The Death of a Country

Syria’s civil war
The country formerly known as Syria

As sectarian divisions deepen, the war is changing the country beyond recognition
Feb 23rd 2013 | BEIRUT AND IDLEB PROVINCE |From the print edition

“MY COUNTRY is being destroyed,” sobs Ahmad, a student from the eastern city of Deir ez-Zor who joined the protests when they began in March 2011. “The regime is killing us, many of the opposition fighters are becoming criminals and the world is watching it like a film.” He is worried that onlookers may think this is normal, seeing that Syria lies in the centre of a region which is no stranger to wars and strife. Syria, with its chemical weapons, alliance with Iran, shrinking government and spreading militias, has become the confluence where all that is worrying about the Middle East comes together.

Two years ago Syria was a rather sleepy place. The muezzins’ call to prayer and the peal of church bells mingled above the rooftops of Damascus, the world’s oldest continually inhabited capital city, where Syrians liked to boast that Christians and Muslims, as well as people from a smattering of other sects, lived side by side in peace. People bustled through the markets. Women could stay out safely alone past midnight. Men played backgammon on the pavements with their neighbours. The Syrian accent, spread through the region by the country’s soap operas, conveyed hospitality and simplicity to fellow Arabs.

Syrians take pride in their colourful history. Ancient buildings dot the landscape, from crusader castles to the exquisite Umayyad Mosque, the architectural masterpiece of an empire centred on Damascus that once stretched through north Africa and up into Spain.

Since Hafez Assad brought his family to power in a bloodless coup in 1970, Syria has had little to celebrate. An authoritarian state snuffed out discussion and creativity with its ubiquitous Mukhabarat and tortured those who caused trouble. Many Syrians were ready to accept this as the price of stability when Bashar Assad inherited the presidency from his father in 2000.

At first the repression seemed to ease under the new President Assad, at least for those who stuck to the bargain and kept out of opposition politics. Life became a little sweeter in 2005 when Coca-Cola arrived. Internet cafés flourished, as did the software that let Syrians visit banned websites such as Facebook. Posters of the Assads still festooned walls across the country, but schools phased out the compulsory wearing of military uniform.

Mr Assad’s stance against Israel and its main backer, America, through his alignment with Hizbullah (the Lebanese Shias’ party-cum-militia) and the regime in Iran, was popular with most Syrians. They had nothing against citizens from hostile countries: “We differentiate between the government and its people,” was a standard refrain during the American-led invasion of Iraq. But they pitied their brothers and sisters in Egypt for being ruled over by Hosni Mubarak, whom they saw as a wrinkled yes-man of the West.

Today that Syria is no more. The uprising, which is now a full-blown civil war between Mr Assad’s forces and the opposition, has brought new freedoms. Young Syrians are no longer afraid to deride the regime openly. Even within the security forces, people discuss politics. “We all say things we wouldn’t have dared talk about in our own homes before,” says Aisha, a mother of four from Idleb province, in the north-west. Neighbourly bonds have sometimes grown strong amid the bloodshed. Altruistic bravery is common. Women risk their lives to smuggle medicine to rebel areas through the regime’s checkpoints, because the soldiers are less likely to search them. In Damascus people sleep ten to a room, welcoming relations who have fled from more dangerous areas.

But these gains have come at a terrible price. War is tearing Syria apart. For months the country has been divided between Mr Assad’s forces and the rebel groups. Neither side has victory within its grasp. The rebels control swathes of land in the north and east, where the regime shells towns and villages and sends its aircraft to bomb military and civilian targets. The regime is determined to consolidate its grip along a north-south axis from Damascus through Homs and Hama (the country’s third- and fourth-biggest towns) to Latakia, the port and region that were home to the Assad family and its Alawite sect.

At present, there is no chance of a political opening that could lead to serious negotiations between the opposition and the regime. The circle around Mr Assad refuses to contemplate his exit. Until recently the political opposition, which since November has been gathered under an umbrella calling itself the Syrian Opposition Coalition, had refused to negotiate unless Mr Assad goes first. He, meanwhile, has taken comfort from the solid financial and political backing of Iran. Russia, which supplies Mr Assad with money and weapons, has sometimes hinted that it will put pressure on him, only to step back at the last minute—possibly, Western diplomats speculate, on the personal command of Vladimir Putin. They believe that Russia’s president is determined to frustrate the West, especially America, and to prevent it from forcing change, as it did in Libya. A joint call from Russia and the Arab League for a negotiated settlement does not mean that calculation has changed.

Western governments have struggled to keep up with what is happening inside the country. Fearing another Middle Eastern adventure in the wake of Iraq, the American administration has been reluctant to do anything beyond calling for Mr Assad to go. At a congressional hearing earlier this month Leon Panetta, the outgoing secretary of defence, and General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, revealed that they had recommended arming the rebels. Although this plan had the backing of Hillary Clinton, then secretary of state, and David Petraeus, then head of the CIA, the White House vetoed the idea. Though Britain and France would like to ease the European Union’s arms embargo, some European states, including Germany and the Nordic countries, are set against doing so. On February 18th, at a meeting in Brussels, the EU endorsed a compromise resolution to provide more “non-lethal aid”. Members of the Syrian opposition grumble that even the West’s pledges of cash to the political opposition have not been honoured.

Opposition fighters, divided into numerous groups, varying from large battalions of a thousand to handfuls of men, get far fewer weapons than they had hoped. Gulf countries, including Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, have supplied mostly light weapons, many through private donors. Libya has chipped in. But the rebels are equipped mainly with AK-47 rifles, home-made rockets and kit captured from Mr Assad’s arms depots and barracks.

The din of battle

The UN reckons that 70,000 Syrians, mostly civilians, have died. The true figure is probably far higher: thousands have gone missing or have been locked up. In the past few weeks an average of 5,000 people have fled every day. The UN’s High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) says the number now exceeds 860,000, but many more have left uncounted. The number displaced within the country is higher still. More than 4m Syrians now lack fuel, electricity, a telephone line and food.

A hardened and increasingly sectarian underclass on each side—disenfranchised mainly Sunni rebels and the regime’s mainly poor Alawites—is bearing the brunt of the battle. Middle-class Syrians and secular activists are leaving in droves. A lawyer in Tal Abyad, a border village north-east of Aleppo, Syria’s second city, bemoans the fact that armed rebels have displaced the civilians who sought to administer his town and the area around it. Yet the hundreds of rebel groups, despite their efforts to co-ordinate, have failed to jell into a coherent army with a chain of command. Each of them wants to stake out its own patch. Opposition groups seem keener to court their financial backers than to lighten the burden of local civilians.

Sometimes the rebels turn on each other and fight. Islamist groups have clashed with the Kurdish militias that control the north-east of the country, where most of Syria’s Kurds live. Syria will be harder to put together again after the war ends.

