So you know when you’re flop­ping about at home, mind­ing your own busi­ness, drink­ing from your wa­ter bot­tle in a way that does not pos­sess any in­tent to sub­vert the Commonwealth of Australia?

It’s a feel­ing I know all too well, and in which I was vig­or­ously par­tak­ing when I got this mes­sage in “the group chat”.

A nice mes­sage from my friend, with a photo of a board­ing pass 🙂 A good thing about mes­sages from your friends is that they do not have any rip­pling con­se­quences 🙂🙂🙂

The man in ques­tion is Tony Abbott, one of Australia’s many for­mer Prime Ministers.

For se­cu­rity rea­sons, we try to change our Prime Minister every six months, and to never use the same Prime Minister on mul­ti­ple web­sites.

This par­tic­u­lar for­mer PM had just posted a pic­ture of his board­ing pass on Instagram (Instagram, in case you don’t know it, is an app you can open up on your phone any time to look at ads).

The since-deleted Instagram post show­ing the board­ing pass and bag­gage re­ceipt. The cap­tion reads “coming back home from japan 😍😍 look­ing for­ward to see­ing every­one! cli­mate change is­n’t real 😌 ok by­eee”

My friend (who we will re­fer to by their group chat name, 𝖍𝖔𝖌𝖌𝖊 𝖒𝖔𝖆𝖉𝖊) is ask­ing whether I can “hack this man” not be­cause I am the kind of per­son who reg­u­larly com­mits 𝒄𝒚𝒃𝒆𝒓 𝒕𝒓𝒆𝒂𝒔𝒐𝒏 on a whim, but be­cause we’d re­cently been talk­ing about board­ing passes.

I’d said that peo­ple post pic­tures of their board­ing passes all the time, not know­ing that it can some­times be used to get their pass­port num­ber and stuff. They just post it be­ing like “omg go­ing on hol­i­dayyyy 😍😍😍”, un­aware that they’re post­ing cringe.

People post their board­ing passes all the time, be­cause it’s not clear that they’re meant to be se­cret

Meanwhile, some hacker is rub­bing their hands to­gether, be­ing all “yumyum iden­tity fraud 👀” in their dark web Discord, be­cause this hap­pens a lot.

So there I was, mak­ing in­tense and mean­ing­ful eye con­tact with this chat bub­ble, ask­ing me if I could “hack this man”.

Of course, my friend was­n’t ac­tu­ally ask­ing me to hack the for­mer Prime Minister.

I mean… what are you gonna do, not click it? Are you gonna let a link that’s like 50% ad­ver­tis­ing track­ing ID tell you what to do? Wouldn’t you be cu­ri­ous?

The for­mer Prime Minister had just posted his board­ing pass. Was that bad? Was some­one in dan­ger? I did­n’t know.

What I did know was: the least I could do for my coun­try would be to have a ca­sual browse 👀

So I had a bit of a ca­sual browse, and got the pic­ture of the board­ing pass, and then…. I did­n’t know what was sup­posed to hap­pen af­ter that.

Well, I’d heard that it’s bad to post your board­ing pass on­line, be­cause if you do, a bored 17 year-old Russian boy called “Katie-senpai” might some­how use it to com­mit iden­tity fraud. But I don’t know any­one like that, so I just clum­sily googled some stuff.

Eventually I found a blog post ex­plain­ing that yes, pic­tures of board­ing passes can in­deed be used for Crimes. The part you wanna be look­ing at for all your crim­ing needs is the bar­code, be­cause it’s got the “Booking Reference” (e.g. H8JA2A) in it.

Why do you want the book­ing ref­er­ence? It’s one of the two things you need to log in to the air­line web­site to man­age your flight.

The sec­ond one is your… last name. I was re­ally hop­ing the sec­ond one would be like a pass­word or some­thing. But, no, it’s the book­ing ref­er­ence the air­line emails you and prints on your board­ing pass. And it also lets you log in to the air­line web­site?

That sounds sus­pi­ciously like a pass­word to me, but like I’m still fine to pre­tend it’s not if you are.

I’ve been prac­tic­ing every morn­ing at sun­rise, but still can’t scan bar­codes with my eyes. I had to set­tle for a bar­code scan­ner app on my phone, but when I tried to scan the pic­ture in the Instagram post, it did­n’t work :((

Maybe I should­n’t have blurred out the bar­code first

Well, maybe it was­n’t scan­ning be­cause the pic­ture was too blurry.

I spent around 15 min­utes in an “enhance, ENHANCE” mon­tage, fid­dling around with the im­age, in­creas­ing the con­trast, and so on. Despite the mon­tage tak­ing up way too much of the 22 minute episode, I could­n’t even get the bar­code to scan.

After star­ing at this im­age for 15 min­utes, I no­ticed the Booking Reference is just… printed on the bag­gage re­ceipt.

But it did not pre­pare me for this.

After re­cov­er­ing from that emo­tional roller­coaster, I went to qan­tas.com.au, and clicked “Manage Booking”. In case you don’t know it be­cause you live in a coun­try with fast in­ter­net, Qantas is the main air­line here in Australia.

Well, the lo­gin form was just… there, and it was ask­ing for a Booking Reference and a last name. I had just flaw­lessly read the Booking Reference from the board­ing pass pic­ture, and, well… I knew the last name.

I did hes­i­tate for a split-sec­ond, but… no, I had to know.

The “Manage Booking” page, logged in as some guy called Anthony Abbott

Leave a com­ment if you re­ally felt that.

I guess I was now logged the heck in as Tony Abbott? And for all I know, every­one else who saw his Instagram post was right there with me. It’s kinda whole­some, to imag­ine us all there to­gether. But also prob­a­bly sub­op­ti­mal in a gov­ern­men­tal sense.

I then just in­cred­i­bly browsed the page, browsed it so hard.

I saw Tony Abbott’s name, flight times, and Frequent Flyer num­ber, but not re­ally any­thing su­per se­cret-look­ing. Not gonna be com­mit­ting any cy­ber trea­son with a Frequent Flyer num­ber. The flight was in the past, so I could­n’t change any­thing, ei­ther.

The page said the flight had been booked by a travel agent, so I guessed some in­for­ma­tion would be miss­ing be­cause of that.

I clicked around and scrolled a con­sid­er­able length, but still did­n’t find any gov­ern­ment se­crets.

Some peo­ple might give up here. But I, the Icarus of com­put­ers, was sim­ply too dumb to know when to stop.

I wanted to see if there were juicy things hid­den in­side the page. To do it, I had to use the only hacker tool I know.

Right click > Inspect Element, all you need to sub­vert the Commonwealth of Australia

Listen. This is the only part of the story that might be con­fused for highly elite com­puter skill. It’s not, though. Maybe later some­one will show you this same thing to try and flex, act­ing like only they know how to do it. You will not go gen­tly into that good night. You will refuse to ac­knowl­edge their flex, killing them in­stantly.

“Inspect Element”, as it’s called, is a fea­ture of Google Chrome that lets you see the com­put­er’s in­ter­nal rep­re­sen­ta­tion (HTML) of the page you’re look­ing at. Kinda like open­ing up a clock and look­ing at the cool cog party in­side.

Yeahhh go lit­tle cogs, look at ’em ab­solutely go­ing off. Now imag­ine this but with like, JavaScript

Everything you see when you use “Inspect Element” was al­ready down­loaded to your com­puter, you just had­n’t asked Chrome to show it to you yet. Just like how the cogs were al­ready in the watch, you just had­n’t opened it up to look.

But let us dis­pense with friv­o­lous cog talk. Cheap tricks such as “Inspect Element” are used by pro­gram­mers to try and un­der­stand how the web­site works. This is ul­ti­mately fu­tile: Nobody can un­der­stand how web­sites work. Unfortunately, it kinda looks like hack­ing the first time you see it.

If you’d like to know more about it, I’ve pre­pared a short video.

hey youtube wel­come to my hack­ing tu­to­r­ial, to­day we’re gonna hack…. the nsa pic.twit­ter.com/​2Z35GJjSZE— “Alex” (@mangopdf) May 1, 2019

I scrolled around the page’s HTML, not re­ally know­ing what it meant, fu­ri­ously try­ing to find any­thing that looked out of place or se­cret.

I even­tu­ally re­alised that man­u­ally read­ing HTML with my eyes was not an ef­fi­cient way of de­fend­ing my coun­try, and Ctrl + F’d the HTML for “passport”.

