Category Archives: Food

Food, History, Poetry, Security

Keep Saying “Honey Trap”. Man is But a Fly.

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A woman wrote “honey-trap” about a man and a woman in 1859, and in her sentence a man falls for a woman like a fly, ahem, flies into honey. Can you blame the fly? Of course.

The Oxford English Dictionary gives the earliest known use of the phrase to Elizabeth Sheppard, the English novelist who wrote Charles Auchester. It is on page 126 of the second volume of Almost a Heroine, where a man talks about a woman:

I am no fantastic fool, intoxicated by her like a fly fallen into a honey-trap. I will tell you, I know her so well as this. She is perfectly unworldly, but she is also vain of being so; and only so far is she vain at all; her fascinations and her passionate sweetness she is alike unconscious of.

Her meaning is simple. A man says he sees a woman clearly. Falling for her would be the honey-trap, and the man who falls is the fly and the fool.

John le Carré used the phrase 115 years later in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, where an intelligence service sets the honey as a trap and a woman is the bait, almost exactly as Sheppard had phrased it. He later wrote in an introduction to the novel that he invented honey-trap along with lamplighter, scalphunter and babysitter. Time magazine printed a glossary of his words and called him “their inventor”, and the dictionaries agree with him. Merriam-Webster dates the first known use to 1974, and Dictionary.com gives 1970 to 1975 and names le Carré. The OED is the only one that prints Sheppard’s line. It lists her under insect traps and starts the seduction meaning in 1974, so it still credits him.

All of these dictionaries cover English only. Writers in Hebrew, Greek, Latin and Chinese used honey for a lure more than a thousand years before Sheppard or le Carré. Spies use tactics that already work, because inventing one is expensive and likely to fail. To call spy novels the source of this tactic is like saying a journalist invented the news.

Origin Meaning
5th century BC, Chinese The state of Yue sends the beauty Xi Shi to the king of Wu. Chinese calls this 美人計, the beautiful person stratagem, the thirty-first of the Thirty-Six Stratagems.
Hebrew, Proverbs 5:3-4 The lips of the strange woman drip honey (נֹפֶת), and in the end she is bitter as wormwood and sharp as a two-edged sword.
1st century BC, Greek Strabo, Geography 12.3.18: the Heptacometae leave bowls of toxic honey in the road. Pompey’s soldiers eat it and three maniples are killed.
1st century BC, Latin Lucretius: doctors put honey on the rim of the cup so that children drink the wormwood.
8th century, Chinese 口蜜腹劍, honey in the mouth and a sword in the belly. The phrase describes Li Linfu, a male chancellor of the Tang court (Zizhi Tongjian, volume 215).
1624, French Francis de Sales: a spoonful of honey catches more flies than a hundred barrels of vinegar (de la Rivière, Vie, page 584).
1666, Italian and English Torriano: honey gets more flies than vinegar (Italian Proverbs, page 149).
1859, English Sheppard: a man who falls for a woman is a fly in a honey-trap.
1974, English Le Carré: a honey trap is a spy operation.

The Chinese examples matter here more than an English dictionary because of the news. Fast Company reports that U.S. intelligence identified the woman in the Jensen Huang story as a Chinese spy. You can see above exactly for how long Chinese has named the stratagem after the beauty and uses honey for a deceitful man.

The Fast Company column is by Laëtitia Vitaud, and most of it is standard stuff. She argues that 1970s spy novel usage turns a powerful man into the helpless victim of a scheming woman. I mean we’re talking about 1970s spy novels, right? Have you read my post called James Bond Movies Are “Fascist Pig” Glorification?

Then she traces that idea all the way (fast reverse) to Genesis, where Adam blames Eve. Her report is technically accurate that it is English dictionaries who credit le Carré with making the phrase popular. The dictionaries start the phrase with the spy novelist and then credit him for it. Self-proving hypothesis. But her question is more about whether a 63-year-old chief executive officer in total command is as helpless as a bear near honey. Helpless? The inflation of a man into a bear seems more about trying to sound powerful, than about being made helpless by honey it totally consumes and literally wrecks.