Mr Assad and his family, conscious of their minority status in a mainly Sunni country and thus determined to keep Syria broadly secular, insist that the rebels are Islamist extremists, as dangerous to the West as they are to the Arab world. In fact, few of the protesters who started the uprising two years ago were very devout. Alawite defectors are still helped to flee the army. The rebels have mostly left Christians alone. Nor have they slaughtered Alawites, despite the massacres carried out by Mr Assad’s thugs against Sunni villages around Homs. Salafism, the strict version of Islam that has gained ground elsewhere in the Arab world, never found fertile ground in Syria.

But this is changing, too. Western intelligence sources say that jihadists are now arriving in Syria by the busload. Jabhat al-Nusra, the most devout Syrian battalion, which shares al-Qaeda’s worldview, is getting stronger. In December an armed group trashed a Shia prayer house in Zarzour, a town in Idleb. Though many Syrians reject the jihadists the war is becoming religious.

The war has made many Syrians more sectarian in outlook. Alawites have been drafted into the regime’s security forces and militia. “We see that Alawites are stuck,” says Abu Adnan, a rebel fighter in Latakia province, “because Bashar is trying to tie all of their fates to his.”

Both middle-class Syrians and religious minorities are increasingly worried by the way even moderate opposition groups talk of an “Islamic state” to replace Mr Assad’s regime. “We’re bringing back the rule of the Sunnis,” proclaims a fighter in Aleppo’s Tawhid battalion. “We’re the majority, so it’s only fair.” Alawites have reason to be afraid. It is hard to imagine them moving back to mixed cities such as Homs.

Many Syrians have for years looked to mildly Islamist Turkey as an example. “But they aren’t an Islamic state,” grumbles a rebel fighter. “We want something stronger.”

Spot the jihadist
Many Christians are emigrating, having seen what became of their brethren in Iraq and Egypt. Alawites in Damascus say that Maher Assad, the president’s ruthless brother and commander of the Republican Guard that is at the core of the regime, should take over to become their saviour and protector if Bashar is killed.

Beneath it all is the brutalisation of Syrian life. Disputes that have nothing to do with the uprising are being settled with guns. Assassinations and kidnappings have become more frequent. By arming loyalist neighbourhood committees, the regime is dragging more civilians into the war. “I see how my men have become used to killing,” says a rebel commander with Farouq, a large battalion that has brigades spread across the country. “Soon we won’t even realise it is wrong.”

Thousands of homes, factories, schools and hospitals have been razed. Doctors, teachers and engineers have fled. Many Syrians worry that the war will finish only when no one is left to fight. “I just want it to end so I can get married and get on with my life,” sighs the rebel commander. “I am worried that when this is done there won’t be a country left.”

From the print edition: Briefing

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February 21, 2013

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Google’s Retail Stores

Is Google Ripping Off Apple by Opening Its Own Retail Stores? By Will Oremus |

Steve Jobs must be going thermonuclear in his grave. According to Walter Isaacson’s biography, the late Apple chief was so incensed at Google over its Android mobile operating system—a “stolen product,” in his eyes—that he was willing to risk everything to destroy it. Instead, Android has captured 70 percent of the global smartphone market. Now the Wall Street Journal, following the blog 9to5Google, reports that Google is working on plans for a string of Apple-like retail stores, presumably as showcases for the company’s mobile devices, among other products. The move would make sense on multiple levels. Apple Stores not only serve as the company’s public face, they also make piles of money—more per square foot than any retail chain in the United States. And the stores’ famed customer service reinforces brand loyalty.

As long as Google was mainly just making software to run on other companies’ phones, those things didn’t matter very much. Now that the company is working closely with hardware manufacturers to develop its own smartphones, tablets, laptops, and even home entertainment systems, a Google Store would have plenty to stock its shelves. The irony, though, is that Google still wouldn’t need to steal this particular Apple idea if it were just in the business of making Apple knockoffs. Customers don’t need a high-touch retail experience to understand why they might want to buy an Android phone. All they need is a side-by-side comparison of Android and iPhone prices and features. Rather, it’s the company’s foray into genuinely innovative hardware that would make retail stores a necessity.

Chromebooks are one example. The company has already set up Google kiosks in Best Buy to explain to customers the value of these ultra-simple laptops, which have no direct corollary in Apple’s lineup. But the most compelling reason of all to open a Google Store, as 9to5Google points out, might be Google Glass. The leadership thought consumers would need to try Google Glass firsthand to make a purchase. Without being able to use them first hand, few non-techies would be interested in buying Google’s glasses (which will retail from between $500 to $1,000). From there, the decision to sell other Google-branded products made sense. Along with Glass, Google will have an opportunity to demonstrate other upcoming and Google X projects like driverless cars and mini-drone delivery systems at its stores.

If Google follows through on its retail plans, it may indeed be another sign that it is studying Apple’s playbook for building a brand, as the Wall Street Journal has it. But more importantly, it will be a sign that Google’s hardware playbook has sprouted some fresh tricks of its own—potentially, the type of groundbreaking, category-defining devices that made Jobs and Apple worth ripping off in the first place. Google’s stock, by the way, reached a new high on Tuesday, clearing $800 for the first time.

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February 21, 2013

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The Snack Food Industry is Looking to Become this Generation’s Tobacco Litigant