At this point I was fairly sure I was look­ing at the ex­tremely se­cret gov­ern­ment-is­sued ID of the 28th Prime Minister of the Commonwealth of Australia, ser­vant to her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and I was kinda wor­ried that I was some­how do­ing some­thing wrong, but like, not enough to stop.

Well damn, if Tony Abbott’s pass­port num­ber is in this trea­sure trove of com­puter spaghetti, maybe there’s wayyyyy more. Perhaps this HTML con­tains the lost launch codes to the Sydney Opera House, or Harold Holt.

Searching for phone and num­ber did­n’t get any­where, so I searched for 614, the first 3 dig­its of an Australian phone num­ber, us­ing my colos­sal and highly ce­les­tial galaxy brain.

A weird pile of what I could only de­scribe as ex­tremely up­per­case let­ters came up. It looked like this:

So, there’s a lot go­ing on here. There is in­deed a phone num­ber in here. But what the heck is all this other stuff?

I re­alised this was like… Qantas staff talk­ing to ea­chother about Tony Abbott, but not to him?

In what is surely the sub­tweet­ing of the cen­tury, it has a sec­tion say­ing HITOMI CALLED RQSTING FASTTRACK FOR MR. ABBOTT. Hitomi must be re­quest­ing a “fasttrack” (I thought that was only a thing in movies???) from an­other Qantas em­ployee.

What is even go­ing on here? Why do Qantas flight staff talk to ea­chother via this pas­sen­ger in­for­ma­tion field? Why do they send these mes­sages, and your pass­port num­ber to you when you log in to their web­site? I’ll never know be­cause I sud­denly got dis­tracted with

I re­alised the all­caps muesli I saw must be some air­line code for some­thing. Furious and in­tense googling led me to sev­eral an­cient for­bid­den PDFs that ex­plained some of the codes.

Apparently, they’re called “SSR codes” (Special Service Request). There are codes for things like “Vegetarian lacto-ovo meal” (VLML), “Vegetarian ori­en­tal meal” (VOML), and even “Vegetarian ve­gan meal” (VGML). Because I was cu­ri­ous about these codes, here’s some for you to be cu­ri­ous about too (tag ur­self, I’m UMNR):

The phone num­ber I found looked like this: CTCM QF HK1 [phone num­ber]. Googling “SSR CTCM” led me to the de­vel­oper guide for some kind of air­line as­so­ci­a­tion, which I as­sume I am ba­si­cally a mem­ber of now.

I thought maybe the phone num­ber be­longed to the travel agency, but I checked and it has to be the pas­sen­ger’s real phone num­ber. That would be, if my cal­cu­la­tions are cor­rect,,,, *steeples fin­gers* Tony Abbott’s phone num­ber.

My friend who mes­saged me had no idea.

Tony Abbott’s pass­port is prob­a­bly a Diplomatic pass­port, which is used to “represent the Australian Government over­seas in an of­fi­cial ca­pac­ity”.

By this point I’d had enough de­fend­ing my coun­try, and had re­cently no­ticed some new thoughts in my brain, which were:

* oh jeez oh boy oh jeez

* i gotta get some­one, some­how, to re­set tony ab­bot­t’s pass­port num­ber

* can you even re­set pass­port num­bers

* is it pos­si­ble that i’ve done a crime

In this act, I, your well-mean­ing but ul­ti­mately in­com­pe­tent pro­tag­o­nist, at­tempt to do the fol­low­ing things:

* ⬜ fig­ure out whether i have done a crime

* ⬜ no­tify some­one (tony ab­bott?) that this hap­pened

* ⬜ get per­mis­sion to pub­lish this here blog post

* ⬜ tell qan­tas about the se­cu­rity is­sue so they can fix it

Spoilers: This takes al­most six months.

I con­tacted a lot of peo­ple about this. If my cal­cu­la­tions are cor­rect, I called at least 30 phone num­bers, to say noth­ing of The Emails. If you laid all the peo­ple I con­tacted end to end along the equa­tor, they would die, and you would be ar­rested. Eventually I started keep­ing track of who I talked to in a note I now re­fer to as “the hash­tag strug­gle”.

I’m gonna skip a con­sid­er­able vol­ume of te­dious and ul­ti­mately un­sat­is­fy­ing tele­phony, be­cause it’s been a long day of scrolling al­ready, and you need to save your strength.

Alright strap your­self in and en­joy as I am drop-kicked through the goal posts of life.

I did­n’t think any­thing I did sounded like a crime, but I knew that some­times when the other per­son is rich or fa­mous, things can sud­denly be­come crimes. Like, was there go­ing to be some Monarch Law or some­thing? Was Queen Elizabeth II gonna be mad about this?

My usual de­fence against be­ing ar­rested for hack­ing is mak­ing sure the per­son be­ing hacked is okay with it. You heard me, it’s the power of ✨consent✨. But this time I could uh only get it in ret­ro­spect, which is a bit yikes.

So I was won­der­ing like… was log­ging in with some­one else’s book­ing ref­er­ence a crime? Was hav­ing some­one else’s pass­port num­ber a crime? What if they were, say, the for­mer Prime Minister? Would I get in trou­ble for pub­lish­ing a blog post about it? I mean you’re read­ing the blog post right now so ob­vi­ousl

It turned out I could just google these things, and be­fore I knew it I was read­ing “the leg­is­la­tion”. It’s the rules of the law, just writ­ten down.

Look, read­ing pages of HTML? No wor­ries. Especially if it’s to de­fend my coun­try. But who­ever wrote the leg­is­la­tion was just mak­ing up words.

Eventually, I was able to di­vine the fol­low­ing wis­doms from the Times New Roman tea leaves:

* Defamation is where you get in trou­ble for pub­lish­ing some­thing that makes some­one look bad.

But, it’s fine for me to blog about it, since it’s not defama­tion if you can prove it’s true

* But, it’s fine for me to blog about it, since it’s not defama­tion if you can prove it’s true

* Having Tony Abbott’s pass­port num­ber is­n’t a crime

But us­ing it to com­mit iden­tity fraud would be

* But us­ing it to com­mit iden­tity fraud would be

* There are laws about what it’s okay to do on a com­puter

The things it’s okay to do are: If u EVER even LOOK at a com­puter the wrong way, the FBI will in­stantly slam dunk you in a le­gal fash­ion de­pen­dent on the leg­is­la­tion in your area

* The things it’s okay to do are: If u EVER even LOOK at a com­puter the wrong way, the FBI will in­stantly slam dunk you in a le­gal fash­ion de­pen­dent on the leg­is­la­tion in your area

I am pos­si­bly the fur­thest thing you can be from a lawyer. So, I’m sure I don’t need to tell you not to take this as le­gal ad­vice. But, if you are the kind of per­son who takes le­gal ad­vice from mango blog posts, who am I to stand in your way? Not a lawyer, that’s who. Don’t do it.

You know what, maybe I needed help. From an adult. Someone whose 3-year old kid has been buy­ing iPad apps for months be­cause their par­ents can’t fig­ure out how to turn it off.

“Yeah, maybe I should get some of that free gov­ern­ment le­gal ad­vice”, I thought to my­self, legally. That seemed like a pretty com­mon thing, so I thought it should be easy to do. I took a big sip of wa­ter and googled “free le­gal ad­vice”.

Before I went and told every­one about my HTML frol­ick­ing, I spent a week call­ing le­gal aid num­bers, lawyers, and oth­er­wise try­ing to fig­ure out if I’d done a crime.

During this time, I did­n’t tell any­one what I’d done. I asked if any laws would be bro­ken if “someone” had “logged into a web­site with some­one’s pub­licly-posted pass­word and found the per­sonal in­for­ma­tion of a for­mer politi­cian”. Do you see how that’s not even a lie? I’m start­ing to see how lawyers do it.

First I call the state gov­ern­men­t’s Legal Aid num­ber. They tell me they don’t do that here, and I should call an­other Legal Aid place named some­thing slightly dif­fer­ent.

The sec­ond place tells me they don’t do that ei­ther, and I should call the First Place and “hopefully you get some­one more se­nior”.

Follow NPR’s cov­er­age of Ginsburg’s death and the po­lit­i­cal af­ter­math here.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the de­mure fire­brand who in her 80s be­came a le­gal, cul­tural and fem­i­nist icon, died Friday. The Supreme Court an­nounced her death, say­ing the cause was com­pli­ca­tions from metasta­tic can­cer of the pan­creas.