Her main error for me is the one sentence: “The term comes from spy fiction.” No. That’s wrong. The earliest known phrasing of woman being the honey trap for men is Sheppard’s.

But the bigger fault is that her sentence leaves out a woman. A column about sexism repeats the error printed in dictionaries and credits a spy fiction that came 115 years after a woman printed it first.

It also costs Vitaud her best evidence for her own case about the phrase. She wants the press to stop saying “honey trap”. Sheppard’s version in fact shows a better fix.

We can celebrate Sheppard. Say honey trap as she did.

In 1859 the man who falls is a “fantastic fool”, and he is responsible for where he lands. In 1974 he becomes the target of an operation, and the man who made that change claimed the invention. Vitaud’s question about the bear has had an answer since 1859. Man is but a fly, a fool who flies into a trap.

Food, Poetry, Security

Port 502 is French for Iran

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France has accused Iran of sabotage. I love a good attribution, so I went looking for the evidence.

I found a port number.

One port number on one night.

A port for a day.

Are you Frenching kidding me?

That took me back to an incident briefing I led in San Francisco many years ago. The room was packed. Everyone was on the edge of their seat, except one guy. He slouched back and kept shaking his head no. I was walking the room through what we had found when suddenly he stood up and said he had seen the classified version, we don’t get it, and he marched out smiling at us like a Cheshire cat. He declined to say anything useful. He declined to say what the classified data corrected. He flamboyantly checked out, and the room was left to choose between the evidence and the confidence of a man who wanted us to believe it wasn’t enough.

The absence of evidence isn’t the evidence of absence.

France has just played that annoying man at the back of the room with his giant shit eating grin, and people have been taking the report way beyond face value.

A port number. Let me say it again.

An accusation built on a port and covering one night has been read as some kind of grandiose verdict on a month of attacks across a dozen countries. The gap between what Paris published and what the press now believes is the big story here, and it is easy to drag out of its neanderthal cave of lizard brain attribution into the sunlight of modern science.

Start with the official statement. On 9 November the foreign ministry named the Revolutionary Guard unit Shahid Kaveh for the attack on refrigeration controllers at about 700 French stores on the night of 11 October, called it “inédite par son ampleur et son niveau d’agressivité,” and announced it at a G7 press briefing minutes after Reuters reported that investigators privately suspected Iran. The five-agency C4 published a five-page note the same day. It calls its evidence a faisceau d’indices, the French legal term for circumstantial evidence.

It covers one country, and one night. That’s it. Here is the whole case:

  • The attack infrastructure also scanned Schneider Electric equipment over Modbus on port 502, a technique the note associates with Shahid Kaveh from April 2026.
  • The operators used FOFA, a Chinese commercial search engine for internet-connected devices.
  • The propaganda channel CyberbanNews relayed the attack on 13 October. The note’s word is relayée.
  • Farsi traces appeared in the attack infrastructure.

The port. Oh, the port.

CISA AA26-097A of 7 April 2026, signed by six US agencies, tracks CyberAv3ngers as the Shahid Kaveh Group and lists its traffic on ports 44818, 2222, 102, 22 and 502. Those are ports that any control-systems scan is going to reference. The American advisory ships indicators of compromise, the addresses a defender can match against logs. The French note matched the technique and kept the indicators. Had the infrastructure matched, the note would say infrastructure. It says technique.

FOFA is a subscription product and Farsi strings are the easiest artefact of all to plant; Olympic Destroyer carried a forged header copied from North Korean malware for the same reason. It’s like meeting a Russian guy with a beard glued on speaking a few words in Farsi. Speaking of which, on Halloween I met an Iranian teen who had personally made his own very authentic looking Soviet-era army general uniform, complete with insignia and Afghanistan war medals. He knocked and then refused candy, saying it was a bribe against Communist principles. Talk about a convincing costume.

