Linked List: July 15, 2020

Wednesday, 15 July 2020

Apple Wins Irish Tax Battle Against E.U. ★

Valentina Pop and Sam Schechner, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (News+):

Apple Inc. won a major battle with the European Union when the bloc’s second-highest court on Wednesday sided with the U.S. company over a €13 billion ($14.8 billion) tax bill that EU antitrust officials had said the company owed to Ireland. The decision was a rebuke to Margrethe Vestager, who is leading the charge at the European Commission to rein in alleged abuses by big tech companies including Apple, Alphabet Inc.’s Google, and Amazon.com Inc. […]

Apple and Ireland on Wednesday applauded the annulment of the tax case. Ireland reiterated that it gave no special treatment to Apple, and said that the company had paid taxes according to “normal Irish taxation rules.”

Apple said that it supports international talks over how countries should divide up taxation rights for multinational companies. “This case was not about how much tax we pay, but where we are required to pay it. We’re proud to be the largest taxpayer in the world as we know the important role tax payments play in society,” an Apple spokesman said. […]

It’s perfectly reasonable and perhaps correct to argue that Apple, along with all other titanic corporations today, should pay more in taxes. But Apple is not one of these companies that somehow makes a fortune yet pays no or little in taxes — they really are the biggest taxpayer in the world, and I really do think it’s true that they pay what they owe, worldwide. If you think they should pay more, your beef is with the law, not Apple’s compliance with them or their accounting practices.

“Sometimes, the Commissioner for Competition would be well-advised to restrain her eagerness for catchy political headlines and instead prepare her cases more thoroughly, so that they can hold up in a court of law,” said German center-right MEP Markus Ferber, who in 2016 backed the commission’s decision against Apple. “High-profile decisions like these being overturned is quite the disservice to the cause of tax justice,” he said.

I think that’s a harsh burn from a German.

Twitter Account Hijackings Were an Inside Job ★

Joseph Cox, reporting for Motherboard:

A Twitter insider was responsible for a wave of high profile account takeovers on Wednesday, according to leaked screenshots obtained by Motherboard and two sources who took over accounts. […]

After the publication of this piece, Twitter said in a tweet that “We detected what we believe to be a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools.”

Cryptocurrency Scammers Hack Twitter Accounts of Apple, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Many More ★

Karissa Bell, reporting for Engadget:

Hackers promoting crypto scams took over a number of high-profile Twitter accounts Wednesday, including Bill Gates and Elon Musk, who has been a frequent target of would-be crypto scammers. The attackers also gained access to Apple’s Twitter account, which has never sent a tweet. […]

It’s unclear how the hackers gained access to the accounts. CoinDesk reports that many of the affected accounts were using two-factor authentication.

They got the @joebiden account too. Imagine the havoc if they’d tweeted, say, that he was dropping out of the election rather than scamming people for bitcoin.

Will be fascinating to learn how these accounts were hacked. ~~Twitter, to my knowledge, only supports the notoriously insecure SMS as a second factor for 2FA.~~ Will be fascinating too if we can figure out how much of a score these thieves hauled in. Cryptocurrency is like a cash transaction — the thieves get to keep every penny from this. No refunds, no tracing. Perfect for a heist.

Update: Turns out Twitter now supports token-based authentication apps like Authy and hardware dongles as second factors — just switched my accounts, good to know. Solid theory: the thieves didn’t hack all of these high-profile accounts, they hacked one thing, Twitter’s internal tools, giving them access to tweet from any account they want. Update 2: The thieves are stealing the hacked accounts, not just somehow tweeting from them — but they’re not revoking the existing authentication tokens, so account owners still have access.

Update 3: Looks like the heist netted around $118,000. A pittance compared to the disruption it caused.

Trump Makes His Best Case to Date for Invoking 25th Amendment ★

Peter Baker, writing for The New York Times on Trump’s “press conference” yesterday — 63 minutes in length with just 6 of those minutes spent answering questions:

“We could go on for days,” he said at one point, and it sounded plausible.

At times, it was hard to understand what he meant. He seemed to suggest that his presumptive Democratic challenger, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., would get rid of windows if elected and later said that Mr. Biden would “abolish the suburbs.” He complained that Mr. Biden had “gone so far right.” (He meant left.)

