The Statue of Liberty was given to the American people by the French 140 years ago this week to honour the American Revolution, which Paris backed with money, ships and soldiers. Sadly, says Dimitri Burshtein in The Wall Street Journal, some of France’s other gifts have been “far less helpful”. For more than 200 years, French intellectuals have presumed to speak for humanity, and too often humanity has listened. In the 18th century, the philosophes argued that reason could remake society. Revolutionaries took them at their word, executing the king and 17,000 others – many on merely the presumption of counter-revolutionary sympathies – during the Reign of Terror. “The American Revolution produced the Constitution. The French one produced the guillotine.”

The French model – that an enlightened vanguard can act in the people’s name, that the state can reshape society from above, that legitimacy may be won in the street – became a lasting export: the Bolsheviks modelled themselves on the Jacobins. It was at the Café de la Régence in Paris that Karl Marx began his collaboration with Friedrich Engels, who recounted that Marx later despaired of what his French disciples made of his work and declared himself “no Marxist”. Nevertheless, in the 20th century, Paris became a finishing school for revolutionaries. A young Hồ Chí Minh spoke at the 1920 Congress that founded the French Communist Party, which was later joined by a young Pol Pot, who arrived in France on a scholarship in 1949. And it was Michel Foucault whose argument that “knowledge is an instrument of power” swept Western universities from the late 1970s and laid the groundwork for the madness of identity politics. The Statue of Liberty is worth keeping. “Some of the other gifts should be returned to sender.”

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Last week could go down as the “worst in the history of cybersecurity”, says Matteo Wong in The Atlantic. On Wednesday, news emerged about two major vulnerabilities in PHP, a computer programming language used by 70% of websites, which prompted governments, hospitals and firms around the world to go offline as a precaution. (There have already been millions of attempts to exploit these weaknesses.) Unrelated, on the same day, successful attacks were revealed in software used by Netflix, PayPal, Walmart and other big companies. On Thursday a firm that runs lab tests on a third of American adults every year was hit. When I asked a top cyber expert about yet another major hack he paused. “I didn’t see that one,” he said. “It’s been quite a busy week.” There’s been no let-up this week, either, with hackers pilfering a whopping $6.3bn from crypto exchange Binance.

What’s really scary is that this series of incidents – which some security folk are calling “Black October” – may be remembered as “normal, or even tame”. The reason is that over the past two decades companies and individuals have been lulled into a false sense of security. The web is riddled with vulnerabilities, but that’s largely been fine. Most of us don’t think twice about entering our address or bank details on a random website, because until recently there were so few skilled hackers able to take advantage. But now anyone can use AI to deploy a tireless, automated hacker army. A spate of attacks on a South Korean bank last month was traced back to a relatively unsophisticated 26-year-old in China. After he got all the data, he asked AI: “How do I monetise this?” Until every line of code that underpins the web is rewritten to patch all these gaps, we’ll be stuck in this “valley of pain”.

🤖🇨🇿 What’s extraordinary about the PHP hack, says Matt Muir on the Page 94 podcast, is that it was only fixed because “some bloke” in the Czech Republic, Ondřej Surý, converted the relatively complex fixes released by the PHP Foundation into “patches” that anyone could easily install themselves. To be clear, Surý isn’t in charge of anything; “he has a day job”. But thanks to his quick work, a huge chunk of the internet was fixed in a day or so, instead of going offline for, potentially, “a lot longer”.

“Always fly first class. Or your children will.”
Jeremy Clarkson

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