That leaves the repost, the one item specific to Iran, and the note undercuts it itself: the unit’s avatars exist to claim attacks, and for this one their outlet relayed.

The prosecutor added a fifth item when she gave her presentation of the report, IP addresses pointing to terminals located in Iran.

The C4 note has Iranian addresses in one place, the 2024 Olympics kiosk case, under a different unit. For the October attack her own agencies list none. Her fifth item is absent from the document she was presenting. Two of the three names in the annex are on the US Treasury list of 2 February 2024. The names came from Washington, and this evidence says the same about where the verdict comes from. France is relaying an American judgment, which it is leaving as unverifiable.

Of course, it’s only cyber champagne if it comes from the Champagne region of France. Otherwise it’s just sparkling American intelligence. I mean this seems like a case of appellation d’origine contrôlée: the label is French, the grapes were pressed in Maryland. By French law it’s only Iran war attribution if it comes from Fort Meade.

Some of my readers may remember over a decade ago when Russia stood as the accused and I batted the other direction. In 2014 Bloomberg reported that US intelligence officials believed Russia blew up the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan pipeline in 2008 by hacking its cameras. I pointed to the Corner House analysis attributing the blast to the PKK, and Süddeutsche Zeitung later reported an audit showing the cameras were installed after the explosion. “Unprecedented” has the same history: Ralph Langner, who reverse engineered Stuxnet, called the attack very basic, and Maroochy had put sewage in Queensland’s parks a decade earlier.

Same test, whoever is accused: publish what can be checked. Don’t laugh at the room and say you have a secret squirrel solution in your hideout nobody can see.

Now the merger. The same evening a Wavestone partner told the Guardian: “Given that recent cyber-attacks on supermarkets and the blood bank in France concerned freezers it is reasonable to think Iran is directly linked to both.” One night became a month based on the simple fact that both one day and many more days involved freezers. The EU High Representative said the incidents “if attributed” called for a strong response. That’s a strong conditional, and unfortunately she seems like the only official using it.

The method belongs to everyone.

Forescout cites a Danfoss newsletter recording hacktivist attacks in 2022 on 16 Russian supermarkets and 40 Israeli stores, and tracked more than twenty claimed refrigeration attacks between January and October 2026, chiefly in Spain and Italy, with the pro-Russian Z-Pentest Alliance and NoName057(16) the most active. By the time France was hit, Russian-aligned groups had spent nine months rehearsing on European cold storage.

Nine months of Russian attacks isn’t for nothing.

The October attack and the November wave are written up here already.

It belongs to everyone because the vendors built it that way. This is one of the most annoying parts to this story. The vendors need to have WAY more accountability. Regulators really need to get on them like how PCI DSS hammered card systems in the 2000s to force safety innovation in both the distribution and acquisition ends of their industry. Known weakness? Don’t ship weak devices. Don’t connect weak devices. If you do, no more shipping and connecting for you.

On 20 May 2025 CISA published CVE-2025-41450 for the Danfoss AK-SM 8xxA, an authentication bypass “caused by datetime-based password generation.” Claroty’s Team82 published the mechanism in August 2026: the controller accepts a code of the day in place of the administrator password, and the code is derived from the device’s own calendar. Copeland’s XWEB Pro, the other platform on CERT-FR’s list, has the same design, CVSS 10.0. Most of the October victims ran Danfoss models the vendor stopped updating in 2021 and 2016. And France had the most of them: IPinfo found 1,331 Danfoss dashboards open in France five days before the attack, against 1,197 in the other 72 countries combined, on the same firmware mix as everywhere else.

The vendor decides the controller attaches to the internet. The store that owns the food has no way to force safety on the vendor.

The vendor decides.

The vendor.

Decides.

