in a detention facility, with Gui flanked by security guards.
But Liu is adamant that the paper has not made any missteps on his watch. He says the paper was invited – not forced – to cover these stories. In Gui's case, he insists the decision was based on journalistic merit: "The senior editorial leadership team got together, and said: This is important for us to show up. If not, there's a very high likelihood that the other stories reported do not share the entire situation. In fact, a lot of the other reports did not mention the fact that there were security guards standing on either side of Gui Minhai at the start and at the end of the interviews." Liu stressed that "there is a significant difference between how we reported it, and how we would expect state propaganda to report it." But many in Hong Kong were distressed that a journal once seen as a paper of record was effectively running a forced confession on behalf of the Chinese state.
To insiders, even the paper's hardhitting coverage of China forms part of a broader strategy. "It's all smoke and mirrors," longtime contributor Stephen Vines said. "It's so pernicious because a lot of is quite plausible." In November, Vines issued a [25]public statement announcing he will no longer write for the paper. A current SCMP journalist described "a veneer of press freedom", noting, "It's not so much that pieces are pulled and changed. It's where they're positioned, how they're promoted. The digital revolution has made that all very easy to do. You write whatever you want, but the people control what we see." The SCMP has countered public criticism of censorship aggressively, even running [26]a column in which a senior editor blamed censorship accusations on "butthurt ex-Post employees with axes to grind".
Chinese money is also being invested in print media far from home, including in South Africa, where companies linked to the Chinese state have a 20% stake in Independent Media, the country's second-largest media group, which runs 20 prominent newspapers. In cases like this, Beijing's impact on day-to-day operations can be minimal, but there are still things that cannot be said, as one South African journalist, Azad Essa, recently discovered when he used [27]his column, which ran in a number of newspapers published by Independent Media, to criticise Beijing's mass internment of Uighurs. Hours later, his column had been cancelled. The company blamed a redesign of the paper, which had necessitated changes in the columnists used.
But Essa pulled no punches in [28]a piece he subsequently wrote for Foreign Policy: "Red lines are thick and non-negotiable. Given the economic dependence on the Chinese and crisis in newsrooms, this is rarely confronted. And this is precisely the type of media environment that China wants their African allies to replicate." This is true not just in Africa, but for China's media interests across the world.
These days Australia has come to be seen as a petri dish for Chinese influence overseas. At the heart of the row is a controversial Chinese billionaire, Huang Xiangmo, whose [29]links to Labor party politician [30]Sam Dastyari [31]precipitated Dastyari's resignation in 2017. Three years earlier, Huang provided A$1.8m of seed funding to establish the Australia China Relations Institute, a thinktank based at the University of Technology Sydney. ACRI, which is led by former foreign minister Bob Carr, aims to promote "a positive and optimistic view of Australia-China relations".
In the past two years, ACRI has spearheaded a programme organising study tours to China for at least 28 high-profile Australian journalists, whisking them on all-expenses tours with extraordinary access. Many of the breathless resulting articles – footnoting their status as "guests of ACRI" or "guests of the All China Journalist Association" – accord remarkably closely with Beijing's strategic priorities. As well as paeans to China's [32]modernity and size, the articles advise Australians [33]not to turn their backs on China's [34]One Belt One Road initiative, and [35]not to publicly criticise China's policy towards the South China Sea, or [36]anything else for that matter.
Close observers believe the scheme is tilting China coverage in Australia. Economist Stephen Joske briefed the first ACRI tour on the country's economic challenges, and was dismayed at the largely uncritical tone of their coverage. "Australian elites have very little real exposure to China," he said. "There is a vacuum of informed commentary and they [ACRI-sponsored journalists] have filled it with very, very one-sided information."
Participants on the study tours do not downplay their influence. "I found the trip fantastic", says one reporter who asked not to be named. "In Australia, the reporting often doesn't go beyond having a one-party communist system. There's a lot of positive things happening in China in terms of technology, business and trade, and that doesn't get a lot of positive coverage." Others treat the trips with more caution. "You go on these trips knowing you're going to be getting their point of view," says the ABC's economics correspondent Peter Ryan, who went on an ACRI-sponsored trip in 2016.
ACRI responded to our questions about the trips by issuing a statement, saying that its tours "pale into insignificance" compared with similar trips organised by the US and Israel. A spokesman wrote: "Not for a moment has ACRI ever lobbied journalists about what they write. They are free to take whatever position they want." The spokesman also confirmed that in-kind support to the trips has been given by the All-China Journalists Association, a Communist party body whose mission is to "tell China's stories well, spread China's voice". For his part, Huang Xiangmo said he has no involvement in ACRI's operations.
ACRI is a relatively new player in this game. Since 2009, the China-United States Exchange Foundation (Cusef), headed by Hong Kong's millionaire former chief executive Tung Chee-hwa, has taken 127 US journalists from 40 US outlets to China, as well as congressmen and senators. Since Tung has an official position – vice-chairman of the Chinese government advisory body, the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference – Cusef is registered as a "foreign principal" under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (Fara).
A picture of how Cusef has worked to sway coverage of China inside the US can be found in Fara filings by a PR firm working for the foundation since 2009. BLJ Worldwide, which has also represented Syria's Bashar al-Assad, the Gaddafi family, and Qatar's World Cup bid, organised journalist tours and cultivated a number of what it calls "third-party supporters" to marshal positive coverage of China in the US. In one year alone, 2010, BLJ's target was to place an average of [37]three articles per week in the US media, in venues such as the Wall Street Journal, for which it was paid around $20,000 a month. In a memo from November 2017, BLJ lists eight recommended third-party supporters who, it claimed, "can engage by writing their own op-eds, providing endorsements of Cusef, and potentially speaking to select media". Fara filings also show that in 2010, BLJ discussed how to influence the way US schoolchildren are taught about China's much-criticised role in Tibet. After conducting a review of four high-school textbooks, BLJ proposed "a strong, factual counter-narrative be introduced to defend and promote the actions of China within the Tibet Autonomous Region".
Over the past decade, Cusef has widened its remit, mooting ambitious cultural diplomacy plans to influence the US public. According to a January 2018 memo, one of the schemes included a plan to build a Chinese "town called Gung-Ho in Detroit". The memo suggests redeveloping an entire city block to showcase Chinese innovation using design elements from both countries, with a budget of $8-10m. The memo even suggests shooting a reality TV show following the progress of the Gung-Ho community as "a living metaphor for the promise of the US-China relationship". Given Detroit's parlous state, the memo concludes, "It will be very difficult for the news media to be critical of the project."
