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The ‘Accidental Hero’ Who Saved the Internet from WannaCry

Marcus Hutchins (R) the British cyber security expert accused of creating and selling malware that steals banking passwords arrives with his lawyers Marcia Homann (L) and Brian Klein (R) at US Federal Courthouse on August 14, 2017 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. / AFP PHOTO / Joshua Lott via Getty Images)

Marcus Hutchins was only 22 years old when he discovered the Achilles heel of WannaCry, a piece of ransomware that caused $8 billion in damage in 2017 by taking down Windows computers around the world — including in banks and hospitals — and encrypting their contents for a $300 ransom. As Andy Greenberg reports in this epic piece for Wired, Hutchins learned to reverse engineer botnets in part by creating and selling his own malware as a youth in England. Hutchins’ darkhat hacking was not without its innocent victims, and the FBI eventually caught up to him. But did he deserve leniency in sentencing, considering the good work he’d done stopping WannaCry in its tracks, saving lives in the process? You be the judge.

Cybersecurity researchers named the worm WannaCry, after the .wncry extension it added to file names after encrypting them. As it paralyzed machines and demanded its bitcoin ransom, WannaCry was jumping from one machine to the next using a powerful piece of code called EternalBlue, which had been stolen from the National Security Agency by a group of hackers known as the Shadow Brokers and leaked onto the open internet a month earlier. It instantly allowed a hacker to penetrate and run hostile code on any unpatched Windows computer—a set of potential targets that likely numbered in the millions. And now that the NSA’s highly sophisticated spy tool had been weaponized, it seemed bound to create a global ransomware pandemic within hours.

Hutchins hadn’t found the malware’s command-and-control address. He’d found its kill switch.

Hutchins says he still hasn’t been able to shake the lingering feelings of guilt and impending punishment that have hung over his life for years. It still pains him to think of his debt to all the unwitting people who helped him, who donated to his legal fund and defended him, when all he wanted to do was confess.

I point out that perhaps this, now, is that confession. That he’s cataloged his deeds and misdeeds over more than 12 hours of interviews; when the results are published—and people reach the end of this article—that account will finally be out in the open. Hutchins’ fans and critics alike will see his life laid bare and, like Stadtmueller in his courtroom, they will come to a verdict. Maybe they too will judge him worthy of redemption. And maybe it will give him some closure.

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From Russia, With Malice

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Russia, through its Active Measures campaign, is hard at work sowing chaos in America, including misinformation campaigns on social media designed to stoke racial discord, email hacking campaigns aimed at discrediting campaign officials, and “jangling the doorknobs” at state election websites to find vulnerabilities they can use to disrupt elections. Why? So that Americans question the validity of election results and get disillusioned with the whole process. There’s even a hastag: #RIPDemocracy.

As Franklin Foer reports at The Atlantic, Russia wants to eradicate democracy, and they’re doing a fine job of it. The problem, which plays right into the hands of the Russians, is that the United States is already too divided to do much about it.

The Russians have learned much about American weaknesses, and how to exploit them. Having probed state voting systems far more extensively than is generally understood by the public, they are now surely more capable of mayhem on Election Day—and possibly without leaving a detectable trace of their handiwork. Having hacked into the inboxes of political operatives in the U.S. and abroad, they’ve pioneered new techniques for infiltrating campaigns and disseminating their stolen goods. Even as to disinformation, the best-known and perhaps most overrated of their tactics, they have innovated, finding new ways to manipulate Americans and to poison the nation’s politics. Russia’s interference in 2016 might be remembered as the experimental prelude that foreshadowed the attack of 2020.

Problems of inattention, problems of coordination, and deep concerns about November—these themes came up over and over in my interviews for this story. Indeed, at times everyone seemed to be sounding the same alarm. H. R. McMaster, who briefly served as Donald Trump’s national security adviser, sounded it when he proposed a new task force to focus the government’s often shambolic efforts to safeguard the election. Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, sounded it when he realized how poorly the bureaucracy was sharing the information it was gathering about the Russian threat.

Vladimir Putin dreams of discrediting the American democratic system, and he will never have a more reliable ally than Donald Trump. A democracy can’t defend itself if it can’t honestly describe the attacks against it. But the president hasn’t just undermined his own country’s defenses—he has actively abetted the adversary’s efforts. If Russia wants to tarnish the political process as hopelessly rigged, it has a bombastic amplifier standing behind the seal of the presidency, a man who reflexively depicts his opponents as frauds and any system that produces an outcome he doesn’t like as fixed. If Russia wants to spread disinformation, the president continually softens an audience for it, by instructing the public to disregard authoritative journalism as the prevarications of a traitorous elite and by spouting falsehoods on Twitter.

