Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut
Q: “An AI tool with all your passwords or a bear in the woods?” Signal president Meredith Whittaker: “Look, I know social media wants this. I know you guys want this little clip. But what the fuck? What the fuck?? Both are bad!”
anything on your phone that shows a time has to know where you are.Underneath sit every Android phone, every iPhone and most of the servers on the internet. They all get local time from one text file, the time zone database, which holds every clock rule a government has ever announced.Paul Eggert, a lecturer at UCLA, keeps that file up to date in his spare time…”
Wall Street Journal – no paywall: “As U.S. and Israeli forces bombed Iran early this year, a poultry farmer in northern Israel decided to check on his chickens. When he launched the app on his phone for the webcam outside his coop, he was alarmed to see that its language had been switched to Arabic. He contacted Israel’s National Cyber Directorate, which found that hackers had taken control of the Chinese-made camera. They weren’t interested in chickens. The camera’s orientation on the coop offered it a line of sight to the movements of Israeli security forces along the nearby border with Lebanon. The cyber directorate said it helped the farmer harden the camera’s security and adjust its viewing angle to stop capturing military operations. The farmer’s webcam was one of an estimated 1.2 billion internet-connected cameras worldwide, according to cybersecurity consultants S-RM.
The devices have become a background fixture of daily life in the form of security systems, doorbells, traffic controls and even baby monitors—and potentially any of them are vulnerable to snooping, say cybersecurity experts and hackers. “We are now seeing the conversion of civilian surveillance into wartime intelligence collection,” said Alexander Leslie, a national-security expert at threat-intelligence consultants Recorded Future, who sees a global “soft underbelly” in omnipresent digital eyeballs.
The Wall Street Journal spoke with intelligence agencies, cybersecurity experts, military officials and hackers to scope out the extent and impact of the invasive surveillance. The Journal also reviewed dozens of hours of footage and hundreds of images, much of it made public by hackers, and independently verified their authenticity, by geolocating their locations and checking for any signs of digital manipulations. Intelligence agencies scour the internet for vulnerable cameras and robotically tap in to them by testing millions of passwords.
Now, AI has made it even easier to hack into them and analyze their data at scale, transforming cameras that were designed to boost safety into tools for combatants to track, surveil and attack the enemy—often surpassing the abilities of human intelligence analysts. Algorithms digest endless reams of footage to find hidden gems and patterns for agents to monitor. “AI changed everything,” said Kristopher Kortright, leader of Team OneFist, an international hacker group supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia…”
In an effort to save face while mired in scandal, KPMG has released embarrassing information about itself. It gives legislators some serious fodder.
Will KPMG's decision to fully expose itself prove to be the correct one? (Image: Crikey/Zennie)
Accounting firms like KPMG Australia are at their most uncomfortable when they have to drop their pants all the way to their ankles in public. Sometimes avoiding transparency is difficult.
The Big Four firm has been mired in controversy since its treatment of a whistleblower who revealed multiple breaches of ethical standards, auditing standards and other legal rules by sharing confidential audit client information with colleagues who were chasing large audits.
KPMG Australia’s audit team for Lendlease, for example, had access to information about audit tender pricing from its competitors. That information made its way into the hands of the audit pursuit team working on winning the Westpac audit — an audit that became available because Westpac’s previous auditor found itself in a tax policy confidentiality breach scandal.
Lendlease executives told a parliamentary committee earlier this year that KPMG will no longer be its audit firm after having the firm run its eyes over the company’s books for many decades following the confidentiality breach.
Senior KPMG partners could have taken actions to deal with what was one of the most significant series of ethical breaches from within one practice in decades. Rather than deal with serious breaches of ethical, professional, and audit and assurance standards, as well as possible breaches of other laws or regulations, bosses gave preference to chasing millions in audit fees.
The firm will continue to bleed audit clients such as ANZ because companies — and, indeed, governments — generally stop having a fetish for a firm logo when the firm’s partners crap in their own nest by breaching standards.
KPMG Australia now finds itself licking wounds internally, while also being under attack by media and politicians from the outside. All this forces the firm to make itself vulnerable and publicly release internal reviews. There are several reasons for this that should be obvious to those with a keen eye for crisis management, but let’s go through them for old time’s sake.
The first reason to release documents publicly is to avoid looking like an institution that has an absence of discipline within its professional ranks. Leaking to business journalists writing about the accounting world or gossip columns will naturally occur. Angry partners will want to express their anger publicly via proxy, and who better than a media megaphone to amplify issues a firm may otherwise wish to bury.
It is standard operating procedure for people within accounting firms who want to keep a professional image, while quietly shuffling out things their colleagues might prefer to remain hidden, to let the world know things are not that great in the state of Denmark. Releasing reviews or pre-empting leaks from a firm is one way of emphasising the company is maintaining control even in a time of crisis.
This is a lesson KPMG has obviously learned from PwC Australia, after it failed to handle the media and public relations well during the early part of its tax leaks scandal.
KPMG’s circumstances are far worse — one of the worst this author has seen in three decades — and the gradual release of reports is designed to ensure that the firm attempts to control the message as best as possible.
The reports released so far are a mixed bag: some good, and some much less flattering. KPMG has attracted a mix of commentary from people for whom some of the language and process of the accounting profession is clearly foreign.