“People could point to these things and say, ‘They’ve got too much sugar, they’ve got too much salt,’ ” Bible said. “Well, that’s what the consumer wants, and we’re not putting a gun to their head to eat it. That’s what they want. If we give them less, they’ll buy less, and the competitor will get our market. So you’re sort of trapped.” (Bible would later press Kraft to reconsider its reliance on salt, sugar and fat.) When it came to Lunchables, they did try to add more healthful ingredients. Back at the start, Drane experimented with fresh carrots but quickly gave up on that, since fresh components didn’t work within the constraints of the processed-food system, which typically required weeks or months of transport and storage before the food arrived at the grocery store. Later, a low-fat version of the trays was developed, using meats and cheese and crackers that were formulated with less fat, but it tasted inferior, sold poorly and was quickly scrapped. When I met with Kraft officials in 2011 to discuss their products and policies on nutrition, they had dropped the Maxed Out line and were trying to improve the nutritional profile of Lunchables through smaller, incremental changes that were less noticeable to consumers. Across the Lunchables line, they said they had reduced the salt, sugar and fat by about 10 percent, and new versions, featuring mandarin-orange and pineapple slices, were in development. These would be promoted as more healthful versions, with “fresh fruit,” but their list of ingredients — containing upward of 70 items, with sucrose, corn syrup, high-fructose corn syrup and fruit concentrate all in the same tray — have been met with intense criticism from outside the industry. One of the company’s responses to criticism is that kids don’t eat the Lunchables every day — on top of which, when it came to trying to feed them more healthful foods, kids themselves were unreliable. When their parents packed fresh carrots, apples and water, they couldn’t be trusted to eat them. Once in school, they often trashed the healthful stuff in their brown bags to get right to the sweets. This idea — that kids are in control — would become a key concept in the evolving marketing campaigns for the trays. In what would prove to be their greatest achievement of all, the Lunchables team would delve into adolescent psychology to discover that it wasn’t the food in the trays that excited the kids; it was the feeling of power it brought to their lives. As Bob Eckert, then the C.E.O. of Kraft, put it in 1999: “Lunchables aren’t about lunch. It’s about kids being able to put together what they want to eat, anytime, anywhere.” Kraft’s early Lunchables campaign targeted mothers. They might be too distracted by work to make a lunch, but they loved their kids enough to offer them this prepackaged gift. But as the focus swung toward kids, Saturday-morning cartoons started carrying an ad that offered a different message: “All day, you gotta do what they say,” the ads said. “But lunchtime is all yours.” With this marketing strategy in place and pizza Lunchables — the crust in one compartment, the cheese, pepperoni and sauce in others — proving to be a runaway success, the entire world of fast food suddenly opened up for Kraft to pursue. They came out with a Mexican-themed Lunchables called Beef Taco Wraps; a Mini Burgers Lunchables; a Mini Hot Dog Lunchable, which also happened to provide a way for Oscar Mayer to sell its wieners. By 1999, pancakes — which included syrup, icing, Lifesavers candy and Tang, for a whopping 76 grams of sugar — and waffles were, for a time, part of the Lunchables franchise as well. Annual sales kept climbing, past $500 million, past $800 million; at last count, including sales in Britain, they were approaching the $1 billion mark. Lunchables was more than a hit; it was now its own category. Eventually, more than 60 varieties of Lunchables and other brands of trays would show up in the grocery stores. In 2007, Kraft even tried a Lunchables Jr. for 3- to 5-year-olds. In the trove of records that document the rise of the Lunchables and the sweeping change it brought to lunchtime habits, I came across a photograph of Bob Drane’s daughter, which he had slipped into the Lunchables presentation he showed to food developers. The picture was taken on Monica Drane’s wedding day in 1989, and she was standing outside the family’s home in Madison, a beautiful bride in a white wedding dress, holding one of the brand-new yellow trays. During the course of reporting, I finally had a chance to ask her about it. Was she really that much of a fan? “There must have been some in the fridge,” she told me. “I probably just took one out before we went to the church. My mom had joked that it was really like their fourth child, my dad invested so much time and energy on it.” Monica Drane had three of her own children by the time we spoke, ages 10, 14 and 17. “I don’t think my kids have ever eaten a Lunchable,” she told me. “They know they exist and that Grandpa Bob invented them. But we eat very healthfully.”

. ‘It’s Called Vanishing Caloric Density.’ At a symposium for nutrition scientists in Los Angeles on Feb. 15, 1985, a professor of pharmacology from Helsinki named Heikki Karppanen told the remarkable story of Finland’s effort to address its salt habit. In the late 1970s, the Finns were consuming huge amounts of sodium, eating on average more than two teaspoons of salt a day. As a result, the country had developed significant issues with high blood pressure, and men in the eastern part of Finland had the highest rate of fatal cardiovascular disease in the world. Research showed that this plague was not just a quirk of genetics or a result of a sedentary lifestyle — it was also owing to processed foods. So when Finnish authorities moved to address the problem, they went right after the manufacturers. (The Finnish response worked. Every grocery item that was heavy in salt would come to be marked prominently with the warning “High Salt Content.” By 2007, Finland’s per capita consumption of salt had dropped by a third, and this shift — along with improved medical care — was accompanied by a 75 percent to 80 percent decline in the number of deaths from strokes and heart disease.) Karppanen’s presentation was met with applause, but one man in the crowd seemed particularly intrigued by the presentation, and as Karppanen left the stage, the man intercepted him and asked if they could talk more over dinner.

Their conversation later that night was not at all what Karppanen was expecting. His host did indeed have an interest in salt, but from quite a different vantage point: the man’s name was Robert I-San Lin, and from 1974 to 1982, he worked as the chief scientist for Frito-Lay, the nearly $3-billion-a-year manufacturer of Lay’s, Doritos, Cheetos and Fritos. Lin’s time at Frito-Lay coincided with the first attacks by nutrition advocates on salty foods and the first calls for federal regulators to reclassify salt as a “risky” food additive, which could have subjected it to severe controls. No company took this threat more seriously — or more personally — than Frito-Lay, Lin explained to Karppanen over their dinner. Three years after he left Frito-Lay, he was still anguished over his inability to effectively change the company’s recipes and practices. By chance, I ran across a letter that Lin sent to Karppanen three weeks after that dinner, buried in some files to which I had gained access. Attached to the letter was a memo written when Lin was at Frito-Lay, which detailed some of the company’s efforts in defending salt. I tracked Lin down in Irvine, Calif., where we spent several days going through the internal company memos, strategy papers and handwritten notes he had kept. The documents were evidence of the concern that Lin had for consumers and of the company’s intent on using science not to address the health concerns but to thwart them. While at Frito-Lay, Lin and other company scientists spoke openly about the country’s excessive consumption of sodium and the fact that, as Lin said to me on more than one occasion, “people get addicted to salt.”

Not much had changed by 1986, except Frito-Lay found itself on a rare cold streak. The company had introduced a series of high-profile products that failed miserably. Toppels, a cracker with cheese topping; Stuffers, a shell with a variety of fillings; Rumbles, a bite-size granola snack — they all came and went in a blink, and the company took a $52 million hit. Around that time, the marketing team was joined by Dwight Riskey, an expert on cravings who had been a fellow at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, where he was part of a team of scientists that found that people could beat their salt habits simply by refraining from salty foods long enough for their taste buds to return to a normal level of sensitivity. He had also done work on the bliss point, showing how a product’s allure is contextual, shaped partly by the other foods a person is eating, and that it changes as people age. This seemed to help explain why Frito-Lay was having so much trouble selling new snacks. The largest single block of customers, the baby boomers, had begun hitting middle age. According to the research, this suggested that their liking for salty snacks — both in the concentration of salt and how much they ate — would be tapering off. Along with the rest of the snack-food industry, Frito-Lay anticipated lower sales because of an aging population, and marketing plans were adjusted to focus even more intently on younger consumers. Except that snack sales didn’t decline as everyone had projected, Frito-Lay’s doomed product launches notwithstanding. Poring over data one day in his home office, trying to understand just who was consuming all the snack food, Riskey realized that he and his colleagues had been misreading things all along. They had been measuring the snacking habits of different age groups and were seeing what they expected to see, that older consumers ate less than those in their 20s. But what they weren’t measuring, Riskey realized, is how those snacking habits of the boomers compared to themselves when they were in their 20s. When he called up a new set of sales data and performed what’s called a cohort study, following a single group over time, a far more encouraging picture — for Frito-Lay, anyway — emerged. The baby boomers were not eating fewer salty snacks as they aged. “In fact, as those people aged, their consumption of all those segments — the cookies, the crackers, the candy, the chips — was going up,” Riskey said. “They were not only eating what they ate when they were younger, they were eating more of it.” In fact, everyone in the country, on average, was eating more salty snacks than they used to.