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RIP Little Richard, the ‘Self-Proclaimed King and Queen of Rock & Roll’

CIRCA 1956: Musician Little Richard performs onstage in circa 1956. (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images)

Richard Penniman, best known to the world as Little Richard, passed away on May 9 at the age of 87. In 2015, David Ramsey wrote this lyrical profile of Richard for Oxford American in which he notes that Little Richard’s big break came after he recorded “Tutti Frutti,” a song reworked from a bawdy “ode to sodomy” played in the “dodgier clubs” of the chitlin’ circuit. The song’s lyrics were rewritten and recorded with 15 minutes left in the session. It was a “wild, sexy nonsense song that changed music forever.” “I created rock & roll, didn’t even know what I was doing,” Richard said.

Little Richard has always been attuned to signs. At the height of his fame, on tour in Australia in October 1957, he saw a big ball of fire in the sky above the stadium. This was his second vision of fire. On the flight over, the glow of the engines appeared to him as flames and he pictured yellow-haired angels holding the plane aloft.

The message, to Little Richard, was clear. He had to leave show business, quit singing the devil’s music, and get right with God.

“It looked as though the big ball of fire came directly over the stadium about two or three hundred feet above our heads,” he later told his biographer, Charles White. “It shook my mind. . . . I got up from the piano and said, ‘This is it. I am through. I am leaving show business to go back to God.’” And he did. He ditched the tour—leaving half a million dollars’ worth of canceled bookings, with multiple lawsuits to come. The change in plans kept him off a scheduled flight that crashed into the Pacific Ocean. The Lord wasn’t messing around.

A star who mistook a satellite for a ball of fire. And we might pause here to note that whether or not it was a message from God, something like a miracle was afoot. A freaky-deaky bisexual black man who grew up poor in the Jim Crow South in Macon, Georgia, singing a wild, sexy nonsense song that changed music forever, everywhere—even in a packed stadium halfway around the world, as shrieking Australian teenagers nearly started a riot, scuffling to touch the man’s discarded clothes. Fire in the heavens and fire on earth.

For all of us, actuarially speaking, sooner or later the end is nigh. So let us dance: black and white, man and woman, believer and heathen. And everything in between. Let us dance, all of us, while we are still able, while we still can.

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How China Censored Citizens and the Press on COVID-19

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As Shawn Yuan reports at Wired, the Chinese government knew that a new SARS-like pneumonia had appeared in late 2019, yet they worked hard to keep this deadly virus a secret from their population and the world. As citizens shared accounts of the devastation with one another on social media, as reporters wrote and published stories about the outbreak, the Chinese government’s censors vigilantly deleted their posts and their accounts. Why? To conceal the extent of the outbreak and the inadequacy of its response, so that China could portray itself as a benevolent savior to its people and a generous friend supplying medical equipment to the world.

That night, just when Yue was about to log off and try to sleep, she saw the following sentence pop up on her WeChat Moments feed, the rough equivalent of Facebook’s News Feed: “I never thought in my lifetime I’d see dead bodies lying around without being collected and patients seeking medical help but having no place to get treatment.”

Yue thought that she had become desensitized, but this post made her fists clench: It was written by Xiao Hui, a journalist friend of hers who was reporting on the ground for Caixin, a prominent Chinese news outlet. Yue trusted her.

She read on. “On January 22, on my second day reporting in Wuhan, I knew this was China’s Chernobyl,” Xiao Hui wrote. “These days I rarely pick up phone calls from outside of Wuhan or chat with friends and family, because nothing can express what I have seen here.”

Unable to contain her anger, Yue took a screenshot of Xiao’s post and immediately posted it on her WeChat Moments. “Look what is happening in Wuhan!” she wrote. Then she finally drifted off.

The next morning, when she opened WeChat, a single message appeared: Her account had been suspended for having “spread malicious rumors” and she would not be able to unblock it. She knew at once that her late-night post had stepped on a censorship landmine.

It’s not hard to see how these censored posts contradicted the state’s preferred narrative. Judging from these vanished accounts, the regime’s coverup of the initial outbreak certainly did not help buy the world time, but instead apparently incubated what some have described as a humanitarian disaster in Wuhan and Hubei Province, which in turn may have set the stage for the global spread of the virus. And the state’s apparent reluctance to show scenes of mass suffering and disorder cruelly starved Chinese citizens of vital information when it mattered most.

