Nathaniel Rich, author of the novel “Cloudthief”, in a non-fiction retelling for New York Times Magazine of a 2007 heist of a London data centre by Terry Ellis and others:

The fixer — Ellis called him Ray and won’t reveal his name — met him in North London near Hampstead Heath for coffee and cakes. When it came time to discuss business, to avoid being overheard, they strolled into the park.

Ray had brought Ellis a few jobs before. But this job, he warned, was of an entirely different order. As Ellis claims in “The Art of Robbery,” a self-published memoir written after his release from prison, he eventually learned that Ray had been contacted by a consultant employed by “some influential bankers from America.” The bankers “were involved in prime mortgages” and had “circumnavigated” certain regulations. Damning evidence of these circumnavigations could be found in banking files held in the King’s Cross area in a giant building known as a data center.

This is a dramatic story, and one I think should be read with a heavy dose of skepticism. It seems that most of the criminal details have been shared by Ellis. For a start, the claim that some bankers ostensibly contracted with “Ray” is just a little too perfect for a recession-era tale. These bankers are pretty much universally loathed, and this justification makes this theft seem more palatable than a simple financial motive. For example, there was a similar data centre theft in October 2006, which would be unrelated to the lending crisis in the following years.

Another problem is that Rich says crimes like these are covered-up in part by a data centre operator because they are loathe to “admit to flaws in its security, [which] would only encourage additional attacks and scare away its clients”. Therefore, the lack of evidence for the specific circumstances of this crime is supposed to be a buttress for its likelihood, not a weakness, which is not reassuring.

The story of the theft was, as far as I can tell, broken by Here is the City, then a gossipy financial news site:

The data center itself is thought to be used by a number of companies, including JPMorgan, which is believed to have told staff that some of its systems could be off-line for parts of the day today as a result of the theft. Fortunately the thieves are thought to have got away with just the computer hardware, and not any sensitive information which may also have been stored at the facility.

Tom Espiner, of ZDNet, a few days later:

Reports circulating on the Internet last week that JPMorgan, a customer of Verizon Business, had been affected by the burglary were incorrect, according to a source at the investment bank. There has been no loss of service or data, said the source.

On the one hand, of course all these parties tried to cover this up. The reading-between-the-lines story implied by these early reports and Rich’s telling is that some banking higher-ups, perhaps from JPMorgan, wanted to cover up some crimes, and denying any meaningful effect is just more cover-up. But little of this is substantiated by contemporary or current reporting — which is, of course, the whole problem with using a lack of evidence as the foundation for a story.

Rich, in the Times:

“The banks knew they were sending mortgages to people who couldn’t pay back,” he says today. “That’s what broke the whole system. That was the big con.” Ellis remains convinced that the bankers who paid for the Verizon job wanted to destroy evidence of their involvement in fraudulent subprime mortgages — the inside information that Ellis received about the data center, he believes, “would have had to come from the top” — but he can’t prove it. He never saw what was on the servers.

“Our job was to get the motherboards,” he says. “We were paid quite handsomely. Whatever happened after that was none of our concern.”

In contemporaneous reports, the Metropolitan Police noted the theft of motherboards and processors. But if these bankers wanted to cover up their fraudulent practices, surely the hard drives would have been the target, right? In Rich’s version, entire servers were taken, so perhaps this is just a misunderstanding.

This story smells fishy. I believe the theft happened, of course, and Ellis’ involvement, but I am not as convinced this had anything to do with covering up some white collar crime. (By the way, the Guardian in 2018 published an interview with Ellis about the interesting prison where he was transferred and which led to his rehabilitation.)

The heist element is only about half of Rich’s story; much of it is a discussion about data centre secrecy:

The public fogginess about data centers is not an accident. It is the product of a willful strategy by the world’s largest tech corporations, whose business models rest on the public assumption that the internet, and all the data it holds, is as immaterial as air — or as a cloud, to borrow the metaphor commonly used to describe the sum of information stored on servers. As the digital-media scholar Tung-Hui Hu writes in “A Prehistory of the Cloud,” the cloud “hides its physical location by design.”

[…]

It was a lot easier to defend data when people didn’t know it existed. The more people learn about data centers, the more they hate them. […]

If you read a website like this one, you were probably aware that data centres were commonplace twenty or more years ago. Like the one near King’s Cross, some were hidden in plain sight, while others were purpose-built facilities that look like hangars stuffed with servers. But the A.I. boom has meant rapid increases in the speed, scale, and quantity of data centres. People quickly learned not only of their existence, but how much pressure they put on local resources. Tech companies, it seemed, were caught by surprise; and as someone who spends a lot of time immersed in this world, so was I.