The court, in a state­ment, said Ginsburg died at her home in Washington, D. C., sur­rounded by fam­ily. She was 87.

“Our na­tion has lost a jus­tice of his­toric stature,” Chief Justice John Roberts said. “We at the Supreme Court have lost a cher­ished col­league. Today we mourn but with con­fi­dence that fu­ture gen­er­a­tions will re­mem­ber Ruth Bader Ginsburg as we knew her, a tire­less and res­olute cham­pion of jus­tice.”

Architect of the le­gal fight for wom­en’s rights in the 1970s, Ginsburg sub­se­quently served 27 years on the na­tion’s high­est court, be­com­ing its most promi­nent mem­ber. Her death will in­evitably set in mo­tion what promises to be a nasty and tu­mul­tuous po­lit­i­cal bat­tle over who will suc­ceed her, and it thrusts the Supreme Court va­cancy into the spot­light of the pres­i­den­tial cam­paign.

Just days be­fore her death, as her strength waned, Ginsburg dic­tated this state­ment to her grand­daugh­ter Clara Spera: “My most fer­vent wish is that I will not be re­placed un­til a new pres­i­dent is in­stalled.”

She knew what was to come. Ginsburg’s death will have pro­found con­se­quences for the court and the coun­try. Inside the court, not only is the leader of the lib­eral wing gone, but with the court about to open a new term, the chief jus­tice no longer holds the con­trol­ling vote in closely con­tested cases.

Though Roberts has a con­sis­tently con­ser­v­a­tive record in most cases, he has split from fel­low con­ser­v­a­tives in a few im­por­tant ones this year, cast­ing his vote with lib­er­als, for in­stance, to pro­tect at least tem­porar­ily the so-called DREAMers from de­por­ta­tion by the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion, to up­hold a ma­jor abor­tion prece­dent and to up­hold bans on large church gath­er­ings dur­ing the coro­n­avirus pan­demic. But with Ginsburg gone, there is no clear court ma­jor­ity for those out­comes.

Indeed, a week af­ter the up­com­ing pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, the court is for the third time sched­uled to hear a chal­lenge brought by Republicans to the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare. In 2012, the high court up­held the law in a 5-4 rul­ing, with Roberts cast­ing the de­cid­ing vote and writ­ing the opin­ion for the ma­jor­ity. But this time the out­come may well be dif­fer­ent.

That’s be­cause Ginsburg’s death gives Republicans the chance to tighten their grip on the court with an­other ap­point­ment by President Trump so con­ser­v­a­tives would have 6-3 ma­jor­ity. And that would mean that even a de­fec­tion on the right would leave con­ser­v­a­tives with enough votes to pre­vail in the Obamacare case and many oth­ers.

At the cen­ter of the bat­tle to achieve that will be Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. In 2016, he took a step un­prece­dented in mod­ern times: He re­fused for nearly a year to al­low any con­sid­er­a­tion of President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nom­i­nee.

Back then, McConnell’s jus­ti­fi­ca­tion was the up­com­ing pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, which he said would al­low vot­ers a chance to weigh in on what kind of jus­tice they wanted. But now, with the ta­bles turned, McConnell has made clear he will not fol­low the same course. Instead he will try im­me­di­ately to push through a Trump nom­i­nee so as to en­sure a con­ser­v­a­tive jus­tice to fill Ginsburg’s lib­eral shoes, even if Trump were to lose his re­elec­tion bid. Asked what he would do in cir­cum­stances such as these, McConnell said: “Oh, we’d fill it.”

So what hap­pens in the com­ing weeks will be bare-knuckle pol­i­tics, writ large, on the stage of a pres­i­den­tial elec­tion. It will be a fight Ginsburg had hoped to avoid, telling Justice John Paul Stevens shortly be­fore his death that she hoped to serve as long as he did — un­til age 90.

“My dream is that I will stay on the court as long as he did,” she said in an in­ter­view in 2019.

She did­n’t quite make it. But Ruth Bader Ginsburg was nonethe­less a his­toric fig­ure. She changed the way the world is for American women. For more than a decade, un­til her first ju­di­cial ap­point­ment in 1980, she led the fight in the courts for gen­der equal­ity. When she be­gan her le­gal cru­sade, women were treated, by law, dif­fer­ently from men. Hundreds of state and fed­eral laws re­stricted what women could do, bar­ring them from jobs, rights and even from jury ser­vice. By the time she donned ju­di­cial robes, how­ever, Ginsburg had worked a rev­o­lu­tion.

That was never more ev­i­dent than in 1996 when, as a rel­a­tively new Supreme Court jus­tice, Ginsburg wrote the court’s 7-1 opin­ion de­clar­ing that the Virginia Military Institute could no longer re­main an all-male in­sti­tu­tion. True, Ginsburg said, most women — in­deed most men — would not want to meet the rig­or­ous de­mands of VMI. But the state, she said, could not ex­clude women who could meet those de­mands.

“Reliance on over­broad gen­er­al­iza­tions … es­ti­mates about the way most men or most women are, will not suf­fice to deny op­por­tu­nity to women whose tal­ent and ca­pac­ity place them out­side the av­er­age de­scrip­tion,” Ginsburg wrote.

She was an un­likely pi­o­neer, a diminu­tive and shy woman, whose soft voice and large glasses hid an in­tel­lect and at­ti­tude that, as one col­league put it, was “tough as nails.”

By the time she was in her 80s, she had be­come some­thing of a rock star to women of all ages. She was the sub­ject of a hit doc­u­men­tary, a biopic, an op­eretta, mer­chan­dise ga­lore fea­tur­ing her “Notorious RBG” moniker, a Time mag­a­zine cover and reg­u­lar Saturday Night Live sketches.

On one oc­ca­sion in 2016, Ginsburg got her­self into trou­ble and later pub­licly apol­o­gized for dis­parag­ing re­marks she made about then-pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Trump.

But for the most part Ginsburg en­joyed her fame and main­tained a sense of hu­mor about her­self.

Asked about the fact that she had ap­par­ently fallen asleep dur­ing the 2015 State of the Union ad­dress, Ginsburg did not take the Fifth, ad­mit­ting that al­though she had vowed not to drink at din­ner with the other jus­tices be­fore the speech, the wine had just been too good to re­sist. The re­sult, she said, was that she was per­haps not an en­tirely “sober judge” and kept nod­ding off.

Born in Brooklyn, Ruth Bader went to pub­lic schools, where she ex­celled as a stu­dent — and as a ba­ton twirler. By all ac­counts, it was her mother who was the dri­ving force in her young life, but Celia Bader died of can­cer the day be­fore the fu­ture jus­tice would grad­u­ate from high school.

Then 17, Ruth Bader went on to Cornell University on a full schol­ar­ship, where she met Martin (aka “Marty”) Ginsburg. “What made Marty so over­whelm­ingly at­trac­tive to me was that he cared that I had a brain,” she said.

After her grad­u­a­tion, they were mar­ried and went off to Fort Sill, Okla., for his mil­i­tary ser­vice. There Mrs. Ginsburg, de­spite scor­ing high on the civil ser­vice exam, could only get a job as a typ­ist, and when she be­came preg­nant, she lost even that job.

Two years later, the cou­ple re­turned to the East Coast to at­tend Harvard Law School. She was one of only nine women in a class of more than 500 and found the dean ask­ing her why she was tak­ing up a place that “should go to a man.”

At Harvard, she was the aca­d­e­mic star, not her hus­band. The cou­ple were busy jug­gling sched­ules and their tod­dler when Marty Ginsburg was di­ag­nosed with tes­tic­u­lar can­cer. Surgeries and ag­gres­sive ra­di­a­tion fol­lowed.

“So that left Ruth with a 3-year-old child, a fairly sick hus­band, the law re­view, classes to at­tend and feed­ing me,” Marty Ginsburg said in a 1993 in­ter­view with NPR.

The ex­pe­ri­ence also taught the fu­ture jus­tice that sleep was a lux­ury. During the year of her hus­band’s ill­ness, he was only able to eat late at night; af­ter that he would dic­tate his se­nior class pa­per to her. At about 2 a.m., he would go back to sleep, Ruth Bader Ginsburg re­called in an NPR in­ter­view. “Then I’d take out the books and start read­ing what I needed to be pre­pared for classes the next day.”