November looked different. More than 100 stores in at least nine countries, plus cold rooms at three sites of the French blood service through a rental contractor. Ransom-ISAC logged one XWEB site hit with the factory login. Sekoia’s Danfoss honeypots the same evening caught an undisclosed exploit. Two operators at least. Sekoia is the only vendor to have published an infrastructure analysis spanning both waves, and it judges the two “may have been conducted by the same threat actor” while stating that “no technical indicators currently link this incident to that cluster,” the cluster France named. One actor, with nothing technical to link it to Tehran. Sekoia’s motive hypothesis, France’s deployment of troops and air defence to the Yanbu oil terminal as announced 24 September, gives Iran a reason. But it gives a defender nothing to verify.

Then the Russian claim arrived and vanished. Poof!

Or as I like to say, the poof is the proof.

NoName057(16) and Z-Pentest claimed November in a Telegram video and deleted the channels. Sekoia calls the claim unsubstantiated on three grounds. Two describe NoName, its history of false claims and its DDoS profile. The third is that the leaked credentials look like infostealer logs, which is also how an attacker gets contractor logins for these controllers. Z-Pentest made the claim too, and Z-Pentest is the group known for control systems; Forescout tracked it as the year’s most active claimant on refrigeration, and Denmark’s Defence Intelligence Service attributed a 2024 waterworks attack to it. The groups that practiced this all year claimed it, then erased the claim. That is the pattern: the operation that succeeds leaves the case open and the blame elsewhere.

France could be right about Iran. Could be… but what they published is a port number, and that ain’t right. It undermines credibility, if anything.

Imagine someone saying that some moldy cheese must be from France just because it tastes like old socks. Ok, but shouldn’t we have some actual tests before we slap a “made in France” label? The UK has actually landed in this spot already when they discovered that 100% of their real English honey from real English bees labels are bullshit, and they’ve been swallowing sweet impostor sauce for years. Literally 10 out of 10 jars failed the authenticity test, which should have been required a long time ago. Regulation is the mother of innovation:

Honey is one of the most adulterated food items on the market. We provide full traceability; we highlight 1. the location – area, country – from which we source our honey; and 2. the communities that manage our hives.

Anyone talking about a month of attacks solved is skipping all the parts where we prove who the attacker actually was and will be. The actual known culprits already proven are the vendors. They shipped a calendar password into internet-facing fridge controllers. And they forced it to be used in an unsafe state. Who should be blamed? The vendors. And probably Russia, if we get to that state of evidence. But in the meantime, the vendors.

Energy, Food, History, Security

Not Cool: Russia Out for Blood, Thaws Europe’s Fridges in Ten Countries

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Russia is attacking Europe. If you balk at that phrase, instead of accepting it, the attack methods are working as designed. The infrastructure of refrigeration is in danger, which on the night of 1 to 2 November meant disruption directed at France’s blood supply.

Why blood? We could ask the same question of the “hospital trains” disrupted by Russia in the weeks after NATO announced they would roll from the Netherlands all the way to the Russian border as proof of wartime capabilities.

I think by now everyone knows about refrigeration controllers being warmed. Fridges and freezers at night, connected to networks, are being popped at supermarkets in Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Ireland, Portugal and Italy. Danfoss confirmed its equipment was involved, just like it was in France on 11 October. But let’s talk for a moment about the refrigeration contractor for the Établissement français du sang, which lost control of cold rooms holding blood products.

Le Canard enchaîné reported on 3 November that the setpoint on containers maintained by Coolworld, including sites in Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, was changed from minus 30°C to 110°C. That’s a lot of Fahrenheit. A technician on night duty saw the temperature in the cold rooms rising. The Health Ministry says the simple detection prevented any operational consequence. The EFS first described the contents as donor samples kept for transfusion monitoring, then confirmed that frozen plasma for transfusion was among the products in the targeted units.