Health Care, Science and Technology, Thinking and Intelligence, Tricking Mother Nature

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February 20, 2013

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Chinese Hacking

China ‘aiding hacker attacks on west’

Study claims military unit based in Shanghai has stolen vast amounts of data from companies and defence groups Share 224 inShare 19 Email Charles Arthur guardian.co.uk,

The Chinese army has launched hundreds of cyber-attacks against western companies and defence groups from a nondescript office building in Shanghai, according to a report that warns hackers have stolen vast amounts of data from their targets. Mandiant, a security company that has been investigating attacks against western organisations for over six years, said in a report (PDF) the attacks came from a 12-storey building belonging to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) general staff’s department, also known as Unit 61398. Mandiant said it believed a hacking network named the Comment Crew or the Shanghai Group was based inside the compound, in a rundown residential neighbourhood. Although the report fails directly to place the hackers inside the building, it argues there is no other logical reason why so many attacks have emanated from such a small area. “It is time to acknowledge the threat is originating in China, and we wanted to do our part to arm and prepare security professionals to combat that threat effectively,” said the report. The discovery will further raise the temperature in the intergovernmental cyberwars, which have heated up in recent years as the US, Israel, Iran, China and UK have all used computer subterfuge to undermine rival state or terrorist organisations.

One security expert warned that companies in high-profile fields should assume they will be targeted and hacked, and build systems that will fence sensitive data off from each other. Rik Ferguson, global vice-president of security research at the data security company Trend Micro, said: “We need to concentrate less on building castles and assuming they will be impervious, and more on building better dungeons so that when people get in they can’t get anything else.” . Mandiant says Unit 61398 could house “hundreds or thousands” of people and has military-grade, high-speed fibre-optic connections from China Mobile, the world’s largest telecoms carrier. “The nature of Unit 61398’s work is considered by China to be a state secret; however, we believe it engages in harmful computer network operations,” Mandiant said in the report. It said Unit 61398 had been operating since 2006, and was one of the most prolific hacking groups “in terms of quantity of information stolen”. This it estimated at hundreds of terabytes, enough for thousands of 3D designs and blueprints. “APT1”, as Mandiant calls it, is only one of 20 groups Mandiant says has carried out scores of hacking attacks against businesses and organisations in the west, including companies that work in strategic industries such as US power and water infrastructure.

A typical attack would leave software that hid its presence from the user or administrator and silently siphon data to a remote server elsewhere on the internet at the instruction of a separate “command and control” (C&C) computer. By analysing the hidden software, the pattern of connections and links from the C&C server, the team at Mandiant said they were confident of the source of the threat. A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman denied the government was behind the attacks, saying: “Hacking attacks are transnational and anonymous. Determining their origins is extremely difficult. We don’t know how the evidence in this so-called report can be tenable. Arbitrary criticism based on rudimentary data is irresponsible, unprofessional and not helpful in resolving the issue.” But Ferguson told the Guardian: “This is a pretty compelling report, with evidence collected over a prolonged period of time. It points very strongly to marked Chinese involvement.” Mandiant, based in Alexandria, Virginia, in the US, investigated the New York Times break-in, for which it suggested Chinese sources could be to blame.

President Barack Obama is already beefing up US security, introducing an executive order in his State of the Union speech this month that would let the government work with the private sector to fend off hacking. But it will take until February 2014 to have a final version ready for implementation. The revelation comes days after the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, as well as the social networks Facebook and Twitter, said they had been subjected to “highly sophisticated” hacks that in some cases focused on correspondents writing about China and its government. Separate investigations by the computer company Dell, working with the news company Bloomberg, tracked down another alleged hacker, Zhang Changhe, who has written a number of papers on PC hacking. Zhang works at the PLA’s “information engineering university” in Zhengzhou, Henan province, north-central China. The allegations will raise the temperature in the continuing cyberwar between the west and China, which has been steadily rising since the Pentagon and MI6 uncovered Titan Rain, a scheme that tried to siphon data from the Pentagon and the House of Commons in 2006, and which one security expert said at the time dated back at least to 2004. Ferguson suggested that western governments were also carrying out attacks against Chinese targets – “but that’s not a culture which would open up about being hit. I would be surprised and disappointed if most western nations don’t have a cybersecurity force.”

The Stuxnet virus, which hit Iran’s uranium reprocessing plant in 2010, is believed to have been written jointly by the US and Israel, while Iranian sources are believed to have hacked companies that issue email security certificates so that they can crack secure connections used by Iranian dissidents on Google’s Gmail system. China is also reckoned to have been behind the hacking of Google’s email servers in that country in late 2009, in an operation that files from WikiLeaks suggested was inspired by the Beijing government. A timeline of government-sponsored hacking attacks 2004 suspected: Chinese group in Shanghai begins probing US companies and military targets. 2005: “Titan Rain” pulls data from the Pentagon’s systems, and a specialist says of a December 2005 attack on the House of Commons computer system that “The degree of sophistication was extremely high. They were very clever programmers.” 2007: Estonia’s government and other internet services are knocked offline by a coordinated attack from more than a million computers around the world – reckoned to have been run from a group acting at the urging of the Russian government. Nobody is ever arrested over the attack.

2008: Russia’s government is suspected of carrying out a cyberattack to knock out government and other websites inside Georgia, with which it is fighting a border skirmish over the territory of Ossetia. December 2009: Google’s email systems in China are hacked by a group which tries to identify and take over the accounts of Chinese dissidents. Google withdraws its search engine from the Chinese mainland in protest at the actions. Wikileaks cables suggest that the Chinese government was aware of the hacking. 2010: The Flame virus begins silently infecting computers in Iran. It incorporates cutting-edge cryptography breakthroughs which would require world-class experts to write. That is then used to infect Windows PCs via the Windows Update mechanism which normally creates a cryptographically secure link to Microsoft. Instead, Flame puts software that watches every keystroke and frame on the PC. Analysts say that only a “wealthy” nation state could have written the virus, which breaks new ground in encryption. The Stuxnet worm is discovered to have been affecting systems inside Iran’s uranium reprocessing establishment, passing from Windows PCs to the industrial systems which control centrifuges that separate out heavier uranium. The worm makes the centrifuges spin out of control, while suggesting on their control panel that they are operating normally – and so break them. Iran denies that the attack has affected its project. The US and Israel are later fingered as being behind the code.

September 2011: a new virus that silently captures data from transactions in Middle Eastern online banking is unleashed. The principal targets use Lebanese banks. It is not identified until August 2012, when Russian security company Kaspersky discovers the name “Gauss” embedded inside it. The company says the malware it is “nation state-sponsored” – probably by a western state seeking to trace transactions by specific targets. 2012: About 30,000 Windows PCs at Saudi Aramco, the world’s most valuable company, are rendered unusable after a virus called “Shamoon” wipes and corrupts data and the part of the hard drive needed to “bootstrap” the machine when it is turned on. In the US, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta described Shamoon as “one of the most destructive viruses ever” and suggested it could be used to launch an attack as destructive as the 9/11 attacks of 2001.