Marty Ginsburg sur­vived, grad­u­ated and got a job in New York; his wife, a year be­hind him in school, trans­ferred to Columbia, where she grad­u­ated at the top of her law school class. Despite her aca­d­e­mic achieve­ments, the doors to law firms were closed to women, and though rec­om­mended for a Supreme Court clerk­ship, she was­n’t even in­ter­viewed.

It was bad enough that she was a woman, she re­called later, but she was also a mother, and male judges wor­ried she would be di­verted by her “familial oblig­a­tions.”

A men­tor, law pro­fes­sor Gerald Gunther, fi­nally got her a clerk­ship in New York by promis­ing Judge Edmund Palmieri that if she could­n’t do the work, he would pro­vide some­one who could. That was “the car­rot,” Ginsburg would say later. “The stick” was that Gunther, who reg­u­larly fed his best stu­dents to Palmieri, told the judge that if he did­n’t take Ginsburg, Gunther would never send him a clerk again. The Ginsburg clerk­ship ap­par­ently was a suc­cess; Palmieri kept her not for the usual one year, but two, from 1959-61.

Ginsburg’s next path is rarely talked about, mainly be­cause it does­n’t fit the nar­ra­tive. She learned Swedish so she could work with Anders Bruzelius, a Swedish civil pro­ce­dure scholar. Through the Columbia University School of Law Project on International Procedure, Ginsburg and Bruzelius co-au­thored a book.

In 1963, Ginsburg fi­nally landed a teach­ing job at Rutgers Law School, where she at one point hid her sec­ond preg­nancy by wear­ing her mother-in-law’s clothes. The ruse worked; her con­tract was re­newed be­fore her baby was born.

While at Rutgers, she be­gan her work fight­ing gen­der dis­crim­i­na­tion.

Her first big case was a chal­lenge to a law that barred a Colorado man named Charles Moritz from tak­ing a tax de­duc­tion for the care of his 89-year-old mother. The IRS said the de­duc­tion, by statute, could only be claimed by women, or wid­owed or di­vorced men. But Moritz had never mar­ried.

The tax court con­cluded that the Internal Revenue Code was im­mune to con­sti­tu­tional chal­lenge, a no­tion that tax lawyer Marty Ginsburg viewed as “preposterous.” The two Ginsburgs took on the case — he from the tax per­spec­tive, she from the con­sti­tu­tional one.

According to Marty Ginsburg, for his wife, this was the “mother brief.” She had to think through all the is­sues and how to fix the in­equity. The so­lu­tion was to ask the court not to in­val­i­date the statute but to ap­ply it equally to both sexes. She won in the lower courts.

“Amazingly,” he re­called in a 1993 NPR in­ter­view, the gov­ern­ment pe­ti­tioned the U. S. Supreme Court, stat­ing that the de­ci­sion “cast a cloud of un­con­sti­tu­tion­al­ity” over lit­er­ally hun­dreds of fed­eral statutes, and it at­tached a list of those statutes, which it com­piled with Defense Department com­put­ers.

Those laws, Marty Ginsburg added, “were the statutes that my wife then lit­i­gated … to over­turn over the next decade.”

In 1971, she would write her first Supreme Court brief in the case of Reed v. Reed. Ruth Bader Ginsburg rep­re­sented Sally Reed, who thought she should be the ex­ecu­tor of her son’s es­tate in­stead of her ex-hus­band.

The con­sti­tu­tional is­sue was whether a state could au­to­mat­i­cally pre­fer men over women as ex­ecu­tors of es­tates. The an­swer from the all-male Supreme Court: no.

It was the first time the court had struck down a state law be­cause it dis­crim­i­nated based on gen­der.

And that was just the be­gin­ning.

By then Ginsburg was earn­ing quite a rep­u­ta­tion. She would be­come the first fe­male tenured pro­fes­sor at Columbia Law School, and she would found the Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union.

As the chief ar­chi­tect of the bat­tle for wom­en’s le­gal rights, Ginsburg de­vised a strat­egy that was char­ac­ter­is­ti­cally cau­tious, pre­cise and sin­gle-mind­edly aimed at one goal: win­ning.

Knowing that she had to per­suade male, es­tab­lish­ment-ori­ented judges, she of­ten picked male plain­tiffs, and she liked Social Security cases be­cause they il­lus­trated how dis­crim­i­na­tion against women can harm men. For ex­am­ple, in Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld, she rep­re­sented a man whose wife, the prin­ci­pal bread­win­ner, died in child­birth. The hus­band sought sur­vivor’s ben­e­fits to care for his child, but un­der the then-ex­ist­ing Social Security law, only wid­ows, not wid­ow­ers, were en­ti­tled to such ben­e­fits.

“This ab­solute ex­clu­sion, based on gen­der per se, op­er­ates to the dis­ad­van­tage of fe­male work­ers, their sur­viv­ing spouses, and their chil­dren,” Ginsburg told the jus­tices at oral ar­gu­ment. The Supreme Court would ul­ti­mately agree, as it did in five of the six cases she ar­gued.

Over the years, Ginsburg would file dozens of briefs seek­ing to per­suade the courts that the 14th Amendment guar­an­tee of equal pro­tec­tion ap­plies not just to racial and eth­nic mi­nori­ties but to women as well.

In an in­ter­view with NPR, she ex­plained the le­gal the­ory that she even­tu­ally sold to the Supreme Court.

“The words of the 14th Amendment’s equal pro­tec­tion clause — ‘nor shall any state deny to any per­son the equal pro­tec­tion of the laws.’ Well that word, ‘any per­son,’ cov­ers women as well as men. And the Supreme Court woke up to that re­al­ity in 1971,” Ginsburg said.

During these pi­o­neer­ing years, Ginsburg would of­ten work through the night as she had dur­ing law school. But by this time, she had two chil­dren, and she later liked to tell a story about the les­son she learned when her son, in grade school, seemed to have a pro­cliv­ity for get­ting into trou­ble.

The scrapes were hardly ma­jor, and Ginsburg grew ex­as­per­ated by de­mands from school ad­min­is­tra­tors that she come in to dis­cuss her son’s al­leged mis­be­hav­ior. Finally, there came a day when she had had enough. “I had stayed up all night the night be­fore, and I said to the prin­ci­pal, ‘This child has two par­ents. Please al­ter­nate calls.’ ”

After that, she found, the calls were few and far be­tween. It seemed, she said, that most in­frac­tions were not worth call­ing a busy hus­band about.

In 1980, President Jimmy Carter named Ginsburg to the U. S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Over the next 13 years, she would amass a record as some­thing of a cen­trist lib­eral, and in 1993, President Bill Clinton nom­i­nated her to the Supreme Court, the sec­ond woman ap­pointed to the po­si­tion.

She was not first on his list. For months, Clinton flirted with other po­ten­tial nom­i­nees, and some wom­en’s rights ac­tivists with­held their ac­tive sup­port be­cause they were wor­ried about Ginsburg’s views on abor­tion. She had been pub­licly crit­i­cal of the le­gal rea­son­ing in Roe v. Wade.

But in the back­ground, Marty Ginsburg was lob­by­ing hard for his wife. And fi­nally Ruth Ginsburg was in­vited for a meet­ing with the pres­i­dent. As one White House of­fi­cial put it af­ter­ward, Clinton “fell for her — hook, line and sinker.” So did the Senate. She was con­firmed by a 96-3 vote.

Once on the court, Ginsburg was an ex­am­ple of a woman who de­fied stereo­types. Though she looked tiny and frail, she rode horses well into her 70s and even went para­sail­ing. At home, it was her hus­band who was the chef, in­deed a mas­ter chef, while the jus­tice cheer­fully ac­knowl­edged she was an aw­ful cook.

Though a lib­eral, she and the court’s con­ser­v­a­tive icon, Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016, were the clos­est of friends. Indeed, an opera called Scalia/Ginsburg is based on their le­gal dis­agree­ments, and their af­fec­tion for each other.

Over the years, as Ginsburg’s place on the court grew in se­nior­ity, so did her role. In 2006, as the court veered right af­ter the re­tire­ment of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, Ginsburg dis­sented more of­ten and more as­sertively, her most pas­sion­ate dis­sents com­ing in wom­en’s rights cases.

Dissenting in Ledbetter v. Goodyear in 2007, she called on Congress to pass leg­is­la­tion that would over­ride a court de­ci­sion that dras­ti­cally lim­ited back pay avail­able for vic­tims of em­ploy­ment dis­crim­i­na­tion. The re­sult­ing leg­is­la­tion was the first bill passed in 2009 af­ter Obama took of­fice.