Again, that’s a specific target of Russia for a particular reason. Transfusion centers are one of the puzzle pieces of NATO defense capabilities.

The October post here had brought up ANSSI searching for other exposed companies before the attack spread, and it highlighted two gaps: scan history, and Danfoss sites outside France. I think we have answers now.

Country Company (stores)
Belgium, Luxembourg Delhaize (several dozen), Carrefour (15), Intermarché (10 to 15), Spar (5), IKEA Mons (1)
Netherlands 17 businesses including butchers
Germany Edeka Reisbach, stores in North Rhine-Westphalia
Sweden ICA (limited number), Coop (6 or 7 of about 800)
Finland Kesko (a few smaller stores)
Estonia Selver (1)
Ireland Musgrave SuperValu (13 of 223)
Portugal Intermarché (7)
Italy Coop, Radenza Group (at least 4, Sicily)

Answers? Let me be clear. Every country on that list supports Ukraine, and all but neutral Ireland send it weapons. The map of the second wave is the map of European support for Kyiv, minus France, hit three weeks earlier.

Reuters established in July 2025 that Elon Musk ordered Starlink coverage cut over part of Kherson in late September 2022, in the middle of Ukraine’s counteroffensive, which left units without communications and let Russian positions escape encirclement. Every day Russia holds Ukrainian ground is a day of Russian strikes on Ukrainian civilians, and every one of those strikes is a demand on a transfusion service. See the connection?

The attack method in question here is the one from France. Sabcobel, which runs refrigeration for Delhaize, said units were simply switched into a defrost mode. An ICA store in Sjöbo found its fridges and freezers set to 50°C. A Selver freezer in Estonia was set to 50°C on an older Danfoss controller and caught within ten minutes. A butcher in Hove near Antwerp found his fridges at 18°C and lost about 15,000 euros of meat.

The door was the one from France too, and it was a cheap door. Flimsy, weak, to a point we shouldn’t even call it a door. ANSSI director Vincent Strubel told the French Senate on 21 October that the agency’s assessment of the October cases pointed to exposed administration interfaces and trivial passwords, and that the vulnerabilities Claroty published earlier in the year were absent from the path. The October post spoke to those vulnerabilities and the firmware that fixed them. The attackers needed a login page on the public internet and a bad password that nobody changed. Danfoss told NOS the Dutch systems that were hit sat on open networks with default passwords, that most targets had locked down after the French attack, and that the few who had not were the ones hit. Sabcobel said many but not all of its customers had secured their connections. Selver said the store that was hit was the last one it had yet to move to a new system. Three weeks of public warning had sorted targets into two groups, meaning the victim list is a discrete second group. The breach-of-duty argument from October has a clear control group.

The vendor was well aware of this attack for at least the past four years. A Danfoss application note from 2022 documents attacks on sixteen Russian supermarkets and forty Israeli stores, and records that the Israeli installations lacked firewall or VPN protection.

I’ll say that again. Russian supermarkets are on the 2022 list.

The Danfoss security advisories page listed nothing about either 2026 wave as of 3 November. CERT-FR alert CERTFR-2026-ALE-012 was last updated on 16 October. It covers the Danfoss AK-SM and AK-SC series and the Copeland and Dixell xweb lines, says the campaigns are probably still underway, and advises operators to check their insurance contract before cutting the data feed to their refrigeration contractor.

The blood case is interesting because it differs from the stores in two ways.

The first is a degree. Every store that reported a setpoint had reported 50°C. Hot! But the EFS containers were set to 110°C, and that figure is a programmed instruction rather than a measured temperature. A different temperature ceiling points at a different controller, and the controller vendor in the Coolworld case is still unnamed.

The second is a detection. Most stores found out late, from staff opening doors in the morning or from alarms. The EFS found out during the early moves, because someone on night shift had a job to observe the thermometer.