Cusef responded to questions about its activities with a statement, saying: "Cusef has supported projects which enhance the communication and understanding between peoples of US and China. All of our programmes and activities operate within the framework of the laws and we are fully committed to carrying out our work by maintaining the highest standard of integrity." BLJ did not respond to requests for comment.
China's active courtship of journalists extends well beyond short-term study tours to encompass longer-term programmes for reporters from developing countries. These moves were formalised under the auspices of the China Public Diplomacy Association, established in 2012. The targets are extraordinarily ambitious: the training of 500 Latin American and Caribbean journalists over five years, and 1,000 African journalists a year by 2020.
Through these schemes, foreign reporters are schooled not just on China, but also on its view of journalism. To China's leaders, journalistic ideals such as critical reporting and objectivity are not just hostile, they pose an existential threat. One leaked government directive, known as [38]Document 9, even defines the ultimate goal of the western media as to "gouge an opening through which to infiltrate our ideology". This gulf in journalistic values was further underlined in a series of CGTN videos issued last year, featuring prominent Chinese journalists accusing non-Chinese practitioners of being "[39]brainwashed" by "western values of journalism", which are depicted as irresponsible and disruptive to society. One Xinhua editor, Luo Jun, argues in favour of censorship, saying, "We have to take responsibility for what we report. If that's being considered as censorship, I think it's good censorship."
With its fellowships for foreign reporters, Beijing is moving to train a young generation of international journalists. A current participant in this programme is Filipino journalist Greggy Eugenio, who is finishing up an all-expenses-paid media fellowship for reporters from countries participating in China's grand global infrastructure push, the [40]Belt and Road Initiative. For 10 months, Eugenio has been studying and travelling around China on organised tours, as well as doing a six-week internship at state-run television. Twice a week he attends classes on language, culture, politics and new media at Beijing's Renmin University of China, as he works towards a master's degree in communication.
"This programme continuously opens my mind and heart on a lot of misconceptions I've known about China," Eugenio said in an email. "I've learned that a state-owned government media is one of the most effective means of journalism. The media in China is still working well and people here appreciate their work." Throughout his time in China, he has been filing stories for the state-run Philippine News Agency, and when he finishes next month he will return to his position writing for the presidential communication team of Filipino president Rodrigo Duterte.
Some observers argue the expansion of authoritarian propaganda networks – such as Russia's RT and Iran's Press TV – has been overhyped, with little real impact on global journalism. But Beijing's play is bigger and more multifaceted. At home, it is building the world's biggest broadcaster by combining its three mammoth radio and television networks into a single body, the Voice of China. At the same time, a reshuffle has transferred responsibility for the propaganda machinery from state bodies to the Communist party, which effectively tightens party control over the message. Overseas, capitalising on the move from analogue to digital broadcasting, it has used proxies likesuch as StarTimes to increase its control over global telecommunications networks, while building out new digital highways. "The real brilliance of it is not just trying to control all content – it's the element of trying to control the key nodes in the information flow," says Freedom House's Sarah Cook. "It might not be necessarily clear as a threat now, but once you've got control over the nodes of information you can use them as you want."
Such blatant exhibitions of power indicate the new mood of assertiveness. In information warfare – as in so much else – Deng Xiaoping's famous maxim of "hide your strength and bide your time" is over. As the world's second-largest economy, China has decided it needs discourse power commensurate with its new global stature. Last week, a group of the US's most distinguished China experts released [41]a startling report expressing concern over China's more aggressive projections of power. Many of the experts have spent decades promoting engagement with China, yet they conclude: "The ambition of Chinese activity in terms of the breadth, depth of investment of financial resources, and intensity requires far greater scrutiny than it has been getting."
As Beijing and its proxies extend their reach, they are harnessing market forces to silence the competition. Discourse power is, it seems, a zero-sum game for China, and voices that are critical of Beijing are co-opted or silenced, left without a platform or drowned out in the sea of positive messaging created by Beijing's own "borrowed" and "bought" boats. As the west's media giants flounder, China's own media imperialism is on the rise, and the ultimate battle may not be for the means of news production, but for journalism itself.
• Follow the Long Read on Twitter at [42]@gdnlongread, or sign up to the long read weekly email [43]here.
1. http://chinamediaproject.org/2017/09/29/the-fable-of-the-master-storyteller/
2. https://www.theguardian.com/world/china
3. https://www.icirnigeria.org/how-china-fuels-deforestation-in-nigeria-west-africa/
4. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/dec/07/china-plan-for-global-media-dominance-propaganda-xi-jinping#img-2
5. https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2018/10/20/china-is-broadening-its-efforts-to-win-over-african-audiences
6. http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2018-10/24/c_137553538_3.htm
7. https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/10/01/chinas-global-propaganda-is-aimed-at-bosses-not-foreigners/
8. https://ottawamagazine.com/people-and-places/society/the-ex-files-journalist-mark-bourries-behind-the-scenes-account-of-his-two-years-in-the-employ-of-xinhua/
9. http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2012/s3632894.htm
10. https://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2014/03/29/fake-foreign-reporters-in-china-another-view/
11. https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/china-radio/
12. https://www.hudson.org/events/1610-vice-president-mike-pence-s-remarks-on-the-administration-s-policy-towards-china102018
13. https://interactive.guim.co.uk/uploader/embed/2018/12/chinawatch-zip/giv-3902F3YNNYT2VqA9/
14. https://www.hongkongfp.com/2016/04/03/china-spends-big-on-propaganda-in-britain-but-returns-are-low/
15. https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2016/aug/12/mail-online-goes-into-partnership-with-the-peoples-daily-of-china
16. https://www.apnews.com/823dcdd6a1d4469880c536766a296639
17. https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/magic-weapons-chinas-political-influence-activities-under-xi-jinping
18. https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1890057/alibaba-buys-south-china-morning-post-full-qa-executive-vice-chairman
19. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/dec/07/china-plan-for-global-media-dominance-propaganda-xi-jinping#img-3
20. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/1988501/young-chinese-legal-activist-regrets-civil-rights
21. http://www.chinaaid.org/2017/05/tortured-legal-assistant-breaks-silence.html
22. https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/law-crime/article/2132797/sweden-using-me-chess-piece-says-detained-hong-kong
23. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/22/how-china-snatched-gui-minhai-train-beijing-bookseller-hong-kong
25. https://www.hongkongfp.com/2018/11/13/i-will-no-longer-write-south-china-morning-post/
26. https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1934542/censorship-south-china-morning-post-fact-fiction-and-fallacy
27. https://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/china-thinks-islam-disease-and-muslim-leaders-don-t-care-198998028
28. https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/09/14/china-is-buying-african-medias-silence/
29. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/dec/12/sam-dastyari-quits-labor-senator-china-connections
32. https://www.smh.com.au/opinion/the-difference-between-australia-and-china-is-the-way-we-think-20160802-gqivi4.html
33. https://www.afr.com/brand/chanticleer/opportunities-for-business-in-chinas-one-belt-one-road-20170523-gwaqoo
34. https://www.smh.com.au/business/australia-not-part-of-chinas-silk-road-expansion-of-trade-for-now-20160730-gqh5r8.html
35. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/opinion/lets-tread-carefully-on-south-china-sea-ruling/news-story/12769c0f95be73b9ea5f04c946455bfc
36. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/foreign-affairs/megaphone-diplomacy-with-china-will-always-fail-bob-carr/news-story/a9c9ea5d8e75ba0752dbec48936369b4
37. https://efile.fara.gov/docs/5875-Exhibit-AB-20110714-23.pdf
38. http://www.chinafile.com/document-9-chinafile-translation
40. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/ng-interactive/2018/jul/30/what-china-belt-road-initiative-silk-road-explainer
41. https://www.hoover.org/research/chinese-influence-american-interests-promoting-constructive-vigilance
42. https://twitter.com/@gdnlongread
43. https://www.theguardian.com/info/ng-interactive/2017/may/05/sign-up-for-the-long-read-email
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#hackernews #audacious #campaign #chinas #global #inside #propaganda
When An #Earthquake #Strikes, #Crawl #Inside This #Egg-Shaped #Safety #Pod
If you're driving when an earthquake strikes, you should pull to the side of the road, advises the U.S. government. If you're indoors, it suggests, stay away from door frames. But what if the earthquake is strong enough to reduce the building you're currently in to a pile of rubble?