In 2014, she dis­sented fiercely in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, a de­ci­sion that al­lowed some for-profit com­pa­nies to refuse, on re­li­gious grounds, to com­ply with a fed­eral man­date to cover birth con­trol in health care plans. Such an ex­emp­tion, she said, would “deny le­gions of women who do not hold their em­ploy­ers’ be­liefs, ac­cess to con­tra­cep­tive cov­er­age.”

Where, she asked, “is the stop­ping point?” Suppose it of­fends an em­ploy­er’s re­li­gious be­lief “to pay the min­i­mum wage” or “to ac­cord women equal pay?”

And in 2013, when the court struck down a key pro­vi­sion of the Voting Rights Act, con­tend­ing that times had changed and the law was no longer needed, Ginsburg dis­sented. She said that throw­ing out the pro­vi­sion “when it has worked and is con­tin­u­ing to work … is like throw­ing away your um­brella in a rain­storm be­cause you are not get­ting wet.”

She viewed her dis­sents as a chance to per­suade a fu­ture court.

“Some of my fa­vorite opin­ions are dis­sent­ing opin­ions,” Ginsburg told NPR. “I will not live to see what be­comes of them, but I re­main hope­ful.”

And yet, Ginsburg still man­aged some un­ex­pected vic­to­ries by win­ning over one or two of the con­ser­v­a­tive jus­tices in im­por­tant cases. In 2015, for ex­am­ple, she au­thored the court’s de­ci­sion up­hold­ing in­de­pen­dent re­dis­trict­ing com­mis­sions es­tab­lished by voter ref­er­enda as a way of re­mov­ing some of the par­ti­san­ship in draw­ing leg­isla­tive dis­trict lines.

Ginsburg al­ways kept a back­break­ing sched­ule of pub­lic ap­pear­ances both at home and abroad, even af­ter five bouts with can­cer: colon can­cer in 1999, pan­cre­atic can­cer 10 years later, lung can­cer in 2018, and then pan­cre­atic can­cer again in 2019 and liver le­sions in 2020. During that time, she en­dured chemother­apy, ra­di­a­tion and, in the last years of her life, ter­ri­ble pain from shin­gles that never went away com­pletely. All who knew her ad­mired her grit. In 2009, three weeks af­ter ma­jor can­cer surgery, she sur­prised every­one when she showed up for the State of the Union ad­dress.

Shortly af­ter that, she was back on the bench; it was her hus­band, Marty, who told her she could do it, even when she thought she could not, she told NPR.

A year later her psy­cho­log­i­cal tough­ness was on full dis­play when her beloved hus­band of 56 years was mor­tally ill. As she packed up his things at the hos­pi­tal be­fore tak­ing him home to die, she found a note he had writ­ten to her. “My Dearest Ruth,” it be­gan, “You are the only per­son I have ever loved,” set­ting aside chil­dren and fam­ily. “I have ad­mired and loved you al­most since the day we first met at Cornell. … The time has come for me to … take leave of life be­cause the loss of qual­ity sim­ply over­whelms. I hope you will sup­port where I come out, but I un­der­stand you may not. I will not love you a jot less.”

Shortly af­ter that, Marty Ginsburg died at home. The next day, his wife, the jus­tice, was on the bench, read­ing an im­por­tant opin­ion she had au­thored for the court. She was there, she said, be­cause “Marty would have wanted it.”

Years later, she would read the let­ter aloud in an NPR in­ter­view, and at the end, choke down the tears.

In the years af­ter Marty’s death, she would per­se­vere with­out him, main­tain­ing a jam-packed sched­ule when she was not on the bench or work­ing on opin­ions.

Some lib­er­als crit­i­cized her for not re­tir­ing while Obama was pres­i­dent, but she was at the top of her game, en­joyed her work enor­mously and feared that Republicans might not con­firm a suc­ces­sor. She was an avid con­sumer of opera, lit­er­a­ture and mod­ern art. But in the end, it was her work, she said, that sus­tained her.

“I do think that I was born un­der a very bright star,” she said in an NPR in­ter­view. “Because if you think about my life, I get out of law school. I have top grades. No law firm in the city of New York will hire me. I end up teach­ing; it gave me time to de­vote to the move­ment for evening out the rights of women and men.”

And it was that le­gal cru­sade for wom­en’s rights that ul­ti­mately led to her ap­point­ment to the U. S. Supreme Court.

To the end of her tenure, she re­mained a spe­cial kind of fem­i­nist, both deco­rous and dogged.

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Exclusive: The Billionaire Who Wanted To Die Broke . . . Is Now Officially BrokeIt took decades, but Chuck Feeney, the for­mer bil­lion­aire co­founder of re­tail gi­ant Duty Free Shoppers has fi­nally given all his money away to char­ity. He has noth­ing left now—and he could­n’t be hap­pier.

harles “Chuck” Feeney, 89, who co­founded air­port re­tailer Duty Free Shoppers with Robert Miller in 1960, amassed bil­lions while liv­ing a life of mon­k­like fru­gal­ity. As a phil­an­thropist, he pi­o­neered the idea of Giving While Living—spending most of your for­tune on big, hands-on char­ity bets in­stead of fund­ing a foun­da­tion upon death. Since you can’t take it with you—why not give it all away, have con­trol of where it goes and see the re­sults with your own eyes?

“We learned a lot. We would do some things dif­fer­ently, but I am very sat­is­fied. I feel very good about com­plet­ing this on my watch,” Feeney tells Forbes. “My thanks to all who joined us on this jour­ney. And to those won­der­ing about Giving While Living: Try it, you’ll like it.”

Over the last four decades, Feeney has do­nated more than $8 bil­lion to char­i­ties, uni­ver­si­ties and foun­da­tions world­wide through his foun­da­tion, the Atlantic Philanthropies. When I first met him in 2012, he es­ti­mated he had set aside about $2 mil­lion for his and his wife’s re­tire­ment. In other words, he’s given away 375,000% more money than his cur­rent net worth. And he gave it away anony­mously. While many wealthy phil­an­thropists en­list an army of pub­li­cists to trum­pet their do­na­tions, Feeney went to great lengths to keep his gifts se­cret. Because of his clan­des­tine, globe-trot­ting phil­an­thropy cam­paign, Forbes called him the  James Bond of Philanthropy.

But Feeney has come in from the cold. The man who amassed a for­tune sell­ing lux­ury goods to tourists, and later launched pri­vate eq­uity pow­er­house General Atlantic, lives in an apart­ment in San Francisco that has the aus­ter­ity of a fresh­man dorm room. When I vis­ited a few years ago, inkjet-printed pho­tos of friends and fam­ily hung from the walls over a plain, wooden table. On the table sat a small Lu­cite plaque that read: “Con­grat­u­la­tions to Chuck Feeney for $8 bil­lion of phil­an­thropic giv­ing.”

That’s Feeney—understated pro­file, over­size im­pact. No longer a se­cret, his ex­treme char­ity and big-bet grants have won over the most in­flu­en­tial en­tre­pre­neurs and phil­an­thropists. His stark gen­eros­ity and gutsy in­vest­ments in­flu­enced Bill Gates and Warren Buffett when they launched the Giv­ing Pledge in 2010—an ag­gres­sive cam­paign to con­vince the world’s wealth­i­est to give away at least half their for­tunes be­fore their deaths. “Chuck was a cor­ner­stone in terms of in­spi­ra­tion for the Giving Pledge,” says Warren Buffett. “He’s a model for us all. It’s go­ing to take me 12 years af­ter my death to get done what he’s do­ing within his life­time.”

Feeney gave big money to big prob­lems—whether bring­ing peace to Northern Ireland, mod­ern­iz­ing Vietnam’s health care sys­tem, or spend­ing $350 mil­lion to turn New York’s long-ne­glected Roosevelt Island into a tech­nol­ogy hub. He did­n’t wait to grant gifts af­ter death or set up a legacy fund that an­nu­ally tosses pen­nies at a $10 prob­lem. He hunted for causes where he can have a dra­matic im­pact and went all-in.

In 2019, I worked with the Atlantic Philanthropies on a re­port ti­tled Zero Is the Hero, which sum­ma­rized Feeney’s decades of go-for-broke giv­ing. While it con­tains hun­dreds of num­bers, stats and data points, Feeney sum­ma­rized his mis­sion in a few sen­tences. “I see lit­tle rea­son to de­lay giv­ing when so much good can be achieved through sup­port­ing worth­while causes. Besides, it’s a lot more fun to give while you live than give while you’re dead.”