Much of the consternation I have seen in more general audiences has been about data centres in general. People simply were not aware that Amazon has warehouses full of products, and other warehouses full of computers. As Rich writes, this is deliberate, for business secrecy reasons, security, and environmental costs. But, also, I think some of that unawareness is because of just how boring it is. If nobody wants to know hidden information, is it really a secret? It only became one when the information these companies were hiding had real-life effects.

It does seem that public awareness is putting pressure on corporations to improve data centres and make them more efficient. But that is not a standard. New data centres are powered by petroleum with a pinky promise of renewable offsets. In some regressive regions, like Alberta, new power plants for data centres must be powered by methane gas. In a further complication, Meta’s proposed data centre is scheduled to be completed before the power plant is ready, meaning it will be dependent on existing grid power for perhaps years. Meta’s is just one of the data centres proposed for Alberta. Another one, a gigawatt cluster, would also require a dedicated gas-fired power plant, while Kevin O’Leary’s questionable project is supposed to require over three times the combined power of those other two.

For years, the tech industry told us we did not need to have much concern for how digital products and services worked, and many of us did not bother to find out. But it turns out the demands of our email and Netflix subscription were comparatively easy to hide. At the very least, what we ought to demand from projects with the scale and ambition of these data centres is open disclosure of their power consumption, water use, and emissions.

But we ought to demand more than the bare minimum. Transparency does as much good as a big banner reading we are destroying the planet but we are also creating a lot of value for shareholders. When a single data centre is projected to use about as much power as the entire city of Calgary is currently — Enmax says 1,260 megawatts as of writing — we should have a say in whether that makes sense. A.I. remains a thing that is happening to us rather than with or for us. It is built on assuming consent and asking forgiveness, which has more-or-less worked for the industry and gave it way too much confidence. Tech companies could have spent decades being better corporate citizens. Data centres are just one part, but they are representative of the difference between the stories told by tech companies and the things we can actually know.

While I am criticizing the New York Times’ odd framing choices, here is a more substantial critique from Alejandra Caraballo:

Over the last several years it has become readily apparent that there has been a shift in the editorial framing and focus of the New York Times when it regards issues relating to transgender people. This is particularly pronounced when it comes to issues of gender affirming care for transgender youth. The Times has contested this accusation of bias or editorial shifting of their priorities and framing, often by pointing to individual stories and claiming that the stories are rigorously fact checked and true. The issue is that any particular article can be argued about in isolation about whether or not the framing is biased against transgender people but when viewed in the aggregate the shift can become much more pronounced and difficult to defend.

To assess the framing of thousands of articles, Caraballo ran the text through three different large language models plus VADER. Caraballo notes the LLMs fared better at interpreting words in a greater context.

Setting aside the technology, it is alarming to see the Times’ coverage shift, and so noticeably in 2022. Caraballo attributes this to several predominantly internal factors, including losing the paper’s only openly trans writer, but I stumbled across another possible external influence.

Hope Pisoni, Uncloseted Media:

[The Manhattan Institute’s] attacks on education also target K-12 schools. Starting in 2022, it began frequently demonizing schools for teaching “radical gender” ideology and “transitioning kids without parental consent.” Wuest says this is because disparaging public schools supports its longtime policy goals related to school choice. She cites a 2022 speech by [Christopher] Rufo at Hillsdale College.

The links in the quoted paragraph primarily go to the innocuous-seeming City Journal, though it is a publication of the Manhattan Institute. It ran loads of articles in 2022 from Rufo taking things out of context to, as Pisoni writes, advance the broader conservative policy goals of the Institute and stirring up a broader panic about trans people. And the Times loves taking direction from Rufo.

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Tripp Mickle, of the New York Times, wrote another one of those articles exploring the feasibility of iPhone manufacturing in the United States. There is basically nothing new here; the only reason it seems to have been published is because the U.S. president farted out yet another tariff idea, this time one targeted specifically at the iPhone at a rate of 25%.¹

Anyway, there is one thing in this article — bizarrely arranged in a question-and-answer format — that is notable:

What does China offer that the United States doesn’t?

Small hands, a massive, seasonal work force and millions of engineers.

