Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

One issue in Amber Heard’s lawsuit against Johnny Depp is the authenticity of some iMessages. The Daily Mail has a story laying out both sides: “Johnny Depp’s assistant claims his text messages apologizing to Amber Heard for the actor’s actions are FAKE and have been heavily doctored.”

iPhones have all kinds of crypto. Is there a cryptographic hash on a screen shot such that if Amber Heard were to produce the original files we would be able to tell that it was an authentic screen shot from a particular date from either a particular iPhone or at least some iPhone?

What about up in the Apple server farm? iMessages are encrypted but can Apple read them all? Does Apple save them all?

If these (very convenient for a divorce plaintiff) messages are not authentic, how would Amber Heard and her legal team have gone about fabricating the depicted images? Straight up artistic work in Photoshop? Or better to engage in an exchange with a trusted associate and then use Photoshop to cut out and substitute the central portion of the screen?

Update: A friend pointed out that there are multiple web sites, e.g., www.ios7text.com, that will generate screen shots like the ones that Amber Heard may be presenting as evidence. Here’s an example that I created:

 

In fact, I wonder if this is the service that was used to create the ones offered by Amber Heard and her attorneys. My actual iPhone shows “Details” in the upper right, but ios7text.com defaults to “Contact” in the upper right, as do the screen shots displayed by the Daily Mail. My iPhone shows a microphone icon at bottom right, but ios7text.com and the displayed images show the word “Send” at the bottom right.

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I listened to Minecraft: The Unlikely Tale of Markus “Notch” Persson and the Game that Changed Everything as an audiobook (could be cut in half). I hadn’t realized that the Swedish computer game industry was so huge. The authors say that about 22 percent of computer game revenue in Europe goes to Swedish companies, mostly located in one neighborhood in Stockholm, despite the country having less than 2 percent of Europe’s population.

What do folks think accounts for this? The long winters? It doesn’t seem to be favorable tax treatment. A Swedish gaming success would be taxed at the capital gains rate of 30 percent, higher than some other European countries and the U.S. (an American would pay 20 percent federal tax, another 4 percent Obamacare tax, and then another 13 percent in California, but the average combined rate across all states is 28.6 percent).

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Folks:

My current laptops include a 2010 Thinkpad with 13″ screen and a 2012 HP 17″ notebook (heavy, but this is the one that I actually take with me because the keyboard and screen are large enough to do real writing).

I briefly tried a friend’s Dell XPS 13 and found the keyboard too cramped so I am thinking that perhaps a 15-inch notebook computer is the best option.

Who has bought one of these recently and found a keyboard with the same spacing as a standard desktop keyboard? I don’t need a numeric keypad.

This is for business use so it doesn’t have to be cheap, but on the other hand I don’t want it to be so expensive that I will cry if I drop it. My desktop is Windows 10 so, to avoid a cross-wired brain, the laptop should also run Windows 10.

Thanks in advance for any ideas.

[Separate question: A 480 GB SSD retails for less than $100 on Amazon.com. Why is that mainstream laptops from Dell and HP are still being shipped with mechanical hard drives? (Or desktop computers for that matter?) The $1,000 Dell XPS 15 ships with a “hard drive” and you need to spend $1,500 for a version with a 256 SSD. Bumping this up to the same capacity as the $100 SSDs at Amazon costs $1,829. Why would a PC vendor want to build machines that consumers will grow to hate?]

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Here’s an email that I sent to domestic senior management regarding a conversation with a 5-year-old when Mindy the Crippler was three months old:

She spilled a bowl of soup on the table. I said “how come my life now is cleaning up after kid and puppy spills?” She said “sometimes you also cook.”

Now we know how they see our lives!

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Folks:

I am going on the Royal Caribbean Serenade of the Seas around the Baltic (previous posting) from July 24-April 6 (come join me! there is still space on the ship! We’ll turn it into a photography and computer nerdism cruise.).

We dock in Rostock, Germany from 7:00 am to 9:30 pm on August 3, I believe. This is billed as a chance to see Berlin, but I’ve already been there (my story from 1993) and it is more than a 6-hour round-trip bus ride from Rostock (cruise tourists sign up for 12-hour excursions to Berlin where they spend about 6 hours actually in the city and 6+ hours on the bus).