While articles and posts that displease Chinese censors continue to be expunged across the Chinese internet, the messages that thrive on television and state-sanctioned sites are rosy: News anchors narrate videos of nurses saying how honored they have been to fight for their country despite all the hardships and video clips of China “generously” shipping planeloads of medical equipment to other countries hit hard by the virus are playing on a loop.

As the outbreak began to slow down in mainland China, the government remained cautious in filtering out any information that might contradict the seemingly unstoppable trend of recovery. On March 4, a Shanghai news site called The Paper reported that a Covid-19 patient who had been discharged from the hospital in late February later died in a post-discharge isolation center; another news site questioned whether hospitals were discharging patients prematurely for the sake of “clearing all cases.” Both stories vanished.

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‘Hand to hand to hand’: How Coronavirus Spread Aboard the Diamond Princess

This picture taken on February 24, 2020 shows crew members aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship at the Daikoku Pier Cruise Terminal in Yokohama port. - Hundreds of crew members aboard a coronavirus-riddled cruise ship in Japan began disembarking on February 27, the government said. (Photo by Kazuhiro NOGI / AFP) (Photo by KAZUHIRO NOGI/AFP via Getty Images)

At one point Carnival Cruise Line’s Diamond Princess would have a greater number of Coronavirus cases than anywhere in the world outside China. For GQ, Doug Bock Clark reports on how the delayed, woefully inadequate response from Carnival’s management, the Japanese government, as well as the ship’s captain and crew helped the virus to spread.

And Japanese officials eventually acknowledged the quarantine was flawed.

They had no idea about the danger. Not as they crowded around the famous champagne waterfall. Hundreds of delighted cruise passengers watched as golden bubbly, poured atop a pyramid of 300 glasses, filled the stemware below. Then the drinks were passed out. Hand to hand to hand. Guests clinked coupes and posed for photos, making the evening feel momentous. It was their fourth night aboard the Diamond Princess—a floating city of a ship that had been churning south from Yokohama, Japan—and they were all still unaware of how much their journey would transform them, and even the world.

For a week more, the Diamond Princess cruised on. The Amigos took a memorable kayak excursion in Vietnam, among the karst monoliths of Ha Long Bay. They enjoyed street food in Taiwan. But while there, panicky headlines and more temperature guns made the virus impossible to ignore. Still, they considered themselves safe, unaware that an 80-year-old passenger—a man who had coughed through the first half of the cruise before disembarking in Hong Kong—had been admitted to a hospital, where it was discovered that he was infected with the coronavirus.

For government officials and corporate leaders, the question of whether it was fair—or even safe—to quarantine the passengers but not the crew was obscured by the priority to keep the ship operational. And so the poor took care of the rich, and the citizens of less powerful nations served those from more powerful nations, and the Diamond Princess remained a miniaturized version of the global order—because what other way could things go?

Before bidding goodbye to the ship, Arma had stood alone on the glass-walled bridge. The normally stoic captain was emotional. He had been with the boat since it was built and had guided it safely through every storm, until this one. He felt like he understood what he called her “beautiful soul.”

One last time, he switched on the P.A., in order to speak to the ship itself. It wasn’t her fault, he told her. He promised that they would see each other again, and he wished her a good night, his words echoing in the vacant galleries and cabins. They had done their best, he and his ship—and like all good captains, he was the last person to leave. As he strode off the gangway in his crisp uniform, he was the very image of debonair fortitude. Except his true expression was hidden behind a protective mask.

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Where ‘Strangers Whisper Secrets in Your Ear’

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At the New York Review of Books, Leslie Jamison reviews “Private Lives Public Spaces,” an exhibition of home movies and photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. (While the museum is closed, you can check out the exhibit online.) What makes this review fascinating is the thread of desire that runs through it — that keen human need to document our present as it all-too-quickly turns into our past.

By showing amateur home movies in one of the most famous museums in the world, “Private Lives Public Spaces” asks us to see not just the aesthetic richness of daily life, but also to see it as a parade of minor performances: vacation as a performance of leisure, a garden party as a performance of sociability, parenting as a performance of love. Is there anyone who doesn’t sometimes imagine an audience for even the most unremarkable moments of her life?

The exhibit spans two floors, and while the upper level contains work by professional artists working with 8 mm film—Andy Warhol, Peggy Ahwesh, Cindy Sherman—the lower floor has a stronger gravitational pull, bringing me back to the home movies. Placards that usually bear the names of famous artists display suburban-sounding surnames instead: Levitt family. Thompson family. Hubley family. Descending to this level feels like dropping into the subconscious—a place not of art, exactly, but the deep place art comes from. Each film channels the gaze of an amateur—which is to say, a gaze tuned like a radio channel to the affective nuances of daily living: amusement, awkwardness, delight, and the extravagant devotion of love. Love gets accused of blinding us, or dulling our gaze, but it can summon our vision most urgently.