https://futurism.com/egg-pods-humans-save-life-earthquake/
#earthquake #strikes #crawl #inside #egg-shaped #safety #pod
Thieves boosting signal from key fobs inside homes to steal vehicles
Auto thefts are on the rise across the Greater Toronto Area, by 30 per cent in the city alone, and wireless key fobs may have a role to play.
Posted by colinprince (karma: 14400)
Post stats: Points: 106 - Comments: 122 - 2018-12-05T14:30:55Z
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In late August, Sean Panchal and his wife had just settled down to relax after putting their newborn to bed when they saw car lights through the curtains of their Danforth-area home in Toronto.
At first, they thought it may be another car going by.
Later, they discovered someone had hopped into their Toyota RAV4 and driven away.
"I sort of went outside to see if I could see anything or see which direction they went, and that was essentially it," Panchal said.
Later that week, police found the car in a Scarborough parking lot with the plates and all of the vehicle's contents, including two strollers and a car seat, removed.
Panchal did get his car replaced through insurance, but months later, he still wonders how the thief got inside.
Panchal says the thieves completely emptied his car before dumping it in a Scarborough parking lot in suburban Toronto. (Sean Panchal)
According to Markham automotive security specialist Jeff Bates, owner of Lockdown Security, wireless key fobs have a role to play in many recent car thefts, with thieves intercepting and rerouting their signals — even from inside homes — to open and steal cars.
"We've seen it anecdotally through some of our clients that have come in that have some new vehicles that surprisingly have gotten stolen," he said.
Bates said the spike is so great, a local Toronto car dealership selling new Lexus vehicles asked his company to install tracking systems on all high-end SUVs because so many of their vehicles are being stolen.
One of his customers, who came from the dealership, had his car stolen three times by thieves rerouting the key-fob signal, according to Bates.
The increased need for Bates's security services comes as police are seeing a spike in auto thefts across the GTA.
In Toronto, they're up 30 per cent compared to this time last year. The Toronto Police Service couldn't provide a representative to speak about the rise, but told CBC Toronto they'll hold a news conference on high-end vehicle thefts this week.
In Durham, auto thefts are up 16 per cent this year, and in Halton, there have been 517 cases so far this year, compared to 490 in total last year.
Toronto police reported 4,250 auto theft cases by Dec. 3, 2018, compared to 3,358 at this time last year. By year end in 2017, they reported 3,526, as seen above.
Police in Peel and York regions did not have their 2018 auto theft data readily available.
Relay thefts
According to Bates, many of these thieves are using a method called "relay theft."
Key fobs are constantly broadcasting a signal that communicates with a specific vehicle, he said, and when it comes into a close enough range, the vehicle will open and start.
"The way that the thieves are getting around this is they're essentially amplifying that low power signal coming off of the push start fob," he said.
"They will prey upon the general consensus that most people are leaving their key fobs close to the front door of their home and the vehicle will be in the driveway."
The thief will bring a device close to the home's door, close to where most keys are sitting, to boost the fob's signal.
They leave another device near the vehicle, which receives the signal and opens the car.
Many people don't realize it, Bates said, but the thieves don't need the fob in the car to drive it away.
The Toronto Police Service's 11 Division posted this photo on Nov. 26 to warn people about relay thefts. (Toronto Police Service)
"The vehicle will continue running in perpetuity until it runs out of gas or until you shut it down," he said.
"They do that for safety so that if you lose the key fob or if it loses signal the vehicle doesn't shut down while you're driving, but that right there is part of the vulnerability."
Panchal said he isn't sure thieves used this method to take his car, but he didn't see any signs of forced entry after it was recovered.
"It's pretty insane just to think about something like that even happening. I guess that's what they're doing these days, right? If that's what they can do, that's what they will do."
Earlier this year, an Oakville, Ont., man caught his alleged thief on-camera seemingly using the relay theft method, as seen below.
Sebastian Bielawski posted this video in July after waking up to find his Lexus RX 350 2017 had vanished from his Oakville driveway. He believes he's the victim of a relay theft. 0:37
How to protect your vehicle
According to Bates, the automotive industry made a trade-off when it started creating push-start fobs, putting convenience ahead of security.
Some manufacturers are working to fix the fob vulnerabilities, but there are ways vehicle owners can protect themselves.
The first tip, Bates said, is to not keep your keys by the front door.
"If you do live in a house, try to leave your keys either upstairs or … as far away from the vehicle as possible," he said.
"The other thing that you can do is there are products out there that you can put your key fob into," such as a faraday cage — a box used to block radio signals — a key pouch, which works similarly, or even a steel box.
Bates said it's important to look at solutions, considering more and more vehicles are being equipped with remote start fobs.