The identical attack already carries a Russian name on a US indictment. The US Justice Department announced on 9 December 2025 charges against CyberArmyofRussia_Reborn and NoName057(16), alleged Russian government backing for both, and attributed to CARR a November 2024 intrusion at a Los Angeles meat-processing plant that spoiled the meat and caused an ammonia leak. The joint advisory published the same day by the FBI, CISA, NSA and allied agencies describes these groups selecting operational-technology victims on availability and existing exposure. A refrigeration controller on a public address with a default password is such an obviously bad idea, do I even have to say it fits? Eleven months later the Russian TTP ran across ten European countries in one night. EU Agriculture Commissioner Christophe Hansen called it a deliberate attempt to disrupt the food supply chain.

Food supplies, blood supplies. What do you think nations tell their citizens to have ready during a war? Not a coincidence that Britain has recently been telling people to stockpile food in case of… well, they haven’t said exactly.

The officials reading logs have chosen words carefully. Belgium’s Centre for Cybersecurity told reporters on 2 November that the identity of the attackers was unknown and “it may never be determined”, while the federal prosecutor opened a criminal investigation. Sweden’s National Cybersecurity Centre is sharing information with Nordic and European agencies. Danfoss said the Dutch attacks were the same kind as in France, Sabcobel said the same method was used in Belgium, and Kitman Coldtech said the method in Estonia was similar. A shared method across ten countries on one night, three weeks after a rehearsal in one country, is a campaign.

The lack of EU preparedness for integrity breaches is incredibly frustrating to me, as I’ve been banging the gong on this since at least 2012.

A Russian campaign of breaching integrity of control systems succeeds when the case stays open. The Belgian statement started out that way on day one. “May never be determined” is the Russian operational objective, as stated by the victim.

The same agencies attribute, so let’s think about the difference. The Dutch military intelligence service MIVD reported in April 2025 that a Russian hacker group had carried out a cyber sabotage attack on the digital control system of a public facility in the Netherlands, the first known case in the country, and that a second Russian operation against Dutch critical infrastructure looked like preparation for sabotage. Norway’s PST said in August 2025 that pro-Russian hackers had taken control of the Risevatnet dam in Bremanger in April through a weak password on a web-accessible control panel, opened a valve for four hours, and posted a video of the panel on Telegram the same day. A dam valve and a freezer setpoint belong to the same target class: an internet-facing industrial controller behind a weak credential, in a state that arms Ukraine.

The target class is Russian doctrine, to put it simply. Colonel Chekinov and Lieutenant General Bogdanov published a series in Military Thought from 2010 to 2017; their 2010 article on asymmetrical actions lists the civilian infrastructure where Russia should be able to inflict unacceptable damage in nonmilitary security areas, and their 2013 article on new-generation war names dams, nuclear plants and other infrastructure facilities as targets in the opening period of a conflict. UK Defence Intelligence read the strikes on Ukraine’s grid from October 2022 as the first attempt to run the Strategic Operation for the Destruction of Critically Important Targets, a doctrine built on hitting a state’s civilian infrastructure in place of its army to force its leaders to capitulate. The International Criminal Court issued warrants for Shoigu and Gerasimov in June 2024 for that same campaign, strikes on electric infrastructure from 10 October 2022 to at least 9 March 2023, as war crimes and the crime against humanity of inhumane acts. Food is absent from the target lists in the doctrine. Food is what spoils when the targets on the list go down, and a fridge controller is the shortest path to that result.

Food as the weapon itself was announced at the level of the Security Council. Medvedev wrote on 1 April 2022, five weeks into the invasion, that the food security of many countries depends on Russian supplies, that this is “a quiet but formidable weapon”, and that Russia would supply food and crops only to its friends. The Black Sea blockade followed, and the strikes on Ukrainian ports and grain storage after Russia left the grain deal in July 2023.

