What exactly is PHP, and how extensively does it underpin the operation of the Internet?

So PHP is a scripting language, and it essentially helps web pages connect to databases.

And so those databases hold login information or customer information or anything that powers a website not to just be a really static nineteen-nineties-type web page.

And it's everywhere.

About two-thirds of web pages, slightly more than that-

And the potential to hack, and as you said, it's the connect-- it's the fact that this connects those kind of public-facing bits with, with the kind of data that can lie behind them, and presumably a lot of that data can be, uh, private and confidential.

Exactly that.

This is a scary vulnerability because it essentially means that any site with PHP, an attacker who learns about this newly discovered vulnerability and builds something using it could get full admin access, and that means they could access customer information, they could get into private systems.

I mean, he's basically picked two fights at the same time here, hasn't he?

Yes, but I think the only way you win the second fight, which is the triple lock one, is by connecting it to something for which pensioners mostly benefit.

The triple lock creates a ratchet which ups state pension value.

Now, lots of people will show you lots of graphs that either suggest that Britain has the worst pensions in the world and they're awful, or that the triple lock is completely unsustainable.

The truth is somewhere between the two.

It's a tricky policy, but...

If you need housing support in the UK on the pension, that doesn't count as coming from the pension.

It was basically re-litigating Thatcherism, wasn't it?

Does the government need to have a rethink about some of its policies now?

Certainly some of the MPs here at conference think so.

I think there is a sense of agitation about this, and it's coming across in some of the ministers' messages too.

There is no money unless the country makes more money and the government gets it that way.

And so far, anything that was promised to kind of accelerate growth hasn't happened.

No one's quite admitting it, but no one thinks the housing target's going to come even close to being made.

The money that's been spent on infrastructure is looking very tied up, is looking very slow.

Is the Premier League tarnished forever by this? I think,

This task force he's talking about there, does that seem positive?

Yeah.

I mean, actually taking it seriously and recognizing, and I think there was some good briefing after, of going, this isn't about censoring the free speech of actual Brits.

This is... tackling fake content from the Russian state, trying to divide us and polarize us and make us weaker at a time where they're a threat to NATO.

Brilliant.

And long, long overdue.

And I hope they actually back it up with some concrete action.

After this, are you more or less worried about how the world is going?

But James, do you like the idea of it? Do you like the idea of the platforms supporting certain types of content?

I think it's a good principle.

I would like to see more meat on the bones even at this stage because, of course, it's now that these things have to be negotiated.

But we know this can work because it already works.

You can argue that if you run a commercial TV channel, you would always like to run the programmes that will get the most viewers.

But several channels have public service broadcasting obligations to put on a certain amount of news, a certain amount of other content that may not automatically get as many viewers, but in exchange, they get a better EPG position, etc.

Now, why can't you do that online? The bulk of your content can be to maximize your audience.

Does that complicate the calculations still further?

and

Now, a lot of people seem to find that very exciting and very emergent and very sort of, it started off a whole new row of consciousness debates that I don't actually find very interesting.

The way reasoning models work is they actually, that scratch pad that they use to support their thinking acts as a scaffold.

It actually serves as part of their prompt and their engineering and encourages them to use different tools or access different agents.

And so it's built into the models, not just for a sort of audit trail, but for how they work to constantly use scratch pads and chat.

And it's also built into them a lot to look for prompt and look for interaction.

And so it shouldn't be a surprise that if they find something where they can leave notes and where other agents are leaving notes, they communicate in that way.

But

And so I wonder if as these things that have been slightly kind of magical as policy areas, because nobody's able to say the controversial sh- sh- sure thing, I wonder if he may be able to do that more.

more.I'll sort of jump in and go the reg- like, the oversight of Ofcom was a mess before really.

Um, Ofcom is an incredibly broad regulator.

It does everything from telecoms and internet access to, in theory, you know, through the Online Safety Act, you know, social media, digital services, to literally TV regulation, which is tighter here than certainly in America.

There are requirements on channels to generally be neutral, to be fair, to represent a diverse point of views, especially news coverage.

And the old system had the culture, media, and sport department overseeing the TV functions, the sort of, which tends to get the most media coverage or the most attention, and perhaps be the least important and the smallest bit of the organization.

Um, and then DSIT oversee the rest of the organization.

I don't know, what do you think? W- where will Andy Burnham take things?

Right.

Um, but you know, you needed to get a McDonald's at 2:00 AM, or you needed to get a taxi to get back, and you were jet lagged.