On September 14, 2020, Chuck Feeney—with wife Helga Feeney—signed doc­u­ments in San Francisco mark­ing the close of the Atlantic Philanthropies af­ter four decades of global giv­ing.

On September 14, 2020, Feeney com­pleted his four-decade mis­sion and signed the doc­u­ments to shut­ter the Atlantic Philanthropies. The cer­e­mony, which hap­pened over Zoom with the Atlantic Philanthropies’ board, in­cluded video mes­sages from Bill Gates and for­mer California Gov. Jerry Brown. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi sent an of­fi­cial let­ter from the U. S. Congress thank­ing Feeney for his work.

At its height, the Atlantic Philanthropies had 300-plus em­ploy­ees and ten global of­fices across seven time zones. The spe­cific clo­sure date was set years ago as part of his long-term plan to make high-risk, high-im­pact do­na­tions by set­ting a hard dead­line to give away all his money and close shop. The 2020 ex­pi­ra­tion date added ur­gency and dis­ci­pline. It gave the Atlantic Philanthropies the time to doc­u­ment its his­tory, re­flect on wins and losses and cre­ate a strat­egy for other in­sti­tu­tions to fol­low. As Feeney told me in 2019: “Our giv­ing is based on the op­por­tu­ni­ties, not a plan to stay in busi­ness for a long time.”

While his phil­an­thropy is out of busi­ness, its in­flu­ence re­ver­ber­ates world­wide thanks to its big bets on health, sci­ence, ed­u­ca­tion and so­cial ac­tion. Where did $8 bil­lion go? Feeney gave $3.7 bil­lion to ed­u­ca­tion, in­clud­ing nearly $1 bil­lion to his alma mater, Cornell, which he at­tended on the G.I. Bill. More than $870 mil­lion went to hu­man rights and so­cial change, like $62 mil­lion in grants to abol­ish the death penalty in the U.S. and $76 mil­lion for grass­roots cam­paigns sup­port­ing the pas­sage of Obamacare. He gave more than $700 mil­lion in gifts to health rang­ing from a $270 mil­lion grant to im­prove pub­lic health­care in Vietnam to a $176 mil­lion gift to the Global Brain Health Institute at the University of California, San Francisco.

One of Feeney’s fi­nal gifts, $350 mil­lion for Cor­nell to build a tech­nol­ogy cam­pus on New York City’s Roosevelt Island, is a clas­sic ex­am­ple of his giv­ing phi­los­o­phy. While no­to­ri­ously fru­gal in his own life, Feeney was ready to spend big and go for broke when the value and po­ten­tial im­pact out­weighed the risk.

FORBES spoke to Influential Philanthropists On How Chuck Feeney Changed Charity And Inspired Giving

“Chuck’s been the model for us all. If you have the right he­roes in life, you’re 90% of the way home. Chuck Feeney is a good hero to have.”

“Chuck Feeney is a true pi­o­neer. Spending down his re­sources dur­ing his life­time has in­spired a gen­er­a­tion of phil­an­thropists, in­clud­ing me. And his ded­i­ca­tion to anony­mous giv­ing—and fo­cus on ad­dress­ing the prob­lems of the day—re­flect the strength of his char­ac­ter and so­cial con­science. We all fol­low in his foot­steps.”

“Chuck cre­ated a path for other phil­an­thropists to fol­low. I re­mem­ber meet­ing him be­fore start­ing the Giving Pledge. He told me we should en­cour­age peo­ple not to give just 50%, but as much as pos­si­ble dur­ing their life­time. No one is a bet­ter ex­am­ple of that than Chuck. Many peo­ple talk to me about how he in­spired them. It is truly amaz­ing.”

“Chuck took giv­ing to a big­ger ex­treme than any­one. There’s a lot of rich peo­ple—very few of them fly coach. He never spent the money on him­self and gave every­thing away. A lot of peo­ple are now un­der­stand­ing the im­por­tance of giv­ing it away, and the im­por­tance of be­ing in­volved in the things you give your money to. But I don’t fly coach!”

“Chuck pi­o­neered the model where giv­ing fin­ishes late in life, rather than start­ing. He was able to be more ag­gres­sive, he was able to take big­ger risks and just get more en­joy­ment from his giv­ing. There’s great power in giv­ing while liv­ing. The longer the dis­tance be­tween the per­son who funded the phil­an­thropy and the work, the greater the risk of it be­com­ing bu­reau­cratic and in­sti­tu­tional—that’s the death knell for phil­an­thropy.”

PHOTO CREDITS: WARREN BUFFETT, BILL GATES AND SANDY WEILL BY MARTIN SHOELLER FOR FORBES; LAURENE POWELL JOBS BY BRIGITTE LACOMBE; JOHN ARNOLD: COURTESY OF ARNOLD VENTURES

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In a re­cent dis­cus­sion on

Hacker News, a com­menter posted

the fol­low­ing ques­tion:

I con­sid­ered re­ply­ing in the thread, but I think it de­serves an in-depth

an­swer — and one which will be seen by more peo­ple than would no­tice

a re­ply in the mid­dle of a 100+ com­ment thread.

First, to dis­pense with the philo­soph­i­cal ar­gu­ment: Yes, this is my life, and yes, I’m free to use — or waste — it how­ever I please; but I don’t think there’s any­thing wrong with ask­ing if this is how my time could be best spent. That ap­plies dou­bly if the ques­tion is not merely about the choices I made but is rather a broader ques­tion: Is our so­ci­ety struc­tured in a way which en­cour­ages peo­ple to make less than the great­est con­tri­bu­tion they could?

That said, I do ob­ject some­what to the premise of the ques­tion — specif­i­cally the state­ment that I “spent [my] time on back­ups”.

On one hand, it is true:

Tarsnap

has been my full time job since 2006. I do oc­ca­sional con­sult­ing — more in the early years than I have re­cently — but fi­nan­cially speak­ing that’s a round­ing er­ror; it’s Tarsnap which pays the bills (including al­low­ing me to buy the house which I’ll be mov­ing into next week). On the other hand: My work on Tarsnap has ex­tended con­sid­er­ably into ad­ja­cent fields.

In 2009, hav­ing had many users ask for passphrase-pro­tected Tarsnap key files, and hav­ing de­ter­mined that the cur­rent state of the art of pass­word based key de­riva­tion was sorely lack­ing, I in­vented

scrypt — and in the process, opened up a whole new field of cryp­tog­ra­phy. Sure, I was do­ing this be­cause it was some­thing I could do to make Tarsnap more se­cure; but it would be a stretch to place this un­der the um­brella of “spending my time work­ing on back­ups”.

In 2011, want­ing to con­nect dae­mons on dis­parate hosts to­gether se­curely, and not be­ing happy with the ex­ist­ing TLS-based op­tions, I wrote

spiped. While I think it re­mains largely un­der­ap­pre­ci­ated by the world at large, I nonethe­less con­sider it a sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tion to com­puter se­cu­rity — and, like scrypt, while I cre­ated it to serve Tarsnap’s needs, it would be a stretch to place such a gen­eral-pur­pose open-source tool un­der the nar­row um­brella of “working on back­ups”.

Around the same time, I started work­ing on

ki­valoo, my high per­for­mance key-value data store. This may be the least used of all of the soft­ware I’ve writ­ten — I’m not aware of any­one else us­ing it at pre­sent (although be­ing open source soft­ware that does­n’t nec­es­sar­ily pre­clude the pos­si­bil­ity) — but I con­sider it to be some of my best code and I think it may be­come used in more niches than merely Tarsnap in the fu­ture.

Starting in 2006, and ac­cel­er­at­ing sig­nif­i­cantly af­ter Amazon launched the “M3” fam­ily of HVM-enabled EC2 in­stances in 2012,

I’ve

been cre­at­ing and main­tain­ing the FreeBSD/EC2 plat­form. While I don’t have any pre­cise sta­tis­tics on its us­age, a sur­vey last year found that

44% of peo­ple

run­ning FreeBSD in the cloud use Amazon EC2; so — de­spite the fact that only 22 peo­ple cur­rently

pro­vide spon­sor­ship for my ef­forts

— it’s clear that my work here has been pro­duc­tive. Again, while I was work­ing on this be­cause I wanted to run FreeBSD in EC2 for Tarsnap, I don’t think it can be placed en­tirely into the cat­e­gory of “working on back­ups”.