These are the moments that affect me most in these movies, these flashes of secret interior life suddenly surfacing: a boy’s hopeless giggling; a woman’s undisguised pleasure at her bag of potato chips on the train; the awkward silence of a boy at the end of the bar mitzvah banquet table, his forced smile; a woman doing a stately waltz, in a baroque ballroom, turning suddenly to flash a sly, flirtatious look at the camera. This secret life dwells in each of us, mysterious, wild, intimate, and these moments of rupture expose what so much art is chasing after: glimpses of the subterranean desires and pleasures and sorrows that are constantly lurking behind our composed surfaces, veiled by the costumes of our facial expressions and our social media accounts, our etiquette and our armor. The crippling fear of exposure lives uneasily alongside its opposite—a primal longing to be seen.

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“Different Days” for Jason Isbell

NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE - OCTOBER 22: Jason Isbell performs at Ryman Auditorium on October 22, 2019 in Nashville, Tennessee. (Photo by Erika Goldring / Getty Images)

Sober for seven years (by the tattooed notch count on his arm), Jason Isbell has mined the hard times and found gold in songs that seem to resonate with well, everyone, including the “most devoted fan bases in modern music: emotional hipster kids, hard-bitten Nashville guitar players, brainy suburban moms.” At GQ, Zach Baron talks to the singer-songwriter-guitarist about writing songs in the car, being a Southern Democrat, staying sober, and being friends with the late John Prine.

Isbell once called the drunk version of himself “intolerable”—one of the milder ways he’s described his drinking years. “He went through a number of years of not necessarily being his best self,” Hood told me. “And you know, a lot of people never come back from that. And the fact that he did and rose to the occasion and grew up to become the kind of person that he really had the potential of being and then some is super admirable to me.”

I asked Isbell if, in all the talking about his past self, he’d found a way to begin forgiving the person he’d been.

“I mean, I’m coming around to forgiving that guy. But it’s pretty recent. Because I think for a lot of the first few years of my sobriety, I needed to hate his fucking guts. So I didn’t have any risk of turning back into him. But I think there’s a phase now that I’m moving into. My friends and my wife remind me sometimes: You know, you weren’t that bad, you weren’t all bad. You know? I loved you then. And…lately they’ve been saying that more, and that’s helpful to me.”

Maybe it’s safer to say it now than it was then.

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How Margaret Atwood is Passing Time During the Pandemic

(Photo by Michael Tran/FilmMagic)

Without book signings, festivals, talks, and fundraisers to attend, Canadian author Margaret Atwood’s got some time on her hands, as she notes at The Guardian. How is she passing time during lockdown? Why, thwarting squirrels, sewing face masks for health care workers, and conducting rubber chicken choirs. As one does.

Mary Beard, the two-fisted Cambridge classicist who understands crises, debacles and pandemics, being an authority on ancient Rome, asked me to do a remote item for the BBC Front Row Late show, which usually reviews theatre but now can’t because there isn’t any. “Just a little something,” she said, “as long as it’s on plagues.” This awakened the Kraken of my deep past – a childhood of reading horror literature, not only the Betty Crocker’s Picture Cookbook for proto-homemakers but also the collected work of Edgar Allan Poe. Who let that into the kiddie section of the library? Well, there isn’t any sex in it: that was probably the excuse; and children are so fond of decaying corpses, especially those with all their teeth pulled out, as in “Berenice”. So me and “The Masque of the Red Death” go way back.

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How A Nonagenarian Insists We Can Avoid The Age of Loneliness

E.O. Wilson

E.O. Wilson, age 90, an “Alabamian who came up North to have work,” is the “world’s foremost authority on biodiversity.” Raised a Southern Baptist, Wilson is not a church goer, though a religious fervor comes in the form of his dedication to science, conservation, and protecting the planet and its inhabitants. As Caleb Johnson reports at The Bitter Southerner, Wilson believes that people have the power to stop climate change and avoid leaving the Anthropocene era for the Eremocene — the Age of Loneliness, “a term Wilson has popularized that defines an epoch marked by an existential and material isolation resulting from having extinguished so many other forms of life.”