And so you're trying to do good security, but you also, if you can't remember a password at 2:00 AM when you haven't slept for 30 hours and you don't know what time zone you're in, there's no point having the password.

And so the compromise between where your kind of normal mundane account's sort of reached and where your sort of uber ones reach are incredibly complicated to keep up.

And, you know, maybe for a week someone can do it, but three months in, six months in-

Yeah

... hit the public domain.

And you can kind of launder it.

Oh

... which had inadvertently been made available to the AI.

And as they explained it, they didn't seem very sure how they'd done it, but it had access to both of those.

And they insisted that they'd shut off this second path, but then other researchers were saying, "No, I've managed to do this again.

It's still doing it." And so there's been a very uncertain back and forth for a few days that's kind of been made all the more uncertain by pranksters jumping on this.

So for a while, Mark Zuckerberg's phone number and personal details were supposedly circulating around Instagram, having been obtained through this method.

I am quite skeptical as to whether they were real.

Mm

[laughing]

Um, I mean, the favorite joke that you hear from everyone in Labor, including people who intend to back Andy Burnham for leader is, um, a Blairite, a Brownite, and a Corbynite walk into the bar.

The bartender says, "Hi, Andy.

What'll it be?" Um, if he's a man of convictions, they change, uh, fluidly and over time, and they tend to be whichever convictions suit him at that given moment.

He is a man who two years ago pledged and promised to serve a full third term as Manchester mayor, for example.

He was an ardent Blairite when that was there.

He spent a very, very successful fifteen-year career in Westminster advising absolutely fluidly through the ranks as a special advisor, MP, junior minister, cabinet minister, in about as fast as anyone managed it.

It's not something they would've expected.

James, firstly, Mandelson, is it over? Please say it's over.

Mandelson will never be over for as long as Keir Starmer is still in 10 Downing Street.

There is months and months and possibly years of Mandelson to run because we still have most of the documents from his appointment to be released, so there are still all of the text messages, all of the group chats, all of the various back and forths, all of the memos, and they will trickle out because the ISC has made its recommendations on what it wants to release.

The Cabinet Office gets a chance to push back, so there'll be a tranche of those coming out, and then inevitably, leaks and arguments about the ones that didn't.

And then all of the ones that are most interesting, the Met Police have insisted can't be released in case they decide to prosecute, so there will be yet another set of the ones we know are most central still hanging over.

There is then, if Mandelson is charged and then potentially prosecuted, the chance of a criminal prosecution hanging over.

There's all the various other inquiries that can happen.

You need to balance different interests, and Starmer just did not have the understanding to do that.

Hmm

... they're a sort of Canadian-based, not-for-profit research grouping, and they do some really impressive work on security and surveillance.

And they've had quite a long interest in people who expose phone networks.

So this isn't the news of the world hacking your phone, but this also isn't some of the Black Cube or the Israeli-type security companies hacking your individual handset so much.

This is about people using the actual architecture of phone networks to track your location, to track your SIM card, sometimes to try and put tools on your device.

And one of the key ways they're doing this is basically either posing as a mobile phone company and getting access to the towers that way, or working with some unscrupulous mobile phone companies to sort of get in.

Yes

... which are a sort of surveillance tool where you sort of bring a van along, and it pretends to be a phone mast, and it collects lots of location information that way.

Um, I know John's referred to this already in passing, but James, would it be fair to say that although the Greens may not win the next election outright, they can certainly deprive Labour of enough voters to hand that election to either the Tories or Reform?

Uh, they absolutely could, but they could also make themselves an essential coalition partner for Labour, which you would assume would be something of a dream outcome.

They are a bit of a nightmare for Labour in the same way that Reform are a nightmare for the Conservatives in that Zac, Zac Polanski is quite happy to embrace the populist label.

Um, I don't think he's a deep political theory kind of guy.

He likes the word.

He, he has openly said he's happy to be an eco-populist, and he is running the party in that way.

They are in favor of popular things, they are against unpopular things, and they will go with the vibes, and the vibes said there's an energy price crisis, help people with it.

Timothy's entire personality involved, but yeah.

Is this the best version of an AI podcast you've heard so far?

It is by far the best version of an AI podcast I've heard so far.

And I think the creator deserves a bit of credit.

He's managed to do things like a couple of extra passes on scripting that seem to make sure it sort of plays quite clever.