What is there to do/see that doesn’t involve more than a one-hour drive (ideally less) from the dock?

Thanks in advance for any help!

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“Amber Heard ‘suffered through years of physical and psychological abuse’ by Johnny Depp, lawyers say” is a Washington Post article in which Ms. Heard is characterized as “a brave and financially independent woman” who is besieged because the defendant whom she sued has a “relentless army of lawyers.”

Although the only thing sought by her original lawsuit (previous posting includes a link to the Petition) is money (property division, alimony, and attorney’s fees), “none of [the plaintiff’s] actions are motivated by money.” (Amber Heard is also seeking to be divorced, of course, but California is a no-fault state (offering what scholars call “unilateral divorce”) so she is 100-percent guaranteed to win that part of her lawsuit.)

The assertion of bravery would seem to merit some examination. Though married for just one year, the headline writers at the Post apparently thought it credible that she “suffered through years of physical and psychological abuse.” Was it brave for her to marry an older person with money? (“One thing that you learn pretty quickly from listening to plaintiffs in Family Court,” said one of the lawyers that we interviewed, “is that 100 percent of rich white guys are abusers.”; see the Domestic Violence Parallel Track) Given that she now says that she was abused for years prior to the marriage, was it brave for her to proceed with the marriage, thus nobly sacrificing herself to spare other women from being beaten by this guy worth $400 million?

What about the “financially independent” angle? If she wins all of her lawsuit claims she will be living in a house that someone else paid for, receiving investment fund statements regarding money that had been earned by someone else, and, via alimony, become a man’s court-ordered lifelong adult dependent. The Feminism section of the Rationale chapter, may shed some light on this characterization:

Legislators and attorneys told us that women’s groups and people identifying themselves as “feminists” were proponents of laws favoring the award of sole custody of children to mothers and more profitable child support guidelines. Is that a recognizably feminist goal? For a woman to be at home with children living off a man’s income? Here’s how one attorney summarized 50 years of feminist progress: “In the 1960s a father might tell a daughter ‘Get pregnant with a rich guy and then marry him’ while in the 2010s a mother might tell a daughter ‘Get pregnant with a rich guy and then collect child support.'” Why is that superior from the perspective of feminism? A professor of English at Harvard said “Because the woman collecting child support is not subject to the power and control of the man.”

In other words, in Feminist terms she will be “financially independent” because she won’t have to do anything for a man in order to stay in the check-of-the-month club and no man will have any control over how she spends the money that she gets from one or more men.

Generally I don’t think that celebrity divorces are very interesting. There aren’t that many movie stars with whom a person can have profitable sex. Using American family law to tap into the earning power of a financial industry executive or a physician is a much more realistic goal for a typical resident of or visitor to the U.S. But the Amber Heard lawsuit seems to be an interesting part of the Zeitgeist.

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We get a lot of press coverage about college students drinking and having sex with each other. We also get books such as Missoula. But what is it like on campus when students are learning and discussing ideas? Here’s a video of University of Massachusetts students that sheds some light on what we’re paying for.

[the “Rationale” chapter of Real World Divorce contains some material related to the “third wave feminism” topic that pops up in the video:

Legislators and attorneys told us that women’s groups and people identifying themselves as “feminists” were proponents of laws favoring the award of sole custody of children to mothers and more profitable child support guidelines. Is that a recognizably feminist goal? For a woman to be at home with children living off a man’s income? Here’s how one attorney summarized 50 years of feminist progress: “In the 1960s a father might tell a daughter ‘Get pregnant with a rich guy and then marry him’ while in the 2010s a mother might tell a daughter ‘Get pregnant with a rich guy and then collect child support.'” Why is that superior from the perspective of feminism? A professor of English at Harvard said “Because the woman collecting child support is not subject to the power and control of the man.”

We interviewed Janice Fiamengo, a literature professor at the University of Ottawa and a scholar of modern feminism, about the apparent contradiction of feminists promoting stay-at-home motherhood. “It is a contradiction if you define feminism as being about equality and women’s autonomy,” she responded. “But feminism today can be instead about women having power and getting state support.”