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February 20, 2013

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Interesting New App

David Zax February 18, 2013 How A Tablet App Could Help Diagnose Concussions Fighting concussions.

There’s an app for that. The Wyss Institute, at Harvard, has developed a tablet application that, among other things, could help diagnose concussions on the sidelines of a football match. Wyss reports on the findings on its site (and in the Journal of Gerontology); CNET and others have taken also taken note. The goal of the app is to bring hard data to a realm that’s traditionally been fairly subjective: diagnosing neuromuscular deficits. Wouldn’t it be nice, Wyss Institute researchers reckoned, if we could be a little bit more precise in assessing these deficits? To that end, the researchers created an application implemented on a Panasonic tablet with a stylus. At root, it’s a simple tracing exercise. A patient is asked to use a stylus to follow a moving target around a circle. Proprietary algorithms measure to what extent a patient deviates from the proper path.

Administer this test to a quarterback who just got sacked, in theory, and instead of vague subjective answers, now you can actually have a numerical score that’s something of a window into his brain state. The tech could be useful not only on the NFL sidelines, but also in doctor’s offices everywhere. Said one of the researchers, Leia Stirling, who led the study: “One day it might sit next to the thermometer and pressure cuff in the doctor’s office….Just as your blood pressure is recorded during every visit, so could your neuromuscular score be tracked over time to determine progress through recovery and rehabilitation.” Stirling’s team is in early stages yet; for now, they’ve only collected baseline data on how healthy people trace these circles.

The next step is to get a pool of data on how people with neuromuscular pathologies do so. “The team is currently conducting a study with athletes in the Boston area to determine the sensitivity of the technology in diagnosing concussions,” says Wyss. Concussion-fighting tech is a longstanding subject in the pages of Technology Review (not to mention in the annals of college and pro football in general, a brutal sport at a moral crossroads). In 2007, Emily Singer reported on a test to spot concussions in athletes; some years after that, she deepened her reporting with this look at a device that could detect concussions on the football field. Brittany Sauser in 2011 wrote about the need to refine research into which helmets offered the best concussion protection; that same year, I took a look at how “smart mouthguards” could help contribute to the solution of what is ultimately, in some respects, a data problem. 0

computer technology, Innovation, Science and Technology, Thinking and Intelligence

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February 19, 2013

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Building a Better Moustrap

Ambri’s Better Grid Battery

A tiny startup called Ambri wants to transform our energy system with massive liquid-metal batteries.

David Bradwell and Donald SadowayAmbri’s CTO, David Bradwell (left), helped invent the first small-scale liquid-metal battery while a graduate student in the MIT lab of Donald Sadoway, who conceived of a design inspired by aluminum smelters.

Standing next to the Ping-Pong table in the offices of the battery startup Ambri, chief technology officer David Bradwell needs both hands to pick up what he hopes will be a building block for a new type of electricity grid. Made of thick steel, it’s a container shaped like a large round cake pan, 16 inches in diameter. Inside it are two metal pucks and some salt powder; a round plate has been welded to the top to make a 100-pound battery cell.

By stringing together a number of these large cells, Ambri plans to make huge batteries, as big as 40-foot shipping containers. It’s not only their size that makes them novel: the chemistry in Ambri’s technology is different from any other currently used in batteries. When the cell is heated to around 500 °C, the disks and powder inside—the battery’s electrodes and electrolyte, respectively—will melt. The result is a battery whose components are all liquid. Conventional rechargeable batteries have solid electrodes that degrade with use, but a battery with only liquid parts could last for years without losing much of its energy storage capacity. The molten materials can also operate at much higher current densities than solids, and for longer periods of time.

Ambri cofounder Donald Sadoway, a professor of materials chemistry at MIT, conceived of the liquid-metal cell as a way to build a grid battery that could store many hours’ worth of energy from solar and wind power at very low cost. Because a stationary battery intended to store power for the grid wouldn’t have to be lightweight like the batteries in our laptops, cars, and flashlights, he was free to depart dramatically from the chemistry that powers those devices. The result is a battery that’s made from abundant, inexpensive materials in a simple production process. It can safely handle large currents and deliver power in quick bursts or for an extended period.

If Ambri or anyone else can make grid storage cheap and dependable, it will change the way we get electricity. Because the output of wind and solar farms is intermittent, these renewable sources alone can’t reliably power the entire grid, or even most of it. Grid operators need to ensure a steady balance between the power being consumed and the amount being generated. The system must be able to meet peak demand, which typically occurs when people turn on their air conditioning on hot summer days. That means wind and solar farms are typically backed up with natural-gas plants that can quickly add to the electricity supply.

The ability to bring in stored power when needed would mean that some of those fossil-fuel power plants could be closed and new ones wouldn’t have to be built. But so far we have no good all-purpose way to store energy for the grid. Today, 99 percent of grid storage takes the form of “pumped hydro”—water is pumped uphill to a reservoir and released to turn a generator when energy is needed. This low-tech method is efficient, and it’s cheap over the long term, but it’s limited to places with mountains and readily available water. As a result, it provides less than 1 percent of the power capacity in the United States on a given day, according to Mark Johnson, director of the grid storage program at the Department of Energy’s ARPA-E research agency.

Chart showing energy storage trade-offs

Dozens of companies are developing new energy storage devices, including various types of giant batteries, large spinning cylinders called flywheels, and even compressed-air storage tanks. But so far none of these approaches are cheap enough to be competitive. Depending on its size, a pumped-hydro plant can deliver power for tens of hours at a cost of about $100 per kilowatt-hour. Grid-level batteries can cost 10 times that, which is why there are just a few hundred megawatts of battery power on the grid—less than the amount contributed by one full-size power plant.

Ambri is betting that by using cheap materials and a simple battery design with no moving parts, it can deliver reliable bulk energy storage for well below $500 per kilowatt-hour. That’s still more expensive than pumped hydro, but since batteries can be placed nearly anywhere, Ambri thinks its technology can be the most economical choice for many applications.

“One metric matters more than anything else on the grid,” says Johnson. “It’s cost, cost, cost.”

Shot Glasses

When Sadoway first considered grid storage in 2005, he looked to aluminum smelters for inspiration. These massive machines, which can stretch to more than 200,000 square feet, use huge amounts of electricity to extract aluminum from molten aluminum oxide through electrolysis. Sadoway, who is trained as a metallurgist, realized that smelting could provide a template for a rechargeable battery that tolerates the current levels needed for the grid. “I looked at that and said, Wow, that looks like half of a battery! And it’s big, it’s scalable, and it’s cheap,” he says.