Even for those who follow Mr. Trump regularly and understand his shorthand, it became challenging to follow his train of thought.

For instance, in discussing cooperation agreements with Central American countries to stop illegal immigration, he had this to say: “We have great agreements where when Biden and Obama used to bring killers out, they would say don’t bring them back to our country, we don’t want them. Well, we have to, we don’t want them. They wouldn’t take them. Now with us, they take them. Someday, I’ll tell you why. Someday, I’ll tell you why. But they take them and they take them very gladly. They used to bring them out and they wouldn’t even let the airplanes land if they brought them back by airplanes. They wouldn’t let the buses into their country. They said we don’t want them. Said no, but they entered our country illegally and they’re murderers, they’re killers in some cases.”

Makes sense to me.

Shameless Beneficiary of Outrageous Nepotism Unveils Ad Campaign Advising 18 Million Unemployed Workers to ‘Find Something New’ ★

Hamza Shaban, reporting for The Washington Post:

Ivanka Trump urged out-of-work Americans to “find something new” Tuesday as part of a new jobs initiative designed to tout the benefits of skills training and career paths that don’t require a college degree.

But the effort — complete with website, advertising campaign and virtual roundtable featuring Apple CEO Tim Cook and IBM chair Ginni Rometty — was swiftly derided on social media as “clueless” and “tone-deaf” given the pandemic, recession and Trump’s own familial employment history.

I don’t know what the exact expiration date was on Cook’s stance that it was better to engage with Trump and his kakistocratic administration, but I do know we’re past it.

Update:

Contemplate this roundtable video from a historical standpoint — say, a few decades from now. What will people see? They will immediately note the stunningly low technical quality and production values. It will be instantly recognizable, whether our future viewers lived through these times or not, as “one of those awful virtual meeting videos made during the COVID-19 crisis”. You know, the crisis in which several hundred thousand Americans needlessly died and millions were sickened because of the Trump administration’s incompetent, insane, sclerotic response. The crisis that Trump’s disastrous, humiliating, “what the hell was anyone thinking when they voted for this obvious lunatic?” presidency is now and forever will remain synonymous with. Like how when I say “Jimmy Carter”, people think “genial peanut farmer who was in over his head and allowed 52 Americans to be held hostage by Iran for over a year and oversaw an energy crisis that culminated in an automobile-dependent nation being unable to buy gasoline”. Or I say “Richard Nixon” and people think “shifty crook whose crippling paranoia drove him to send a squad of bumbling goons straight out of a Coen brothers casting call to burgle his political opposition’s headquarters and then oversaw a criminal attempt to cover it up, inexorably leading to his resigning from office in utter disgrace”. When you say “Trump” decades from now, after our current hot moment has turned igneous, we’ll think about shamefully blatant racism, we’ll think about jaw-droppingly transparent corruption, we’ll think about his stupid-looking hair and poorly-applied bronzer and the rapidly degenerating incoherence of his every utterance, but more than anything we will think about the COVID-19 crisis, and his heartbreakingly cruel, incomprehensibly stupid and irresponsible response to it. That’s Trump’s lines-around-the-block-for-gasoline, his Watergate, his Hoovervilles. But hundreds of thousands of Americans didn’t die waiting for gas in the ’70s, or because G. Gordon Liddy shouldn’t have been trusted to shoplift a pack of gum without getting caught. Just try to imagine how much worse the jaded eyes of history will view a self-inflicted fiasco that resulted in so many American deaths that morgues were overrun in cities across the nation. It’s a presidential albatross without peer.

This roundtable isn’t particularly noteworthy in and of itself, but as an artifact it is emblematic of both the months-long-with-no-end-in-sight quarantine that necessitated the video’s socially awkward and jarringly-low-fi “Brady Bunch” title sequence format, and the I-can’t-believe-this-is-real hypocrisy of a White House initiative to glibly counsel the record-shattering number of unemployed to just “find something new” being led by a senior White House advisor whose one and only qualification for the job is that she is the president’s loyal daughter and only fully-acknowledged adult child who isn’t a complete numb nut.

That’s the roundtable video Tim Cook agreed to be a part of.