Why isn’t there a rift in the sisterhood, with women who work full-time expressing resentment that women who met dermatologists in bars are relaxing at home with 2-4X the income? “[Child support profiteering] is kind of an underground economy. Most people just don’t know what is possible. We hear a lot from the media about deadbeat dads who don’t pay any child support and the poverty of single mothers. The media doesn’t cover women who are profiting from the system. The average person assumes that equal shared parenting is the norm and that, in cases where a man is ordered to pay child support, it will be a reasonable amount.”

How did we get to the divorce, custody, and child support system that prevails in Canada and in most U.S. states? “This is because of the amazing success of feminism,” answered Professor Fiamengo. “The movement has totally changed the sexual mores of society but held onto the basic perceptions that had always advantaged women, e.g., that a woman was purified through motherhood. Feminism did not throw out the foundations of the old order that it pretended to reject.”

What’s the practical implication of these perceptions? How do they influence the legislators writing the statutes and judges hearing cases? “People still think of the mother as the best parent, the essential parent,” said Professor Fiamengo. “And that a woman would never lie to obtain the financial benefits offered by the system. A woman would never try to profit from her child. We think of mothers as moral beings who care only about the welfare of their children. There’s a presumption that mothers don’t operate out of greed or self-interest despite the fact that all humans operate out of self-interest.”

But couldn’t it actually be true that women are purified by motherhood? That they wouldn’t lie to collect a few million dollars tax-free plus enjoy the company of their children? “Even pretty decent people would be tempted by the rewards handed out,” said Professor Fiamengo. “It is easy to justify if you no longer like the guy you had been with.”

“Will Single Women Transform America?” is an Atlantic magazine video that confirms this perspective. The women getting government handouts and/or court-ordered child support for the single-mother lifestyle that they have chosen are characterized as “independent, unmarried women.”]

 

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I know a multi-millionaire who lives in a huge fancy house. He is working on selling his old house, worth about $800,000, but in the meantime his dad lives there. Dad doesn’t have any income so he has been getting taxpayer-funded heating oil to keep the five-bedroom place toasty (but maybe not for the pool heater?). Now it turns out that the taxpayers are spending $7,500 on insulation work due to the fact that the resident qualifies for heating fuel assistance.

I asked what will Dad do once the place finally sells? “I have him on a wait list for public housing in 18 towns.”

Related:

• Obamacare for multi-millionaires

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Now that the kids are in bed it is time to reflect a bit on Memorial Day. I’ve been listening to Masters of the Air: America’s Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany as an audiobook. One sobering statistic is that only about 25 percent of the early B-17 crewmen completed their 25 missions and came home in one piece. After facing terrifying flak and fighter attacks they would get back into the planes somehow and head out despite knowing that the odds of a safe return were not very good and also that neither were the odds of substantially affecting the German war effort (the average bomb dropped by U.S. bombers in World War II was off target by about three quarters of a mile, according to an official study quoted by the author).

As a pilot I don’t have a lot of trouble imagining that they went out on their first mission, but I have trouble imagining the kind of courage that it took to go out on the 2nd through 25th.

Anyway, I am grateful that at least some Americans had that kind of courage and to them I give thanks today.

Related:

• Don’t try to take over the world prematurely
• Hogan’s Heroes turns out to be reasonably accurate

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I met an early 30s teacher who plainly loved kids and loved his job in the Framingham (Massachusetts) Public Schools, which I think are fairly typical for suburban Boston. “Do you have any financial incentive to work?” I asked. He said “The kids inspire me.” But what if they didn’t? Could he do basically nothing at the front of the classroom without getting fired? “The principal can be pretty critical of teachers who don’t put in any effort,” was the answer. What if a teacher is inured to criticism? Could an old burned-out teacher keep cashing paychecks? “Absolutely and there are plenty of those. I could do nothing from now until I’m age 62 and then retire with 80 percent pay.”

[The chart confirms his statement, but it is unclear if this is 80 percent of the standard salary or, as with some other state employees, 80 percent of the final year’s actual compensation, including overtime or summer pay.]

Readers: Should we be grateful every day that a teacher does more than the bare minimum? I certainly felt that the kids in Framingham were lucky to have this guy.

Related:

• Teacher jobs in Massachusetts (legal process to fire a teacher can begin after two years in which a teacher does nothing)
• Touring the Mediocrity Factory (meeting with principal of rich suburban public school)

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