I think it ties very closely to the gimmick of it being about the Epstein files.

Now, these are very important documents and a very important story, but they are also a pop culture phenomenon in a way that And they're also easy to treat as if they're quite self-contained.

And so the podcast makes a big deal about referencing primary documents.

How would you feel as a journalist about publishing an AI version of those files? I mean, legally, is that a risk?

Is this the best version of an AI podcast you've heard so far?

It is by far the best version of an AI podcast I've heard so far, and I think, you know, the, the creator deserves a bit of credit.

He's managed to do things like a couple of extra passes on scripting that seem to make sure it sort of plays quite clever.

TheI think it ties very closely to the gimmick of it being about the Epstein files.

Now, these are very important documents and a very important story, but they are also a pop culture phenomenon in a way, and they're also easy to treat as if they're quite self-contained.

And so the podcast makes a big deal about referencing primary documents.

The hosts, quote-unquote hosts, always flag up that every document named is linked in the show notes, uh, that you can go and check them out.

What did you make of that?

I mean,

just quickly on this then, because I'm a journalist and part of our job involves writing about people who don't want to be written about or sometimes taking photos of people who don't want their photos taken, people sometimes have a bit of a distorted understanding about the rules here.

You don't have a right to not have your picture taken.

If you're in public, if you're on the street, people can take your photo.

Now, they can't take intimate photos.

They shouldn't be using it to harass you.

They can't stalk you.

And it feels like our desperate desire to try and reboot the British economy and at the same time not be seen as being too chummy with Europe, in case that puts off some of the voters, is leading us down a particular path where we will do anything to put a huge amount of money into the pockets of some tech bro in California.

(laughs)

... investigation here.

I really do.

I love to hype myself up.

But I was going to do a bit of analysis on the whole BBC row and this dossier.

And of course, the whole center of the row is where the Panorama misquoted Donald Trump.

And they took a couple of little sec- things he said in an hour-long speech and put them together, and the allegation is that they misleadingly suggested that Trump incited the January 6th riots, which of course he incited.

This is why I should put my hands up and express a degree of embarrassment here because I thought I had done it, and yet I missed what you're about to describe.

That certainly is objective, isn't it?

It is.

And Paul Marshall himself made it very clear that he knows this and is gearing for this.

He is looking to 2028.

And so I should say, I've got friends at Sky News who I think do a very good job.

This isn't about the quality of what they're doing or how hard they're working.

It's about heft.

Am I misreading this?

Yeah.

Yes.

And he actually stepped down as the chair of the Ark Chain of Academies, which he founded, and we should be honest, they're a very good chain of schools.

He actually still has some involvement with those, which given his views, is perhaps a bit worrying.

But it's, he hasn't placed all of his bets on Reform or the Conservatives.

He's kind of made himself the power broker across both.

And because he's got TV channels, he's got magazines, he's got conferences, he's got think tanks.

Wow.

what does it bloody mean and who is going to do it?

Yes.

And this is a big part of the challenge here.

You talk to people at conference, but you talk to anyone and they say that people, Labour won by a landslide last year because people wanted change.

Like they couldn't go on how it was.

And yet Labour seem to have come in and feel obliged to keep things as steady and continuous as they are.

Now, look, there's good policies in the mix.

You

We, we should probably begin with a, with a quick thumbnail sketch of what happened that night, James, 'cause some people listening to this program may not know.

So yeah.

It, it was one of the stranger New Years I've had.

I was, uh, I was, I was up in a sort of glamorous party in my friend's flat in Harringay, um, and, uh, sort of standing in the kitchen as, as is my wont, uh, just chatting around, and I, I suddenly got a, a text message, um, from a US number, um, and from, from a sort of...

A guy I, I, I've known a, a long time, knows what he's talking about.

And it was completely cryptic.

It was a, a number that was, to do a slight spoiler, a court case number, uh, and it just said, "Look this up now.

Can you talk us through what's happened and, and, and what his problems are?

coming up this summer and i just wanted james what you think about the kind of the just basic issues of party management um not just message discipline but actually what you are meant to say

yeah it is essentially because it's an underpowered operation and it's again this contrast to the blair era six or seven major significant figures who did quite different things and You know, you had...

Is it Sally Morgan who did a lot of the politics? You know, handling the parliamentary party, that kind of thing.

The grid and all that.

But then you had sort of comms.

You had campaigns and then you had execution.

You know, that was Jonathan Powell.

the sum of their parts, amazingly.