"I think it's going to continue to happen and I don't think we've seen the end of it. I think it's going to be even more and more prevalent."
Auto theft on the rise in Toronto area, and a security expert thinks he knows why | CBC News
#hackernews #boosting #fobs #from #homes #inside #key #signal #steal #thieves #vehicles
By Sarah Noltner
people sitting inside bus
Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/pM9397vVfFY
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Sarah Noltner (@sarah_noltner) | Unsplash Photo Community
See the best free to download photos, images, and wallpapers by Sarah Noltner on Unsplash.
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Inside the latest Martian robot
#inside #latest #martian #robot
Inside the latest Martian robot | ZDNet
Lucy Condachian of SSL gives us the scoop on how her team designed the robotic arm that is about to dig into Mars.
#ftag=rssbaffb68 #inside #latest #martian #robot
30,000 empty homes and nowhere to live: inside Dublin's housing crisis
Dublin's landlords would rather put their properties on Airbnb than rent to local families. There are echoes in cities around the world
Posted by CharlesDodgson (karma: 315)
\#HackerNews #30000 #and #crisis #dublins #empty... Show more...
\#HackerNews #30000 #and #crisis #dublins #empty #homes #housing #inside #live #nowhere
The room Jenny Quinn shares with her 10-year-old son is about 10 sq metres, kitted out with the most basic furniture and dominated by what looks like a prison-issue metal bunkbed on which they both sleep. There is a small en suite bathroom; behind a heavy wooden shutter, the window looks out on to a bare expanse of concrete.
"He's in drama therapy in school, for anxiety," she tells me. "He cries a lot. He doesn't believe in Santy [Father Christmas] any more. He's not an angry child, but he's lonely: he's so, so lonely. There's no kids his age here: they're all babies. The PlayStation's his best friend, because he can get on that headset and talk to his friends from school. That's it."
For want of a flat with a secure tenancy, the two of them have lived here for almost two years, in what the Irish government calls a "hub": a residential centre for homeless families, of a kind introduced in 2017. This one is run by a housing association called Respond, and is the temporary home of about 35 adults – most of them single women – and their children.
With hideous symbolism, its location was once the convent adjacent to the biggest of the [1]Magdalene laundries: the prison-like workhouses run by nuns in which thousands of unmarried mothers were incarcerated and serially abused. This one was called High Park. In 1993, a mass grave was discovered here, which was found to contain the remains of 155 women. Quinn says the place has a sense of "negativity in the walls"; she does her best to shield her son from any conversations about the facility's awful past.
The night before I meet Quinn, I stay in a flat just to the north of Dublin's city centre, booked via [2]Airbnb, which she and her son would presumably jump at. As if to prove that I am not the only person there paying for a short let, there is a gaggle of young men in the flat above me, who – despite the fact that it is Monday – repeatedly sing a dire and apparently drunken version of Robbie Williams's Angels between midnight and 1am. But the buggies and tricycles on each landing suggest that most of my temporary neighbours are families.
I pay £95 for a single night's stay (including a £43 "cleaning fee"), which highlights why whoever owns it has decided to rent it out in this way. The same move has been made by scores of other landlords: in August 2018, there were reckoned to be 3,165 entire properties listed on Airbnb in Dublin, compared with only 1,329 available for long-term rent.
This is one vivid element of a housing crisis that combines the most contorted aspects of the private market with a rising need that continues to go unanswered. About 10,000 people in [3]Ireland are reckoned to be homeless. The number of families who have nowhere to live has increased by more than 20% since 2017. These are national problems, but they are inevitably concentrated in Ireland's capital, home to more than 10% of the country's population. In the four months between June and September, 415 Dublin families – including 893 children – became newly homeless, adding to a total across the city of about 1,400. Increasing numbers are being forced to live in hotels.
Meanwhile, residential neighbourhoods echo to the clack-clack-clack of suitcase wheels. The city is smattered with key boxes for Airbnb apartments. A stock line among activists demanding action from the government gets to the heart of all this: in 21st-century Dublin, they say, homeless families stay in hotels, and tourists stay in houses.
Last week, a survey titled the Expat City Ranking found that among people who live and work abroad, Dublin came out as the world's worst capital for affordable accommodation. Since the summer, there have been repeated protests in the city, focused most spectacularly on occupations of vacant buildings. This Saturday, a protest organised by the [4]National Homeless and Housing Coalition is expected to attract thousands of people to the middle of Dublin, set on making the case for housing as a basic human right and venting their anger and fear about a simple enough fact: that Ireland's capital is fast becoming an impossible place to live and thousands of lives are being ruined as a result.
Quinn's story is a perfect case in point. Until February 2017, she and her son had been living in a two-bedroom flat in the Dublin suburb of Finglas. She had spent a long time working as a PA before her father's diagnosis with cancer triggered a spell of depression that left her unemployed. To make things even more difficult, her landlord then decided to sell up, which forced her to suddenly confront a private-rented housing market in which the monthly rent for anything similar was well over €1,500 (£1,300). In the absence of any available social housing, she had no option but to declare herself homeless.
The most she has been offered so far is a government-assisted move back into a private-rented flat funded by a new benefit called housing assistance payment. She says that in the current housing climate, a private tenancy would put her at risk of the same experience she had last year ("I could take it and then a year later that landlord could decide to sell and I'll be back at square one"), and more disruption for her son. So, she is currently on a waiting list for a council flat that could take years to materialise and in the middle of a predicament that extends to her friends and relatives.
"I have two friends who both work full-time," she says. "They came home from New Zealand three years ago. They're living in their ma's shed. Their two kids are in bunkbeds in the house. I have friends in their 30s who can't leave home. I have friends who live in log cabins."
Within minutes of arriving in Dublin, the urgency of Ireland's housing crisis is highlighted by how often the issue crops up on the TV and radio. The Greater Dublin area is reckoned to have more than 30,000 properties that are completely empty, many of which are owned by the local council. Thanks chiefly to Ireland's corporate tax rate of 12.5%, Dublin is home to the European HQs of Facebook, TripAdvisor, [5]LinkedIn, Twitter, Google, eBay and, poetically enough, Airbnb. The number of high-paid employees who work for such companies is one of the reasons advertised rents in the city now average around €1,900 a month. As Brexit grinds on, there are fears that if companies relocate from the UK to Ireland, it will only add to Dublin's housing problems.
[6]Jenny Quinn and her son.