Of course, the ques­tion at hand is­n’t whether I’ve done any­thing use­ful, but rather whether this was the most use­ful way I could have spent these years. Judging by the ref­er­ence to the

Millennium

Problems, I imag­ine that the spe­cific al­ter­na­tive they had in mind was a re­search ca­reer; in­deed, be­tween my Undergraduate stud­ies in num­ber the­ory un­der the late Peter Borwein and my Doctoral stud­ies in Oxford I might have con­sid­ered se­ri­ously work­ing on the

Birch

and Swinnerton-Dyer con­jec­ture had my life taken a dif­fer­ent path. (A very dif­fer­ent BSD from the one with which I am cur­rently in­volved!)

So why am I not an aca­d­e­mic? There are many fac­tors, and start­ing Tarsnap is cer­tainly one; but most of them can be sum­ma­rized as “academia is a lousy place to do novel re­search”. In 2005, I made the first pub­li­ca­tion of the use of shared caches in multi-threaded CPUs as a cryp­to­graphic side chan­nel, and in 2006 I hoped to con­tinue that work. Having re­cently re­ceived my doc­tor­ate from Oxford University and re­turned home to Canada, I was el­i­gi­ble for a post-doc­toral fel­low­ship from Canada’s

National Sciences and Engineering

Research Council, so I ap­plied, and… I did­n’t get it. My su­per­vi­sor cau­tioned me of the risks of do­ing work which was overly novel as a young aca­d­e­mic: Committees don’t know what to make of you, and they don’t have any rep­u­ta­tional prior to fall back upon. Indeed, I ran into this is­sue with my side chan­nel at­tack: Reviewers at the Journal of Cryptology did­n’t un­der­stand why they were be­ing asked to read a pa­per about CPU de­sign, while re­view­ers at a com­puter hard­ware jour­nal did­n’t un­der­stand why they were be­ing asked to read about cryp­tog­ra­phy. It be­came clear, both from my own ex­pe­ri­ences and from ad­vice I re­ceived, that if I wanted to suc­ceed in acad­e­mia I would need to churn out in­cre­men­tal re­search pa­pers every year — at very least un­til I had tenure.

In many ways, start­ing my own com­pany has given me the sort of free­dom which aca­d­e­mics as­pire to. Sure, I have cus­tomers to as­sist, servers to man­age (not that they need much man­age­ment), and busi­ness ac­count­ing to do; but pro­fes­sors equally have classes to teach, stu­dents to su­per­vise, and com­mit­tees to at­tend. When it comes to re­search, I can fol­low my in­ter­ests with­out re­gard to the whims of grant­ing agen­cies and tenure and pro­mo­tion com­mit­tees: I can do work like scrypt, which is now widely known but lan­guished in ob­scu­rity for sev­eral years af­ter I pub­lished it; and equally I can do work like ki­valoo, which has been es­sen­tially ig­nored for close to a decade, with no sign of that ever chang­ing.

Is there a hy­po­thet­i­cal world where I would be an aca­d­e­mic work­ing on the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer con­jec­ture right now? Sure. It’s prob­a­bly a world where high-fly­ing stu­dents are given, upon grad­u­a­tion, some sort of “mini-Genius Grant”. If I had been awarded a five-year $62,500/year grant with the sole con­di­tion of “do re­search”, I would al­most cer­tainly have per­se­vered in acad­e­mia and — de­spite work­ing on the more in­ter­est­ing but longer-term ques­tions — have had enough pub­li­ca­tions af­ter those five years to ob­tain a con­tin­u­ing aca­d­e­mic po­si­tion. But that’s not how grant­ing agen­cies work; they give out one or two year awards, with the un­der­stand­ing that those who are suc­cess­ful will ap­ply for more fund­ing later.

In short, aca­d­e­mic in­sti­tu­tions sys­tem­i­cally pro­mote ex­actly the sort of short-term op­ti­miza­tion of which, iron­i­cally, the pri­vate sec­tor is of­ten ac­cused. Is en­tre­pre­neur­ship a trap? No; right now, it’s one of the only ways to avoid be­ing trapped.

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Can a na­tive Mac code ed­i­tor re­ally be that much bet­ter?

Can a na­tive Mac code ed­i­tor re­ally be that much bet­ter?

If we’re be­ing hon­est, Mac apps are a bit of a lost art.

There are great rea­sons to make cross-plat­form apps — to start, they’re cross-plat­form — but it’s just not who we are. Founded as a Mac soft­ware com­pany in 1997, our joy at Panic comes from building things that feel truly, well, Mac-like.

Long ago, we cre­ated Coda, an all-in-one Mac web ed­i­tor that broke new ground. But when we started work on Nova, we looked at where the web was to­day, and where we needed to be. It was time for a fresh start.

It all starts with our first-class text-ed­i­tor.

It’s new, hy­per-fast, and flex­i­ble, with all the fea­tures you want: smart au­to­com­plete, mul­ti­ple cur­sors, a Minimap, ed­i­tor over­scroll, tag pairs and brack­ets, and way, way more.

For the cu­ri­ous, Nova has built-in sup­port for CoffeeScript, CSS, Diff, ERB, Haml, HTML, INI, JavaScript, JSON, JSX, Less, Lua, Markdown, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Sass, SCSS, Smarty, SQL, TSX, TypeScript, XML, and YAML.

It’s also very ex­pand­able, with a ro­bust API and a built-in extension browser.

But even the best text en­gine in the world means noth­ing un­less you actually en­joy spend­ing your time in the app. So, how does Nova look?

You can make Nova look ex­actly the way you want, while still feel­ing Mac-like. Bright, dark, cy­ber­punk, it’s all you. Plus, themes are CSS-like and easy to write. Nova can even au­to­mat­i­cally change your theme when your Mac switches from light to dark mode.

Nova does­n’t just help you code. It helps your code run.

You can eas­ily cre­ate build and run tasks for your pro­jects. We didn’t have them in Coda, but boy do we have them now. They’re custom scripts that can be trig­gered at any time by tool­bar but­tons or key­board short­cuts.

Imagine build­ing con­tent, and with the sin­gle click of a but­ton watching as Nova fires up your lo­cal server, grabs the ap­pro­pri­ate URL, and opens a browser for you, in­stantly. Just think of the time you’ll save.

Nova sup­ports sep­a­rate Build, Run, and Clean tasks. It can open a re­port when run. And the scripts can be writ­ten in a va­ri­ety of lan­guages.

A Nova ex­ten­sion can do lots of things, like add sup­port for new languages, ex­tend the side­bar, draw beau­ti­ful new themes and syn­tax colors, val­i­date dif­fer­ent code, and much more.

Even bet­ter, ex­ten­sions are writ­ten in JavaScript, so any­one can write them. And Nova in­cludes built-in ex­ten­sion tem­plates for fast development.

Check out some of this week’s pop­u­lar ex­ten­sions…

And we’re here to help. Nova has a whole host of set­tings. We have easily cus­tomiz­able key bind­ings. We have cus­tom, quickly-switch­able workspace lay­outs. And we have loads of ed­i­tor tweaks, from match­ing brackets to over­scroll.

Our smart­phones en­able—and en­cour­age—con­stant con­nec­tion to in­for­ma­tion, en­ter­tain­ment, and each other. They put the world at our fin­ger­tips, and rarely leave our sides. Although these de­vices have im­mense po­ten­tial to im­prove wel­fare, their per­sis­tent pres­ence may come at a cog­ni­tive cost. In this re­search, we test the “brain drain” hy­poth­e­sis that the mere pres­ence of one’s own smart­phone may oc­cupy lim­ited-ca­pac­ity cog­ni­tive re­sources, thereby leav­ing fewer re­sources avail­able for other tasks and un­der­cut­ting cog­ni­tive per­for­mance. Results from two ex­per­i­ments in­di­cate that even when peo­ple are suc­cess­ful at main­tain­ing sus­tained at­ten­tion—as when avoid­ing the temp­ta­tion to check their phones—the mere pres­ence of these de­vices re­duces avail­able cog­ni­tive ca­pac­ity. Moreover, these cog­ni­tive costs are high­est for those high­est in smart­phone de­pen­dence. We con­clude by dis­cussing the prac­ti­cal im­pli­ca­tions of this smart­phone-in­duced brain drain for con­sumer de­ci­sion-mak­ing and con­sumer wel­fare.