After hitting upon the idea of the liquid-metal battery, ­Sadoway searched for the perfect electrodes: he ended up choosing magnesium and antimony because they are cheap and separate naturally when in liquid form, the lighter magnesium rising to the top. A liquid-salt electrolyte rests between the magnesium and antimony electrodes, creating a cell with three layers.

When the battery is called upon to deliver power to the grid, magnesium atoms from the top layer—the anode—give off electrons. The resulting magnesium ions travel through the electrolyte and react with the antimony, forming an alloy and expanding the bottom layer of the cell—the cathode. When the battery is charging, it acts like the smelter, liberating the magnesium from its alloy and sending it back through the electrolyte to rejoin the magnesium electrode. The intense flow of current generates the heat used to keep the metals in a molten state. (Ambri has switched to cheaper metal alloys and a salt mixture, but the chemistry works the same way.)

In 2007, when Bradwell was a student in Sadoway’s lab, he used the magnesium-antimony technology to make an experimental battery with about the diameter of a shot glass. By 2009 it had attracted nearly $11 million in research funding from ARPA-E and the French oil company Total. The next year, Sadoway and Bradwell created a company called Liquid Metal Battery Corporation; they then secured seed funding from Bill Gates and Total.

The founders expected the technical work to take longer than the five to seven years that venture capitalists are typically willing to wait before cashing out, so at first they didn’t take money from such investors as many other clean-tech startups had done. By the summer of 2011, though, it was time to build a product. Sadoway recruited a new CEO, Philip Giudice, who helped secure a $15 million round of investment led by Khosla Ventures. The company changed its name to Ambri—based on the name of Cambridge, where the technology was invented.

At least at first, Ambri wants to avoid working with electric utilities, says Giudice, a former Massachusetts state energy official: utilities are conservative and have little financial incentive or regulatory pressure to try out new technologies. Instead, it will initially target military bases and other facilities willing to pay for backup power, such as data centers. These applications are not a huge market, but they will help demonstrate and test the battery.

Later this year, the company plans to make a refrigerator-size module by stacking hundreds of hockey-puck-size cells and wiring them in series. By 2014, the researchers expect, 80 of those modules will be packed together in a full-scale commercial prototype that will generate 500 kilowatts and store two megawatt-hours—enough to power 70 U.S. homes for a full day.

Even after that prototype is up and running, Giudice says, Ambri still plans to avoid the complex, regulation-heavy world of utilities in favor of independent power producers, companies that develop and own energy projects. In west Texas, for example, there’s often a surplus of wind energy at night, when demand and price are lowest. Battery storage would let a wind energy developer provide that power at peak times and earn more money. Another attractive early market is in cities where batteries could be more cost-effective than adding new power lines to meet peak demand for electricity, Giudice says.

If all goes as hoped, Ambri will be able to demonstrate its batteries in multiple installations and show utilities that the technology is low risk, Giudice says. At that point, the company can approach utilities and the state regulators that approve investments in grid equipment. A fully realized utility storage market could be worth billions of dollars in five to 10 years.

The Money

Holding up one of the original shot-glass-size cells next to progressively larger ones—four inches, six inches, and the hefty 16-inch cell—Bradwell shows how far his team has come. But Ambri’s researchers now face the challenge of scaling the liquid-metal battery up to industrial size. Among other tasks, they must design airtight seals on the cells and create a thermal management system that makes sure the heat given off by charging and discharging is enough to keep the components liquid. The group is still determining the individual size that will minimize the fabrication cost, but the cells will be square, between four and 16 inches per side, and about two inches tall.

Ambri has enough money to build its first prototypes. But scaling up production will require more capital at a time when the financing environment for clean-tech companies is far from auspicious. Spooked by poor returns, a series of well-publicized bankruptcies, and the expense of building manufacturing capacity, many venture capitalists have abandoned clean tech, leaving few financing options.

The financing hurdles are particularly high because grid storage startups are taking on big technical challenges in an industry that barely exists. “Venture capitalists like to take either technology or business risk. Some people can take both, but most don’t,” says Bilal Zuberi, an investor at General Catalyst Partners, who has invested in a startup developing grid storage technology based on compressed air. In its next round, Ambri intends to go after investors from the power industry, hoping that companies such as General Electric, ABB, and Siemens can provide not only money but also credibility and expertise in manufacturing and marketing. But even if Ambri’s engineering is flawless and the company secures all the money it needs, it will face the same obstacle confronting so many other alternative energy companies: cheap natural gas. Since natural gas has become the preferred fuel for power generation in the United States, the price that any grid storage technology must meet to be competitive has fallen much lower.

The most significant factor in Ambri’s favor may ultimately be the creaky state of the grid itself. The massive outages caused by Hurricanes Sandy and Irene painfully exposed how vulnerable the power system is, leading politicians and the public to demand solutions. Grid storage could add much-needed resilience and flexibility, providing backup power to buildings and even communities while allowing grid operators to smooth out fluctuations in power supply. Some of the large, centralized power plants that must now be maintained to make sure supply can meet demand would no longer be needed.

Realizing this vision of an electricity system buffered by hundreds of large batteries will take many years, and it will mean upending the status quo in the electric power industry. That’s no easy task. But Ambri believes its battery offers a way to begin taking it on.

Innovation, Investment News, Science and Technology

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February 18, 2013

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Natural Gas Exports

Opponents of LNG exports miss the paradigm shift

January 11, 2013 | Posted by Ken Cohen

The technological revolution that has unleashed the tremendous increase in U.S. domestic energy production has turned traditional thinking about America’s energy and economic policies on its head.

As a result, in just a short period of time our public policy debates have transitioned from multi-decade discussions of scarcity and limits to growth, to discussions of American energy abundance and the enormous benefits that it can offer.

Yet not everyone appreciates or even understands the fundamental shifts underway in our economy as a result of the nation’s increased production of natural gas and oil from unconventional sources such as shale.

Yesterday, for instance, a handful of opportunistic companies held a press conference in Washington, D.C., calling on the federal government to restrict the free trade of America’s abundant energy supplies. The group argues that unrestricted exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) pose risks that the U.S. economy cannot afford.

That protectionist argument seems to assume that energy production and use is a zero-sum game, but it’s not. The group’s warnings that “unfettered exports” will put upward pressure on the prices that manufacturers pay for natural gas feedstocks are rooted in what Jack Gerard, head of the American Petroleum Institute, describes as “misguided economic theories.”

It’s a false choice to claim that increasing exports comes at the expense of domestic manufacturing. In fact, says Jack, the coalition’s “ill-considered policies could have disastrous consequences” for our economy.

I have to agree, and would add several points.

One is that increased exports of LNG will likely end up increasing domestic gas production. That’s because domestic energy supplies are not static – they expand and contract as they become more or less economic to produce. If more markets are opened to their sale, then there will be more demand, more investment and more production. In other words more trade means more supply – and with it, more jobs and economic expansion.