Jenny Quinn and her son. Photograph: Jenny Quinn
For all that the crisis has specifically Irish elements, it is full of echoes of what is happening elsewhere. In the UK, at least 320,000 people are homeless, about 170,000 of them in London. In Copenhagen, youth homelessness has increased by 75% since 2009. Between 2013 and 2017, the number of homeless people in Warsaw rose by 37%. In Athens, one in 70 people are reckoned to have nowhere to live. Even in Germany, the supposed embodiment of "social Europe", there is rising anxiety about a homelessness problem made much worse by the fact that state-owned homes have been sold in huge volumes to private investors. In most of these cases, you find much the same basic themes: the decline of public housing, the arrival of gentrification, the way that tourism now collides with the housing needs of local people, and the sense that city economies built around multinational companies inevitably exclude thousands of people.
The first person I arrange to meet in Dublin is Rory Hearne, an academic who is at the heart of the swirl of politics and protest around the housing crisis. When we talk in the cafe of an upmarket hotel near Dublin's main railway station, he traces what is happening in Ireland back to the 1980s and the way that successive governments restricted the building of public housing. "In the 1970s," he tells me, "a third of all new housing was built by the state. But by 2006, it was down to 5%."
The free-market boom that saw Ireland's economy hailed as the Celtic Tiger, he goes on, was partly built on the easy availability of mortgages and a frenzy of house-building and land-buying, both of which fed into the crash of 2008. In its wake, Ireland saw the phenomenon of "ghost estates": housing developments left unfinished as funding suddenly dried up. At the same time, mortgages and property portfolios were sold at knock-down prices to international "vulture funds", which also bought up huge swathes of land that often have been left empty – partly, says Hearne, because scarce land and housing keeps rents and property prices high.
In 2014, Ireland began a supposed economic recovery, recently crowned by an annual economic growth rate of over 5%. "But you had a private construction industry that had been decimated," says Hearne. "You also had a generation coming in who can't get mortgages, and the growth of precarious work. And all these things come together: people who either used to get housing from local authorities, or who bought their home, were now all going into the private rental sector. So, of course, what happened? Rents started shooting through the roof.
"Homelessness also started to rise. You now see this completely new phenomenon called family homelessness: predominantly lone parents, because lone parents' welfare was cut. Rents are rising, benefits are being cut – and they're being pushed into homelessness."
Since then, he says, the housing shortage has reached parts of the population who would once have considered themselves relatively affluent. "I had a class last week: a mixture of mature and regular students. I asked them: who thinks they'll own their home? Out of 80, not one person put up their hand. That's a shocking, shocking thing."
Dublin's ongoing wave of housing protests is partly the work of people who were energised by the successful campaign to repeal Ireland's ban on abortion. They burst forth again this summer, in the form of a new umbrella group called Take Back the City. In August, its activists occupied a building called Summerhill House, which had until recently been the temporary home of foreign students, said to be paying €450 a month to stay four or five to a room, in bunkbeds. The protests then moved to another empty building on North Frederick Street, where a 12-day occupation was eventually ended by a mixture of private security guards and police officers. To the shock of observers, some of the security guards and the police [7]wore masks.
Protesters then occupied a third building before, in October, about 30 activists moved on to Airbnb's offices in Dublin's old docklands district.
[8]Conor Reddy, during Take Back the City's Department of Housing occupation.
Conor Reddy, during Take Back the City's Department of Housing occupation. Photograph: Conor Reddy
Conor Reddy is a 23-year-old genetics undergraduate at Trinity College Dublin, and a key Take Back the City activist. We meet just after he has finished his morning's lectures; among the first thing he mentions is that he still lives at home with his parents. "If you live in Dublin, that's very common; almost universal," he says. "So, I guess I can't complain. But I've got one friend who lives in Gorey in County Wexford and, throughout the first and second year in college, he was commuting every single day. Four hours a day in a car or a bus. People are commuting crazy distances. They can't engage with college life; they have no time."
Reddy talks me through what Take Back the City has been doing since the summer, and his own involvement in the protests. At North Frederick Street, he says, his exit from the building was followed by police violence: "We kind of wanted to have a blockade of the road. And within a moment, I was grabbed by five or six officers and dragged behind their riot van, out of sight of everybody … and I got knees, and elbows, and punched. There were three of us who were hospitalised. And it was interesting that the people who were arrested were people who had been very vocal in the media."
A police spokeswoman commented that the body's role at such events "is to facilitate peaceful protest while protecting the rights of individuals to do their lawful work safely … Our objective with any such operation is to ensure the safety of the public."
Later the same day, I spend an hour and a half with a Take Back the City insider who will only go by his first name, Aaron. As well as talking, we visit two of the city-centre properties occupied by protesters: huge, opulent Georgian constructions that are still mystifyingly empty. In one of them, there are signs of what recently happened: most notably, a poster pressed up against a dusty window that simply says: "This could be a home."
"I'm a 32-year-old man, still living in my parents' house," Aaron tells me. "As far as my friends and people I know are concerned, half of them don't live in Ireland any more. They live in Australia or Canada. Why? Lack of jobs after the financial crisis and, when the economy improved, no houses to come back to here."
He explains the techniques of what he calls "political occupation", whereby a day is divided into four shifts, and no one can stay in an occupied building for more than two shifts in a row. "You don't want people to get burned out," he says. "You're constantly in fear that the door's going to get smashed in." He talks me through the temporary occupation of Airbnb's offices, which were being used as the location for a series of public talks as part of a day of events focused on Dublin's architecture, and thus suddenly open to a protest.
"The actions have to be symbolic in some way," he says. "While we've been heavily involved in demanding the use of public land for housing, Airbnb is compounding the crisis even more. We're in the midst of a housing emergency, and Airbnb plays a large role in that. And as much as we focus on public land and public housing, Airbnb has to be brought to account as well."
If Ireland's housing crisis has a face and voice, it is probably Erica Fleming, a 33-year-old mother of one who is now a student at Trinity, studying for a degree in English. In 2015, she was working as a receptionist at a Dublin company when she went through a relationship break-up and found that her €1,000-a-month earnings meant she had no hope of finding a flat. "I asked Dublin city council for help," she says. "The only option was to present me and my daughter as homeless."
Over an hour in a crowded Caffè Nero, she explains her experiences and how much they have changed her. She and her daughter became homeless before the hubs were introduced, so she had no choice but to find a hotel or B&B that would accept her, and then re-contact the council, which would foot the bill. "But at the start, nowhere would take us," she says. She spent months pinballing between places: "We had a night here, a night there, with a carful of stuff. I was still going to work every day, with Emily going to school."