I’d come to Wilson in search of hope. A new decade had announced itself with the warmest January on record, smoke from wildfires in Australia visible from outer space, and a novel virus had just begun spreading outward from China. Here in the United States, the current presidential administration continued weakening environmental rules and laws by stripping protections for streams, wetlands, and groundwater. I needed to quiet my inner cynic and its grim take on a future shaped by more extreme weather events and leadership refusing to act on scientists’ warnings that climate change affects every aspect of our environment, and our health, and will continue doing so if we cannot make major societal changes.

In conversation, Wilson asks lots of questions. No surprise since he spent 40 years lecturing in classrooms. Initially, I mistake these questions for him pondering aloud. When I fail to respond to one about how he can better support literature in Alabama, he says, “I’m asking because I want to know what you think.”

So I tell him. And as I talk, Wilson takes out a piece of paper and a pen and scribbles notes. Later, he’ll reference what he calls “our ideas” and share his plan to turn them into reality. Many things make E.O. Wilson extraordinary, not the least of which is, during his 90th year on this planet, he believes work remains to be done.

Wilson has argued that if we don’t soon change the way we live we will leave behind the Anthropocene and enter the Eremocene, or the Age of Loneliness, a term Wilson has popularized that defines an epoch marked by an existential and material isolation resulting from having extinguished so many other forms of life. To his point, a new study published in Nature suggests that mass extinction will look like a cliff rather than a slope as previously predicted. Ecosystem collapse in tropical oceans could begin as soon as next decade, followed by collapse in tropical forests — the most diverse ecosystems on the planet — in the 2040s. In other words, as Wilson writes, the biosphere will be reduced to “our domesticated plants and animals, and our croplands all around the world as far as the eye can see.”

Scientists conceive of time differently than us layfolk. Millenia rather than days, centuries as opposed to minutes. E.O. Wilson is no exception. He assures me it isn’t too late to avoid an Age of Loneliness. He is also known for popularizing the term biophilia, or the innate pleasure we take in the presence of other organisms.

“We can confer immortality on the rest of life if we wish to do so,” he tells me. I leave feeling somewhat convinced, and I wonder what would happen if more people were imbued with a similar sense of possibility and responsibility toward our present environment.

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9,000 Seconds, With Only 47 to Spare

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In this personal essay, Nicholas Thompson, editor in chief of Wired, writes about what he has overcome spiritually, mentally, and physically, to continue to improve as a runner, running a sub-2:30 marathon at age 44. Thompson considers the role that running has played in his life (he’s overcome cancer) and how his father inspired him to excel. Thompson knows that hard physical training, technology in the form of GPS watches, heart rate monitors, and nutrition regimens are important, but he believes running is simply a form of hide and seek with your own brain, ever vigilant in protecting the body from injury.

My variant of thyroid cancer was eminently treatable, and in the months that followed I recovered slowly. At first, I would step out of my apartment and struggle to walk the one block uphill from my apartment, in Brooklyn, to Prospect Park. But in due course I could walk anywhere, and eventually run. One glorious day, I both ran 10 miles and talked optimistically with my wife about having children. Fitness came back faster than I expected. Nine months after the diagnosis, I ran 15 slow miles in the mountains of Aspen, Colorado, and burst into tears as I came down from the last peak.

So why do runners have limits? And why do the limits differ from one person to the next? In part, it’s because of physiological factors: blood oxygen levels, lactate, muscular strength, each of which has a genetic component. But there’s another theory, put forward by a sports physiologist named Tim Noakes. As he puts it, in what he calls the central governor model, part of the reason we slow is because our brain is telling our body to stop because it’s scared. It doesn’t want you to overheat or develop a stress fracture in your shin, so it preemptively hits the brakes. If Noakes’ theory is right, it implies a mind-body dilemma. We all can go faster. We just have to persuade our brains not to start the subconscious shutdown process right away. But the only thing we can use to trick our brain is our brain.

Hitting my goal meant running a marathon in 9,000 seconds, and I crossed the line with just 47 to spare: 2:29:13. Only one person older than me went faster that day. My family sent texts full of emojis and love. Finley came running to congratulate me, to celebrate, and to reveal that, having seen me the week before, and toward the end of the race, he’d worried I’d pushed it too far. For the first time, he said, I had looked like I was truly exhausted. I’d made it. I’d done it. But now it was time to stop for a while.

We give our children our genes and our love, and we don’t have any idea of what, in the end, they’ll do with them. My grandfather scarred my father by trying to push him into sports; my father inspired me by taking me running around the block. Maybe one of my sons will write a tell-all one day about the pressure his father put on him to be something he didn’t want to be. Or maybe they’ll find that they love the sport too, and I’ll end up drinking beet juice with my grandkids.

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