Logistics is where the Europeans get even more specific. Czech police concluded in April 2024 that officers of GRU Unit 29155 blew up the two ammunition depots at Vrbětice in October and December 2014, stock reported to be on its way to Ukraine. Polish prosecutors said in October 2024 that the parcels which ignited at the DHL hub in Leipzig on 20 July and the DHL warehouse near Birmingham on 22 July were sent to test a transfer channel for devices bound for the United States and Canada, and the head of MI5 described the GRU as on a sustained mission of arson and sabotage on British and European streets. That campaign ran on locally recruited disposable agents. A refrigeration campaign that needs a default password and a shopping list of exposed hosts runs on far less, and the December advisory says the groups pick targets exactly that way.

The threats we are talking about have a name in Russian military history. On 14 July 1943 the Central Headquarters of the Partisan Movement ordered Operation Rail War. It opened on the night of 3 August 1943 with tens of thousands of partisans striking the occupied rail network at once, which the Belarusian state war museum defines as simultaneous mass destruction of the enemy’s communications to disorganize his transport, timed to the Red Army offensive at the front. The second stage, Concert, began on 19 September and cut German rail transport in Belarus by 40 percent by the end of the year. The doctrine is one coordinated night, many cheap strikes, against supply, timed to something else. The night of 1 to 2 November has that shape across ten countries, and one of its strikes was aimed at a blood supply.

The evidence establishes a Russian state-aligned campaign against the civilian cold chain of states that are supporting survival of civilians in Ukraine.

The open question is the unit, and the agencies holding the logs will answer it when they decide the cost of saying so is lower than the cost of the next Russian victims. The October attack spoiled food. The November attack reached blood, although it was stopped by one technician who was awake. Or dare I say, woke.

Food, Security

Poisoned Tea: Arrest of Chinese Researcher Mirrors the AI Integrity Breach Story

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Headlines about the University of Wyoming poisoning case tell a confidentiality breach story, built around a Chinese national and a cache of hard drives seized at Los Angeles airport.

The far more important story is trusted input tampering. Prosecutors allege graduate student Aili Wang put a neurotoxin, acrylamide, in the water a fellow researcher used every day to make tea at his desk. His wife and colleagues boiled his kettle’s water down to 63 milligrams of white powder, and a chemistry professor identified it. The affidavit says a hidden camera then recorded Wang rinsing his mug with liquid from her own, and university records tied her uwyo.edu account to acrylamide bought on eBay.

Their professor, Mark Gomelsky, told the AP that Wang failed her first dissertation defense and grew envious of her colleague’s success using bacteria to deliver RNA into human cells. The alleged goal was to stop a competitor from producing results. Tampering with his trusted input to get there is an integrity breach.

It reminds me of Fei-Fei Li.

By her own account, a Princeton professor told her the ImageNet work was unethical. She moved to Stanford in 2009 and kept building it there. The ImageNet leaderboard became the field’s definition of success, and her Stanford profile calls ImageNet one of the three driving forces of the deep learning revolution.

The leaderboard rewarded gaming.

In 2015 the challenge banned Baidu for 12 months after organizers found its team had used multiple accounts to run far more test evaluations than the rules allowed. Baidu fired the team’s leader, who denied cheating.

The leaderboard scored outputs.

The input got its check in 2019, when an art project exposed bias in the person labels. Princeton and Stanford researchers then traced the bias to how ImageNet was built. By then Li co-directed Stanford’s new Institute for Human-Centered AI, promoting ethics for a field that trained on her dataset.

Nationality matters here as competition culture.

China has a name for its grind, neijuan, which young Chinese began using in 2020 for the hypercompetitive and often self-defeating chase after markers of success. American AI runs on its own win-at-all-cost version, and Li’s career runs through both. The headlines tie nationality to espionage. The motive, for what it is worth on explaining behavior, is competition.

Fei-Fei built massive influence and power on a faulty notion of success. Her dataset served biased person labels to the public for a decade before her own field checked them. Same poisoned ramp as Wyoming: win at all cost.