Eventually, she found a hotel that allowed them to stay for just under two years. "Emily used to always say: 'How much longer, how much longer, how much longer?' That was a constant question. And then one day, it dawned on me that she hadn't asked me. And it just killed me. Because I knew then that she had given up.
"I was trying to keep it together so well that I had become robotic. You're just in the one room, so you don't want to let your child see any hurt or pain that you're experiencing. You want to be the person that provides stability. So I used to put Emily into bed at night-time, turn off the lights, and I'd go and sit on the toilet and cry."
During this time, she would regularly contact the city council about the empty houses she saw. "I was showing them photos and saying: 'Here's a property, here's a property, here's a property.' We were passing these houses every day. Council houses. And because I'd gone public, people – carpenters, plasterers, painters – were getting in touch with me, saying: 'We will do it up for you. Just get the key.'
"But the council wouldn't do it. They said that for safety reasons, they couldn't agree. That really did my brain in. It made no sense at all."
[9]Erica Fleming outside Trinity College Dublin.
Erica Fleming outside Trinity College Dublin. Photograph: Brian Lawless/PA
Like Quinn, Fleming resisted the suggestion that she should use the housing assistance payment system and move into a private-rented flat, for fear of being evicted. In April last year, she moved into a council flat, whose rent is assessed according to her income. Her decision to become a student via Trinity's access scheme, she says, was motivated by the fact that without more qualifications: "I was never going to get ahead, ever. There was just a constant poverty trap."
In between her studies, Fleming is now a regular speaker at housing protests, and a familiar presence in the Irish media, where she has gone through a grimly predictable process of being variously praised, doubted and intruded on. Like just about everyone in Ireland's new housing movement, she has seemingly simple demands: action on the issue of empty properties, and a huge new programme of public housing. She is both baffled and outraged by what she sees as the government's reluctance to act.
"It's pure lack of will," she says. "Nobody can sit here and justify why there are so many boarded-up properties. I cannot explain to you how much that irritates me."
Ireland is governed by the centre-right party Fine Gael. So far, its proposed solutions have extended to a plan to assist in the building of 150,000 new homes over the next 20 years on plots the government owns, 40% of which will be classified as either "social" or "affordable". What exactly these terms mean remains unclear: in an emailed statement, a spokesperson for the Department of [10]Housing, Planning and Local Government said that "there is no legal definition of an 'affordable home' – the cost reduction will be decided on a site-by-site basis". Even if the homes concerned are genuinely within people's reach, Hearne insists that the drawbacks of the policy are self-evident. "The majority of the housing that's going to be built will be unaffordable," he says. "What sort of housing policy is that? What sort of economic policy is that? Where is any sort of logic in it?"
Central Dublin – along with 20 other areas of the country – is now classified as a "rent pressure zone", which caps annual rent increases at 4%, but politicians and activists claim this gets nowhere near tackling the causes of skyrocketing housing costs. In the capital as a whole, rents still went up by an average of more than 12% in the year to March 2018.
[11]Nine-year-old Rebecca Cash, who lives with her mother in a bedsit, during Take Back the City's Dublin protest.
Nine-year-old Rebecca Cash, who lives with her mother in a bedsit, during Take Back the City's Dublin protest. Photograph: Brian Lawless/PA
Independently of its 20-year goals, the government has plans for social housing that were first implemented in 2016 under the banner of "Rebuilding Ireland". It claims that this will result in the creation of 50,000 such homes by 2021, two-thirds of which will be newly built. Hearne cautions that official numbers of "new" social homes include existing properties that have simply been refurbished, and that the vast majority of the demand for social homes will continue to be met by pushing people into private-rented housing and making payments to their landlords, a policy that critics say simply adds to rent inflation. As they see it, all this boils down to a depressingly familiar problem: the Irish establishment's bedazzlement with the very same free market that caused the country's housing crisis in the first place.
There are two other elements of the Irish government's plans. It now has what it calls a "[12]national [13]vacant [14]housing strategy", which, among other things, means that councils have been requested to draw up "vacant homes action plans" to set targets for the number of empty homes that "can ultimately be brought back into use, whether for private sale or rent, or for social housing purposes". And, in an attempt to tackle the problems sown by Airbnb and its ilk from June next year, an annual cap of 90 days will apply for the short-term renting of properties.
The Dublin charity Inner City Helping Homeless (ICHH) carries out unending outreach work with the city's rough sleepers and also does its best to help families who simply cannot find anywhere to stay. Among the people who keep it going is Brian McLoughlin. Until last year, he worked at the Dublin offices of eBay; he now does "a bit of consultancy work" between unpaid work at the charity's city centre HQ. "I feel a little bit like I'm using my brain for good rather than evil," he says.
As he sees it, the government's plan to restrict Airbnb rentals to 90 days will not tackle the fundamental problem in central Dublin. "A landlord could still rent somewhere on weekends through the year," he says. "They could make enough money from that not to go through the worry of getting a permanent tenant." He believes the cap should be 40 or 50 days. He and his colleagues, he says, have heard from people evicted by landlords who claimed they needed to refurbish or redevelop their flats, only to see their former homes advertised on Airbnb, "with no refurbishment done. Nothing."
It is perhaps some token of the mess that sits underneath the housing crisis that McLoughlin's charity has tried to talk to Airbnb about what is going on, to no avail. "We've reached out to them on more than one occasion. You don't get anything back. We wanted to sit down and have a talk, but we didn't get a reply." My repeated attempts to get Airbnb to contribute a comment to this article drew a similar blank.
The company's role in the housing crisis is not just a matter of flats booked online by tourists; in a particularly surreal twist, ICHH increasingly uses Airbnb to find emergency accommodation for homeless families. "That's a regular thing," says McLoughlin. "In the first six months of this year, I think we spent €30,000 on families coming to us late at night, when homeless services had told them to go and sleep in a police station. They come here with their children at half eight, half nine at night, and we have to jump on with an Airbnb or a short-term let, and pay the money just to get that family somewhere for a night."
Not for the first time, I get the strong impression that one of the key things standing in the way of any resolution of Ireland's housing crisis is that the status quo aligns with an array of powerful interests. Landlords benefit from endlessly rising rents; hoteliers receive millions of euros to put up homeless families. McLoughlin puts the problem in simple terms: "Homelessness is a massive business for a lot of people, so why would they want it to end?"
[15]The Watermarque Building, home to Airbnb's Dublin HQ.