That insight was supported by analysis last year from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) examining a variety of export-related scenarios (see chart).

According to the EIA, moving toward the most robust pro-trade scenario would likely yield an additional 2 trillion cubic feet of U.S. natural gas production. That translates to more American jobs, growth and government revenues.

Trade expands the pie. That wisdom is well understood when it comes to our major exports of chemicals, cars and agricultural products – and so it should be with energy as well.

The broader point to remember is that society has long recognized the tremendous benefits of free trade, regardless of the commodity or product being traded. Secretary of State Clinton eloquently reinforced that point in a speech last fall, one the members of the coalition calling for import restrictions would be wise to read.

When it comes to the subject of LNG exports, a recent study commissioned by the Department of Energy showed that under all trading scenarios, the economic benefits to the country from LNG exports are significant and exceed any localized impacts; in fact, the benefits increase as exports expand.

Finally, in a curious twist, the group of companies demanding protectionist trade policies from Washington calls its coalition America’s Energy Advantage.

But is preventing exports really to America’s advantage?  The U.S. Department of Energy doesn’t think so. Neither do scholars at the Brookings Institution, Manhattan Institute and Rice University, not to mention trade groups like the National Association of Manufacturers, the American Chemistry Council, the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Then there are the editorial boards of the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Washington Post, among others. And don’t forget award-winning economics columnist Robert Samuelson. Or the bipartisan pairing of former energy secretaries Bill Richardson (Democrat) and Spencer Abraham (Republican). They understand that American consumers would suffer if the federal government moved to limit energy exports.

Protectionist trade policies may work to the advantage of the special interests that lobby for them, but they don’t serve the nation’s interest as a whole.

Clean Energy, Economic Systems, Energy, Finance and Economics, Science and Technology

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February 18, 2013

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Digital Capitalism

Digital capitalism produces few winners
Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google might post huge profits, but many of their staff see little financial benefit

John Naughton
The Observer, Saturday 16 February 2013
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Need a crash course in digital capitalism? Easy: you just need to understand four concepts – margins, volume, inequality and employment. And if you need more detail, just add the following adjectives: thin, vast, huge and poor.

First, margins. Once upon a time, there was a great company called Kodak. It dominated its industry, which happened to be chemistry-based photography. And in its dominance, it enjoyed very fat profit margins – up to 70% in some cases. But somewhere in the depths of Kodak’s R&D labs, a few researchers invented digital photography. When they put it to their bosses, the conversation went something like this. Boss: “What are the margins likely to be on this stuff?” Engineers: “Well, it’s digital technology so maybe 5% at best.” Boss: “Thank you and goodbye.”

Actually, it turned out to be goodbye Kodak: those fat margins on an obsolete technology blindsided the company’s leaders. Kodak’s engineers were right, of course. Anything that involves computers and mass production is destined to be commoditized. My first mobile phone (purchased in the 1980s) cost nearly £1,000. I’ve just seen a handset for sale in Tesco for £9.95. (And, yes, I know that Apple currently earns fat margins on its hardware, but that’s because it’s usually ahead of the competition and it won’t last. What’s happening in the much bigger Android market is a better guide.) And, if anything, the trend towards thin margins in non-hardware businesses is even more pronounced because online markets are relatively frictionless. Just ask anyone who’s trying to compete with Amazon.

Then there’s volume, which in the online world is astronomical. For example: 72 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute; more than 100bn photographs have been uploaded to Facebook; during the Christmas period, Amazon.co.uk dispatched a truck filled with parcels every three minutes; to date, more than 40bn apps have been downloaded from Apple’s iTunes store. And so on. Margins may be thin, but when you multiply them by these kinds of numbers you get staggering amounts of revenue.

These vast revenues, however, are not being widely shared. Instead, they are mostly enriching the founders and shareholders of Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook et al. Of course, those who work at the heart of these organisations – the engineers, developers and the executives who manage them, for example – are richly rewarded in salaries, stock options and lavish perks. But these gilded employees constitute only a minority of the workforces of the big tech companies and most of their colleagues have decidedly more mundane terms of employment – and remuneration.

Take Apple, for example. It makes grandiose claims about the number of jobs that it “directly or indirectly” creates or supports. But about two-thirds of the company’s 50,000 American employees work in the US Apple stores, where many of them were earning about $25,000 a year in 2012 – when the mean annual personal income in the US was $38,337 (2010 figure).

Then there’s the question of employment, a topic on which the big technology companies seem exceedingly sensitive. Facebook, for example, is given to engaging fancy consultants to produce preposterous claims about the number of jobs it creates. One such “report” claimed that the company, which at the time had a global workforce of about 3,000, indirectly helped create 232,000 jobs in Europe in 2011 and enabled more than $32bn in revenues. And Apple, stung by criticism about all the work it has outsourced to Foxconn in China, is now driven to claiming it has “created or supported” nearly 600,000 jobs in the US.

The really tough question that none of these companies really wants to answer is: what kinds of jobs exactly? Anyone seeking an insight into this would do well to consult a terrific report by Sarah O’Connor, the Financial Times’s economics correspondent. She visited Amazon’s vast distribution centre at Rugeley in Staffordshire and her account of what she found there makes sobering reading.

She saw hundreds of people in orange vests pushing trolleys around a space the size of nine football pitches, glancing down at the screens of their handheld satnav computers for directions on where to walk next and what to pick up when they get there. They do not dawdle because “the devices in their hands are also measuring their productivity in real time”. They walk between seven and 15 miles a day and everything they do is determined by Amazon’s software. “You’re sort of like a robot, but in human form,” one manager told Ms O’Connor. “It’s human automation, if you like.”

Still, it’s a job. Until it’s replaced by a robot.

Economic Systems, internet, Investment News, Media

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February 17, 2013

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Self Driving Cars

David Zax

February 15, 2013

Oxford’s Self-Driving Car (on the Left Side of the Road)
Across the pond, Oxford swerves into Google’s self-driving lane.

Self-driving cars aren’t just the realm of corporate giants like Google. Academia plays a big role in this space too, as the BBC points out.  Oxford University’s department of engineering science is behind something called the Oxford RobotCar UK project.

The chaps at Oxford use a Nissan LEAF as their base vehicle (they’ve teamed up with Nissan since September 2012, in fact). The Oxford team uses reflective beacons and guide wires to help the car self-navigate. GPS, the team reports, “does not offer the accuracy required for robots to make decisions about how and when to move safely.” (Bear that in mind, next time you turn a robot loose with your iPhone maps app.)

What’s some of the other hardware involved here? The team puts two scanning lasers beneath the front and rear bumpers of the LEAF, lasers which “allow us to sense the 3D structure of the car’s environment,” they report. Stereo cameras, coupled with a laser, help the robot determine the trajectory of the car “relative [to] routes it has been driven on before.” (The laser scanner simply comes off the shelf, offering an 85-degree field of view, and scanning 13 times a second.)

