Yes, it was the hour when, a long time ago, I was perfectly content. What awaited me back then was always a night of easy, dreamless sleep. And yet something had changed, since it was back to my cell that I went to wait for the next day…as if familiar paths traced in summer skies could lead as easily to prison as to the sleep of the innocent.
Tad Friend writes, if you build “nine hundred miles of sinuous highway and twenty-one thousand miles of tangled surface streets” in one city alone, then you’re going to find at least a few people who want to put those streets to use. This suggests that every city blooms with the kinds of crime most appropriate to its form.
Heists obsess people because of what they reveal about architecture’s peculiar power: the design of new ways of moving through the world. Every heist is thus just a counterdesign—a response to the original architect.
I recently read this interesting, and distressing, story of a man who was drugged and robbed. A form of crime which has been going on for centuries. But the 21st Century twist is that the thieves forced him to transfer large sums of money via his phone's banking apps.
While under the influence, the victim used his usernames, passwords, PINs, and biometrics to send money to the criminal's accounts.
Is there a "technological" way to stop this? His banks initially refused to refund the stolen money. Only once the press stepped in did they relent. One bank, Revolut, said:
This was an unusual case where the payments were authorised by the customer but, as is now clear, without his consent.
The series of audible, metallic clicks made as a key penetrates a lock can now be deciphered by signal processing software to reveal the precise shape of the sequence of ridges on the key's shaft. Knowing this, a working copy of it can then be 3D printed.
I couldn’t seem to convince my writers that I was genuinely ok working with a super rough first draft — i.e., that I’d harbor no hidden judgment about their intelligence, commitment, or excellence at their craft.
So I came up with a new word. “Just give me a v0.crap.” (Pronounced “version zero dot crap”.)
v.0.crap works because it’s attuned to the psychology of the situation. It’s punching through our innate desire not to “look bad”, plus years of corporate conditioning that tells us not to share less-than-polished work. It’s easier for people used to delivering exceptional work to feel they’ve exceeded the goal of “crap”; they can sit comfortably in “good enough for the current purpose.”