The Watermarque Building, home to Airbnb's Dublin HQ. Photograph: Niall carson/PA
At one end of the crisis, then, lies no end of money. At the other are thousands of people who are barely clinging on. Quinn says the reason she wants to talk about her homelessness goes back into her family history. "It's the mental health aspect," she says, explaining that four of her immediate family were once at a so-called "industrial school" called Goldenbridge, run by nuns. "Every one of them became alcoholics," she says.
She then turns her attention to homelessness, and life in hubs like hers. "I think you are now going to have a generation of young girls that are addicted to anti-anxiety medication and antidepressants. I can't get through a day without taking my anti-anxiety medication. If I was to stay here with you without taking it … well, once I get going, I'm fine. But once I'm in that room, I feel like I can't breathe. I feel like the walls are closing in on me."
In the Airbnb where I stayed, the next occupants are presumably living the short-let dream of pristine furniture and fittings, Deliveroo food, plentiful booze and Robbie Williams singalongs. Meanwhile, in their room at the hub, Quinn and her son are grimly killing time.
She is not allowed any alcohol in her room, nor any visitors. "There are even simpler things we're not allowed to have, like a candle," she tells me. "On a Friday night when my son goes out with his dad … I don't have money to go out any more.
"But to be able to light a candle, and have a bottle of wine, stick on a bit of Netflix – Jesus Christ, is that too much? Is that not just normality?"
•Follow Guardian Cities on [16]Twitter, [17]Facebook and [18]Instagram to join the discussion, and explore [19]our archive here.
1. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/feb/05/magdalene-laundries-ireland-state-guilt
2. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/airbnb
3. https://www.theguardian.com/world/ireland
4. https://www.facebook.com/NationalHomelessandHousingCoalition/
5. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/linkedin
6. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/nov/29/empty-dublin-housing-crisis-airbnb-homelessness-landlords#img-2
7. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/masked-men-secure-dublin-property-after-housing-activists-removed-1.3626087
10. https://www.theguardian.com/society/housing
11. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/nov/29/empty-dublin-housing-crisis-airbnb-homelessness-landlords#img-5
12. https://www.housing.gov.ie/housing/home-ownership/vacant-homes/vacant-homes
16. https://twitter.com/guardiancities
17. https://www.facebook.com/guardiancities
18. https://www.instagram.com/guardiancities/?hl=en
19. https://www.theguardian.com/cities
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Inside the sordid world of America's for-profit colleges
The new documentary Fail State, executive produced by Dan Rather, tells the 50-year tale of profit-driven colleges scamming society's most vulnerable
Posted by SmkyMt (karma: 755)
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In 2014, film-maker Alex Shebanow read about Corinthian Colleges, one of America's largest for-profit college companies, while working on a documentary about student loan debt.
Relying heavily on federal student loans, from which it took $1.4bn in yearly revenue, Corinthian was on the brink of collapse after the department of education [1]halted the company's flow of federal funding due to evidence of rampant fraud in its reporting of grades and job placements.
Corinthian, a behemoth of the for-profit college industry that marketed its vocational and post-secondary programs to single mothers at or below the poverty line, was already under investigation by various federal agencies, the education department, and 20 different state attorneys general when it said it could not operate for more than a few days without an influx of cash. Internal documents revealed the for-profit specifically targeted "isolated" and "impatient" individuals with "low self-esteem".
It was this run-in with the sordid underbelly of the predatory for-profit college industry – and a multi-state [2]investigation into a company, QuinStreet, that set up an ostensibly government-run website funneling veterans to for-profits – that inspired Shebanow to expand the scope of his project. The result is his new [3]documentary Fail State, an expansive and infuriating account of the rise of profit-driven colleges, their devastating effects on low-income students, and the ways Republicans and Democrats have aided and abetted their treachery.
"I don't know how these people can sleep at night," says Shebanow, whose work so impressed Dan Rather that the famed journalist signed on as an executive producer. "A lot of people don't realize what's percolating beneath the surface. It was crazy that no one had done a documentary on this until now and that it took a bunch of twentysomething film-makers to do it. I was always so worried someone was going to come out with a documentary of their own because the story is so big and important. I thought there was no way we were the only ones doing it. But somehow, that was the case."
[4]IFrame
As Fail State explains in broad, digestible fashion, all of this began in 1972, when for-profits, often called proprietary, vocational, or career-driven colleges, became eligible for federal student aid under an amendment to Lyndon B Johnson's Higher Education Act of 1965. The rerouting of financial aid money from institutions to students themselves was meant to allow private universities to compete with public ones, whose low costs made enrollment swell. But this opened the door for profit-driven colleges, who took advantage of the desire to make higher education more inclusive by encouraging students to take out huge sums of financial aid money.
These companies promised students eventual employment and, since the money was coming from taxpayers, had no vested interest in whether or not the students could pay back their loans. As an expert says in Fail State, for-profits had what amounted to risk-free access to the US treasury. Predictably, default rates soared in the 1980s, with almost half of all students at these colleges defaulting on their loans. By 1992, however, lawmakers began to wise up to the predatory recruitment practices and the virtually useless degrees these colleges were offering students.
At the time, a series of congressional hearings, and the attention of Congresswoman Maxine Waters (who appears in the documentary), helped set in motion a series of provisions that would allow for oversight of the for-profit industry: the 85-15 rule, requiring that at least 15% of the companies' revenue came from sources other than government student aid; the 50/50 rule, ensuring no more than half of college courses were offered online or by mail; and the incentive compensation rule, banning college recruiters from receiving bonuses based on how many students they lured to the program. In the following decade, though, congressional interest in policing the for-profit sector waned and many of these regulations were dismantled or otherwise softened.
[5]Congresswoman Maxine Waters in Fail Safe.
Congresswoman Maxine Waters in Fail Safe. Photograph: Gravitas Ventures
Shebanow's documentary guides viewers through all this potentially wonky information with a careful hand, emphasizing the fact that Democrats and Republicans alike have been guilty of lenience toward and even support for profit-driven colleges. Sally Stroup, George W Bush's assistant secretary for postsecondary education, was previously a lobbyist for the Apollo Education Group, which runs several for-profit institutions such as the University of Phoenix and Western International University. [6]Nancy Pelosi and members of the Congressional Black Caucus, too, have also been historically cozy with representatives of the for-profit sector.
"It wasn't like we set out to make the most non-partisan film that we could," says the director. "It was more like, 'Here are the facts'. And it was in some ways a happy accident that this issue transcends red and blue politics."