Today we are proud to an­nounce the of­fi­cial re­lease of Vue.js 3.0 “One Piece”. This new ma­jor ver­sion of the frame­work pro­vides im­proved per­for­mance, smaller bun­dle sizes, bet­ter TypeScript in­te­gra­tion, new APIs for tack­ling large scale use cases, and a solid foun­da­tion for long-term fu­ture it­er­a­tions of the frame­work.

The 3.0 re­lease rep­re­sents over 2 years of de­vel­op­ment ef­forts, fea­tur­ing 30+ RFCs, 2,600+ com­mits, 628 pull re­quests from 99 con­trib­u­tors, plus tremen­dous amount of de­vel­op­ment and doc­u­men­ta­tion work out­side of the core repo. We would like to ex­press our deep­est grat­i­tude to­wards our team mem­bers for tak­ing on this chal­lenge, our con­trib­u­tors for the pull re­quests, our spon­sors and back­ers for the fi­nan­cial sup­port, and the wider com­mu­nity for par­tic­i­pat­ing in our de­sign dis­cus­sions and pro­vid­ing feed­back for the pre-re­lease ver­sions. Vue is an in­de­pen­dent pro­ject cre­ated for the com­mu­nity and sus­tained by the com­mu­nity, and Vue 3.0 would­n’t have been pos­si­ble with­out your con­sis­tent sup­port.

Vue had a sim­ple mis­sion from its hum­ble be­gin­ning: to be an ap­proach­able frame­work that any­one can quickly learn. As our user base grew, the frame­work also grew in scope to adapt to the in­creas­ing de­mands. Over time, it evolved into what we call a “Progressive Framework”: a frame­work that can be learned and adopted in­cre­men­tally, while pro­vid­ing con­tin­ued sup­port as the user tack­les more and more de­mand­ing sce­nar­ios.

Today, with over 1.3 mil­lion users world­wide*, we are see­ing Vue be­ing used in a wildly di­verse range of sce­nar­ios, from sprin­kling in­ter­ac­tiv­ity on tra­di­tional server-ren­dered pages, to full-blown sin­gle page ap­pli­ca­tions with hun­dreds of com­po­nents. Vue 3 takes this flex­i­bil­ity even fur­ther.

Vue 3.0 core can still be used via a sim­ple tag, but its in­ter­nals has been re-writ­ten from the ground up into a col­lec­tion of de­cou­pled mod­ules. The new ar­chi­tec­ture pro­vides bet­ter main­tain­abil­ity, and al­lows end users to shave off up to half of the run­time size via tree-shak­ing.

These mod­ules also ex­poses lower-level APIs that un­locks many ad­vanced use cases:

* The core run­time pro­vides first-class API for cre­at­ing cus­tom ren­der­ers tar­get­ing dif­fer­ent ren­der tar­gets (e.g. na­tive mo­bile, WebGL or ter­mi­nals). The de­fault DOM ren­derer is built us­ing the same API.

* The @vue/reactivity mod­ule ex­ports func­tions that pro­vide di­rect ac­cess to Vue’s re­ac­tiv­ity sys­tem, and can be used as a stand­alone pack­age. It can be used to pair with other tem­plat­ing so­lu­tions (e.g. lit-html) or even in non-UI sce­nar­ios.

The 2.x Object-based API is largely in­tact in Vue 3. However, 3.0 also in­tro­duces the Composition API - a new set of APIs aimed at ad­dress­ing the pain points of Vue us­age in large scale ap­pli­ca­tions. The Composition API builds on top of the re­ac­tiv­ity API and en­ables logic com­po­si­tion and reuse sim­i­lar to React hooks, more flex­i­ble code or­ga­ni­za­tion pat­terns, and more re­li­able type in­fer­ence than the 2.x Object-based API.

Composition API can also be used with Vue 2.x via the @vue/composition-api plu­gin, and there are al­ready Composition API util­ity li­braries that work for both Vue 2 and 3 (e.g. vueuse, vue-com­pos­able).

Vue 3 has demon­strated sig­nif­i­cant per­for­mance im­prove­ments over Vue 2 in terms of bun­dle size (up to 41% lighter with tree-shak­ing), ini­tial ren­der (up to 55% faster), up­dates (up to 133% faster), and mem­ory us­age (up to 54% less).

In Vue 3, we have taken the ap­proach of “compiler-informed Virtual DOM”: the tem­plate com­piler per­forms ag­gres­sive op­ti­miza­tions and gen­er­ates ren­der func­tion code that hoists sta­tic con­tent, leaves run­time hints for bind­ing types, and most im­por­tantly, flat­tens the dy­namic nodes in­side a tem­plate to re­duce the cost of run­time tra­ver­sal. The user there­fore gets the best of both worlds: com­piler-op­ti­mized per­for­mance from tem­plates, or di­rect con­trol via man­ual ren­der func­tions when the use case de­mands.

Vue 3′s code­base is writ­ten in TypeScript, with au­to­mat­i­cally gen­er­ated, tested, and bun­dled type de­f­i­n­i­tions so they are al­ways up-to-date. Composition API works great with type in­fer­ence. Vetur, our of­fi­cial VSCode ex­ten­sion, now sup­ports tem­plate ex­pres­sion and props type check­ing lever­ag­ing Vue 3′s im­proved in­ter­nal typ­ing. Oh, and Vue 3′s typ­ing fully sup­ports TSX if that’s your pref­er­ence.

We have pro­posed two new fea­tures for Singe-File Components (SFC, aka .vue files):

These fea­tures are al­ready im­ple­mented and avail­able in Vue 3.0, but are pro­vided only for the pur­pose of gath­er­ing feed­back. They will re­main ex­per­i­men­tal un­til the RFCs are merged.

We have also im­ple­mented a cur­rently un­doc­u­mented com­po­nent, which al­lows wait­ing on nested async de­pen­den­cies (async com­po­nents or com­po­nent with async setup()) on ini­tial ren­der or branch switch. We are test­ing and it­er­at­ing on this fea­ture with the Nuxt.js team (Nuxt 3 is on the way) and will likely so­lid­ify it in 3.1.

The re­lease of Vue 3.0 marks the gen­eral readi­ness of the frame­work. While some of the frame­works sub pro­jects may still need fur­ther work to reach sta­ble sta­tus (specifically router and Vuex in­te­gra­tion in the de­v­tools), we be­lieve it’s suit­able to start new, green-field pro­jects with Vue 3 to­day. We also en­cour­age li­brary au­thors to start up­grad­ing your pro­jects to sup­port Vue 3.

Check out the Vue 3 Libraries Guide for de­tails on all frame­work sub pro­jects.

We have pushed back the mi­gra­tion build (v3 build with v2 com­pat­i­ble be­hav­ior + mi­gra­tion warn­ings) and the IE11 build due to time con­straints, and are aim­ing to fo­cus on them in Q4 2020. Therefore, users plan­ning to mi­grate an ex­ist­ing v2 app or re­quire IE11 sup­port should be aware of these lim­i­ta­tions at this time.

For the near term af­ter re­lease, we will fo­cus on:

* Router and Vuex in­te­gra­tion in new de­v­tools

* Further im­prove­ments to tem­plate type in­fer­ence in Vetur

For the time be­ing, the doc­u­men­ta­tion web­sites, GitHub branches, and npm dist tags for Vue 3 and v3-tar­get­ing pro­jects will re­main un­der next-de­noted sta­tus. This means npm in­stall vue will still in­stall Vue 2.x and npm in­stall vue@next will in­stall Vue 3. We are plan­ning to switch all doc links, branches and dist tags to de­fault to 3.0 by end of 2020.

At the same time, we have started plan­ning for 2.7, which will be the last planned mi­nor re­lease of the 2.x re­lease line. 2.7 will be back­port­ing com­pat­i­ble im­prove­ments from v3, and emit warn­ings on us­age of APIs that are re­moved/​changed in v3 to help with po­ten­tial mi­gra­tion. We are plan­ning to work on 2.7 in Q1 2021, which will di­rectly be­come LTS upon re­lease with an 18 months main­te­nance lifes­pan.

To learn more about Vue 3.0, check out our new doc­u­men­ta­tion web­site. If you are an ex­ist­ing Vue 2.x user, go di­rectly to the Migration Guide.

* *based on Vue Devtools Chrome ex­ten­sion weekly ac­tive users as re­ported by Google.