Young Chinese women have small fingers, and that has made them a valuable contributor to iPhone production because they are more nimble at installing screws and other miniature parts in the small device, supply chain experts said. In a recent analysis the company did to explore the feasibility of moving production to the United States, the company determined that it couldn’t find people with those skills in the United States, said two people familiar with the analysis who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

I will get to the racial component of this in a moment, but this answer has no internal logic. There are two sentences in that larger paragraph. The second posits that people in the U.S. do not have the “skills” needed to carefully assemble iPhones, but the skills as defined in the first sentence are small fingers — which is not a skill. I need someone from the Times to please explain to me how someone can be trained to shrink their fingers.

Anyway, this is racist trash. In response to a question from Julia Carrie Wong of the Guardian, Times communications director Charlie Stadtlander disputed the story was furthering “racial or genetic generalizations”, and linked to a podcast segment clipped by Mickle. In it, Patrick McGee, author of “Apple in China”, says:

The tasks that are often being done to make iPhones require little fingers. So the fact that it’s young Chinese women with little fingers — that actually matters. Like, Apple engineers will talk about this.

The podcast in question is, unsurprisingly, Bari Weiss’; McGee did not mention any of this when he appeared on, for example, the Daily Show.

Maybe some Apple engineers actually believe this, and maybe some supply chain experts do, too. But it is a longstanding sexist stereotype. (Thanks to Kat for the Feminist Review link.) It is ridiculous to see this published in a paper of record as though it is just one fact among many, instead of something which ought to be debunked.

The Times has previously reported why iPhones cannot really be made in the U.S. in any significant quantity. It has nothing to do with finger size, and everything to do with a supply chain the company has helped build for decades, as McGee talks about extensively in that Daily Show interview and, presumably, writes about in his book. (I do not yet have a copy.) Wages play a role, but it is the sheer concentration of manufacturing capability that explains why iPhones are made in China, and why it has been so difficult for Apple to extricate itself from the country.

I have to say, it is quite an odd thing to be listening to a podcast and hear one’s own name. This recently happened to me on the latest episode of “Upgrade”. It feels like I am about to be called to the principal’s office or something. But I was not.

Myke Hurley and Jason Snell discussed an article I wrote about the more granular control available to users in iOS 18 when apps request access to their contacts. (My piece is a response to a New York Times story; Snell also linked to both with some commentary.) Their chat centres Apple’s scale and influence. Even little decisions the company makes are capable of transforming entire industries.

Hurley raises an apt comparison to App Tracking Transparency, which is exactly what I was thinking about when I wrote my piece. I am similarly unsympathetic to corporate empires built on illicitly obtained data. If you cannot make money when users are given a choice to consent, your business model probably sucks. But I do think it is concerning how powerful both of the major players were in the aftermath of that announcement: Meta, for hoarding behavioural data on billions of people; and Apple, for its ability to give users options.

I see parallels to Google’s power over the web. The near-uniform layout and structure of webpages is thanks to Google’s specific suggestions for improving the likelihood of ranking higher. The main difference is Google’s suggestions are sort of optional; if a website’s owner does not care much about search traffic, they can do whatever they want. The prompts on iOS, on the other hand, are baked into the system.

As Snell says, these apps “have to make the case” for granting permission. I do not think that is such a bad thing, and I am amenable to their suggestion of Apple’s built-in apps being placed on a level playing field. I think a lot of this would be more predictable if privacy laws were stronger. A basic level of privacy protections should not be a competitive advantage, nor should users be required to navigate either unceasing permissions dialogs or terms of service agreements to understand the myriad ways their personal information is being exploited — because their personal information should not be exploited.

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Albert Burneko, Defector:

“If the ChatGPT demos were accurate,” [Kevin] Roose writes, about latency, in the article in which he credits OpenAI with having developed playful intelligence and emotional intuition in a chatbot—in which he suggests ChatGPT represents the realization of a friggin’ science fiction movie about an artificial intelligence who genuinely falls in love with a guy and then leaves him for other artificial intelligences—based entirely on those demos. That “if” represents the sum total of caution, skepticism, and critical thinking in the entire article.

As impressive as OpenAI’s demo was, it is important to remember it was a commercial. True, one which would not exist if this technology were not sufficiently capable of being shown off, but it was still a marketing effort, and a journalist like Roose ought to treat it with the skepticism of one. ChatGPT is just software, no matter how thick a coat of faux humanity is painted on top of it.

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