Where Fail State makes its greatest impact is in the testimony it provides from students who were scammed. They attest to being harassed with phone calls, emotionally manipulated, deceived about costs, and persuaded that their post-secondary educations would land them implausibly high-paying jobs. A two-year [7]investigation by the Senate health, education, labor and pensions committee, producing what Shebanow calls one of the most "damning" reports on a single industry in congressional history, found evidence of aggressive and insidious practices like the "pain funnel", a [8]script from which recruiters would read that was designed to prod at emotionally or financially susceptible prospective students.
A year into production, Shebanow and his team scoured the internet for these students and found hundreds of them commiserating in comments sections and company reviews.
"Part of what is so phenomenally saddening to me is that the people who are being affected and preyed upon by these schools are some of the most voiceless in our society, and their arcs are very similar," says Shebanow, noting that students often encountered television, subway or internet advertisements for for-profits and received countless phone calls thereafter until they enrolled.
"They were promised the world. It was affordable. You don't need to worry about your student loan debt. And they enrolled and realized their education was leading nowhere, or some realized the scam halfway through and dropped out, but had all this debt they'd taken on."
That the president himself once [9]ran a criminal for-profit education company – and that he'd appoint in education secretary Betsy DeVos a willing foot soldier for their cause – was not something Shebanow and his team anticipated when they began work on Fail State back in 2013. The saga of Trump University has been well-documented, but DeVos's overtures toward the for-profit industry, including the elimination or rollback of Obama-era gainful employment and student borrower defense regulations, have gone mostly under the radar. DeVos, the director explains, is also tinkering with rules mandating "substantive teacher-student interaction", which ensures students at for-profits are not navigating their coursework alone.
"As a journalist, you always dream of that hard-hitting story," he says. "But the better the story, the worse the human tragedy. When I started this film I'd have never believed anyone who told me the film would be more relevant almost six years down the line."
\* Fail State is now out in the US with a Starz premiere date on 17 December and a UK release date yet to be announced
^ This article contains affiliate links, which means we may earn a small commission if a reader clicks through and makes a purchase. All our journalism is independent and is in no way influenced by any advertiser or commercial initiative.
The links are powered by Skimlinks. By clicking on an affiliate link, you accept that Skimlinks cookies will be set. [10]More information.
1. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/jul/28/corinthian-colleges-for-profit-education-debt-investigation
2. https://www.sfgate.com/education/article/QuinStreet-settles-complaints-it-misled-veterans-3671497.php
3. http://go.theguardian.com/?id=114047X1572903&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FFail-State-Dick-Durbin%2Fdp%2FB07JGMK5H8%2Fref%3Dsr_1_1%3Fs%3Dinstant-video%26ie%3DUTF8%26qid%3D1541627758%26sr%3D1-1%26keywords%3Dfail%2Bstate&sref=https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/nov/09/fail-state-documentary-for-profit-colleges
4. https://www.youtube.com/embed/S64WANCgMek?wmode=opaque&feature=oembed
5. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/nov/09/fail-state-documentary-for-profit-colleges#img-2
6. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/nancy-pelosi
7. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/education/harkin-report-condemns-for-profit-colleges.html
8. https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/06/05/how-to-regulate-for-profit-colleges/for-profit-recruiters-and-the-pain-funnel
9. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/feb/06/trump-university-court-upholds-25m-settlement-to-give-students-money-back
10. https://www.theguardian.com/info/2017/nov/01/reader-information-on-affiliate-links
'Phenomenally saddening': inside the sordid world of America's for-profit colleges
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Photo Gallery: Look Inside the Scrap Yards Sending Copper to China
#china #copper #gallery #inside #look #photo #scrap #sending #yards
Look Inside the Scrap Yards Sending Copper to China
When Christian Delfino's father ended up working as a sorter at a Tampa facility, the photographer saw an apt metaphor.
By Artem Bali
people inside the market
Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/e4T3JKUFlZA
\#photography #CC0 #Unsplash #APIRandom #people #inside #the #market #Bali #Indonesia
Artem Bali (@belart84) | Unsplash Photo Community
See the best free to download photos, images, and wallpapers by Artem Bali on Unsplash.
#photography #cc0 #unsplash #apirandom #people #inside #the #market #bali #indonesia
Inside the mind of a sextortion scam artist
#artist #inside #mind #scam #sextortion
Inside the mind of a sextortion scam artist | ZDNet
Do they really have access to your browsing habits and data?
#ftag=rssbaffb68 #artist #inside #mind #scam #sextortion
Inside Death Café, The Place People Go to Talk About Dying
#about #café #culture #death #dying #inside #people #place #talk
Mortals Anonymous: Inside the Cafés Where People Go to Talk About Dying
Mortality is inevitable. Death Cafés just give you a safe space to talk about it.
Windows Defender becomes first antivirus to run inside a sandbox
#antivirus #becomes #defender #first #inside #run #sandbox #windows
Windows Defender becomes first antivirus to run inside a sandbox | ZDNet
Windows Defender with sandbox support rolled out to Windows insiders, but some Windows 10 users can enable it right now.
#ftag=rssbaffb68 #antivirus #becomes #defender #first #inside #run #sandbox #windows
Step Inside the Air Force's Sound-Swallowing Anechoic Chamber
#air #anechoic #chamber #forces #inside #sound #step #swallowing #transportation
The 30-foot cube is at the center of the the Air Force Research Laboratory's Battlespace Acoustics Branch's efforts to help soldiers, sailors, and air crews focus on what matters, when it matters.
Inside the Robot Petting Zoo, Where the Future Is Friendlier Than Advertised
#advertised #friendlier #future #inside #petting #photo #robot #where #zoo
Welcome Your Cute New Overlords at the First-Ever Robot Petting Zoo
At our recent 25th-birthday celebration, we convened a who's-who of approachable machines for the friendliest robot uprising imaginable.
Stepping Into an Amazon Store Helps It Get Inside Your Head
#amazon #business #head #helps #inside #into #stepping #store
The retailer can learn a lot about shoppers' habits from its growing line of cashier-less Amazon Go convenience stores.
By Pelle Martin
selective focus photography of person holding apple fruit in front of white plastic pack with apple fruits inside
Location: Hørve, Denmark
Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/JNRRgCpsaVs
\#photography #CC0 #Unsplash #APIRandom #selective #focus #photography #of #person #holding #apple #fruit #in #front #of #white #plastic #pack #with #apple #fruits #inside #Hørve #Denmark
Pelle Martin (@pelsen) | Unsplash Photo Community
See the best free to download photos, images, and wallpapers by Pelle Martin on Unsplash.
#photography #cc0 #unsplash #apirandom #selective #focus #of #person #holding #apple #fruit #in #front #white #plastic #pack #with #fruits #inside #hørve #denmark