The team isn’t putting the car on the roads just yet. It’s testing it out in a “specially-made environment at Begbroke Science Park in Oxfordshire,” per the BBC. Professor Paul Newman, a lead on the project, says that the car is gaining “experiences,” of a sort. “The car is driven by a human, and it builds a 3D model of its environment. Using an iPad on the dashboard, a driver can determine when it wants to cede control to the robot, or seize the controls back for himself.

The whole system costs £5,000, but Newman told the BBC costs could be drastically reduced, potentially to as low as £100. Newman seems to think his team’s device will inevitably be cheaper than Google’s more-renowned experiments: “if you look at it, we don’t need a 3D laser spinning on the roof that’s really expensive–so that’s one thing straight away. I think our car has a lower profile,” he said. He added that he thought technology such as this would be commonplace in 15 years.

In the race towards robot-driven roads, who do you think is more likely to win, business or the academy?

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computer technology, Innovation, Science and Technology

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February 17, 2013

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Good Day to Die Hard

– Ian Buckwalter is a freelance film writer based in Washington, D.C. He contributes regularly to NPR, Washingtonian, and DCist.

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How Immortality Killed ‘Die Hard’

By Ian Buckwalter

 

inShare Feb 15 2013, 9:07 AM ET 13

A Good Day to Die Hard makes John McClane invincible. That’s why his franchise needs the axe. good day to die hard 615.jpg

20th Century Fox

“Schieß dem Fenster,” says Hans Gruber to his subordinate, Karl, as they try to catch the “monkey in the wrench” to their heist plan in 1988’s action masterpiece Die Hard. Gruber is trying to tell Karl to shoot the glass, a fact that the audience discovers when Hans repeats himself—in English, oddly, given that they’re both native German speakers—in response to Karl’s quizzical look. (Viewers have noted over the years that the German words Alan Rickman utters here make no grammatical sense, which could explain Karl’s confusion.) 

Hans knows that our hero, New York cop John McClane, is out there barefoot, and a floor covered in glass should sideline him at least temporarily. He’s right. As they create the shower of shards for McClane to run through to make his escape, they also set up the scene that demonstrates exactly what made Die Hard such a foundation-shaker for action cinema, setting it apart from the films that came before. Sadly, the same elements have set it apart from most of the sequels that have come after.

 

 

After that sequence, we next see McClane at the end of an alarmingly thick trail of blood, picking pieces of glass out of his foot. But he’s not doing it with steely resolve, gritting his teeth and planning his revenge. He’s in clearly debilitating pain. Choking back tears on the radio to his pal Sgt. Powell on the outside, he basically says he’s probably not getting out of the Nakatomi building alive. 

We latched onto Die Hard‘s version of John McClane because he’s a relatable hero, an everyman with a quick wit and real vulnerability. Up to that point, audiences knew Willis primarily as the sarcastic, flirty private eye on TV’s Moonlighting, and from lead roles in a couple of Blake Edwards comedies. At that time, Willis as an action hero was as out of left field as if Paul Rudd had been cast as Jason Bourne—and it’s even weirder when you consider that Die Hard came out in an era when Stallone, Schwarzenegger, and Van Damme were the template for the successful action star.

 

Die Hard works so brilliantly because even if we know that action-movie rules dictate that McClane is going to win, we can’t get it out of our head that this guy really could die. The words chosen for the title aren’t insignificant in this respect: Die Hard means something very different from, say, Die Impossible, and the latter is closer to the spirit of the standard-issue ’80s action flick—and to what the Die Hard series has become.

 

Director John Moore was keen to include plenty of references to the original Die Hard in his latest chapter, A Good Day to Die Hard, out this week. While his visual quotation of Gruber falling to his death in one scene was amusing, there’s another parallel scene that underlines just how Die Hard really has become Die Impossible.

 

In the original film, McClane manages to escape from attack on a rooftop by tying a fire hose around his waist and leaping off the side of the building. He then has to do some glass-shooting of his own, breaking a window to get back in. People fall easily through windows all the time in movies, so his need for extra firepower to get through was a refreshingly realistic touch.

 

In A Good Day to Die Hard, McClane goes through an exterior window in much the same fashion. Moore films the moment in the gratuitous, Zach Snyder-like slow motion that he favors in (too) many of the movie’s key moments, and the slowed-down speed actually highlights the implausibility of the sequence. We now have an agonizingly long period of time to ponder how he smashes so easily not just through an exterior window but also the presumably even-more-sturdy frame of the window at the center of his impact point. Apparently John McClane is now part wrecking ball.

 

The implausibility of McClane actually still being alive doesn’t even have anything to do with his growing older; it’s just a matter of the stunts getting more and more outlandish.

Most action movies require a healthy suspension of disbelief. That isn’t a problem, so long as the film earns it. Could someone actually jump off a roof with a fire hose wrapped around their waist and survive the jolt at the bottom? That’s probably a question for the Mythbusters, but as presented in the movie, I was willing to buy it. The gore of the glass-walking aftermath, and the affecting defeatism of Willis’s performance earlier, help sell these later strains in plausibility. 

But when the films become cartoonish in their approach to how injury and adversity affect McClane, he goes from man to superman. We mere mortals can no longer relate. Even the third entry, 1995’s Die Hard With a Vengeance, which was the only sequel to even approach the heights of the original, is guilty. While McClane’s bleary, hungover state does help bring him down to earth, shooting him out of a drain pipe atop a jet of water like something out of an old Looney Tunes short quite literally does the opposite. And that’s without even mentioning the coincidence of his reluctant sidekick Zeus (Samuel L. Jackson) just happening to drive by that pipe at the exact moment McClane fires out of it.

 

As we get farther from the source, the offenses just grow worse, and the implausibility of McClane actually still being alive doesn’t even have anything to do with his growing older; it’s just a matter of the stunts getting more and more outlandish. In 1990, Die Hard 2 had him engaging in a fist fight on the wing of a grounded, but rapidly moving, airplane. That scene wasn’t too much of a stretch: Die Hard 2 is terrible for reasons mostly separate from McClane’s burgeoning invincibility. But to up the ante, in 2007’s Live Free or Die Hard, the script has him jump onto an F-35 fighter jet in a flat spin, from there to a crumbling overpass, and then to the ground. Wile E. Coyote wouldn’t even get out of that one alive.

 

A Good Day to Die Hard reaches a series low in all these respects. In the first half hour alone, McClane survives, scratch-free, at least two incidents that would have killed anyone who didn’t have superpowers. If this McClane walked across broken glass, he’d pull the shards out with his teeth, then chew and swallow them. Christopher Nolan’s vision of Batman is more breakable than this guy; at this point, series producers should just put a cape and a mask on him and call it a day.

 

Actually, calling it a day is probably the way to go all around. I’d recommend that John McClane finally die, if it weren’t for one thing: The John McClane of Die Hard has already been dead and gone for a long time.

Art, Entertainment, Media

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February 16, 2013

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