A recent report by Chartered Accountants — Australia and New Zealand (CAANZ) looked solely at KPMG’s processes and procedures to deal with confidentiality and ethical training. It was not a report that was destined to find people guilty of breaches of standards nor name people that should be thrown out of the profession. CAANZ has a disciplinary process for that more delicate of processes, and those disciplinary investigations are ongoing. Watch this space.
Another report also recently pushed out by KPMG was the governance consultancy company Principia’s deep dive into KPMG’s culture. It found that the firm had a rotten attitude up at the top among partners who opted to stop polishing their ethical halos and replace that with chasing new audit clients, as well as not walking the walk when it came to ethics and making it very difficult for people to raise issues.
The report also found a culture of retribution rather than self-review or introspection when it came to people wanting clear breaches of ethics to be dealt with by the hierarchy, including the now-admitted failure to properly treat the whistleblower involved in the KPMG revelations.
These two reports provide different perspectives on a firm that is troubled, while also providing some evidence that KPMG Australia is attempting to rehabilitate its reputation. Publicly releasing these reports, of course, comes with additional risks that the firm will have considered before releasing these documents into the wild.
The first issue is that they provide ammunition for Senate estimates, due to take place in the next week. Expect the Department of Finance, Department of Defence and any other folks that have contracts with KPMG to get asked whether a firm that received such an unflattering assessment from Principia should continue to receive taxpayer dollars.
The reports will be used by the Australian Greens to further pursue the cause of a debarment regime so that firms found to have questionable ethical cultures are banned from providing government services until they clean up their act.
Regulators such as the Australian Securities and Investments Commission and the Tax Practitioners Board will need to craft cheat notes for their bosses, just in case they get asked what they can do about unflattering assessments of KPMG in those reports.
The two reports mentioned above, and others that will subsequently be released by the firm and Department of Finance, will also be used by the accounting profession’s harshest critics to argue for tighter regulation of the profession, structural separation of accounting firms, downsizing of accounting partnerships to a smaller size, and for corporate regulators to do more work to scare accountants into doing the right thing.
KPMG Australia is doing the right thing in trying its best to be open — as far as the processes of opaque partnerships allow it. But the consequences of the negative assessments of the firm’s character will have wider implications for the accounting world.
FEATURE|The 39-year-old French-American Berkeley professor is campaigning to have voters approve, in a November 3 referendum, a measure that would temporarily impose a 5% tax on the wealth of billionaires living in the state. Some of his colleagues consider that his activism has begun to overshadow his scientific approach.
In the darkness of the Airbus 350, high above the Atlantic, almost every screen played romantic comedies or cartoons. Only one screen remained stubbornly switched off for the entire 11-hour flight: that of Gabriel Zucman, who was fine-tuning a "manifesto against the international oligarchy" on his laptop.
On Saturday, September 26, the French-American economist got up at 4 am in Budapest, where he had gone to help the new Hungarian government with a project for a wealth tax. He ran to avoid missing his connection in Paris. Upon landing in San Francisco, he was as fresh as a daisy. "I'm fired up! I can't wait to dive into the fight." We followed him for five days. Unaffected by jet lag, he went from conference to meeting, to interview, to filming messages that he planned to "bombard" social media with, helped by three comms people who fluttered around him.
The fight centers on Proposition 40, which Californians are set to vote on during the November 3 midterm elections. Voters must answer yes or no to a one-time 5% tax on total wealth – both professional and personal – of the roughly 250 Californian billionaires.
The money raised, estimated at $100 billion, is intended to save the health coverage of 3.5 million Californians, threatened by cuts imposed by the One Big Beautiful Bill, signed on July 4, 2025, by President Donald Trump. Backed by the SEIU-UHW (Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West) union – which collected the 875,000 signatures required to put it to referendum – Proposition 40 draws directly on the work of two French-American professors at the prestigious University of California, Berkeley: Zucman, 39, and Emmanuel Saez, 53, his mentor and friend.
The economists spent nearly 10 years working on the explosion of wealth inequality, which they describe as "the most significant social and political event of the early 21st century," as well as on the tax rates of the ultra-wealthy, which various tax loopholes and legal arrangements have kept extremely low. In 2023, Zucman joined the Paris School of Economics and sparked a heated debate in France over the so-called "Zucman tax" (2% of net wealth above €100 million), which led to him being labeled a "pseudo-academic" and a "far-left activist" by Europe's richest man, Bernard Arnault.
But his campaign is international, it includes Sweden, Germany, Belgium, England and Spain. In 2024, he even traveled to São Paulo, Brazil, to present his ideas to the finance ministers of the G20, which was then chaired by President Lula.
Two competing referendums
"Look, my billionaires are right there!" Zucman pointed to the window. His office at Berkeley is next to Saez's, on the sixth floor of the ugliest building on campus, a brutalist concrete block called Evans Hall. At the foot of the building, a few parking spots are marked with signs reading "Reserved for Nobel Prize Winners." Zucman and Saez each received, in 2023 and 2009 respectively, the highly prestigious John Bates Clark Medal, which in economics often precedes a Nobel. Hardly what you would call "pseudo-academics."
Evans Hall, which houses the economics department. IAN BATES FOR M LE MAGAZINE DU MONDE
"On the right, there's Mount Tamalpais, the Golden Gate and over there, in the mist, the San Francisco skyline. The people trying to kill Proposition 40 live over there!" Several major business leaders, claiming that this tax could derail California's economy, have spent outrageous amounts of money to make sure it fails. The figures, which are available online, are mind-boggling.
On that day, they had already spent $220 million, flooding television with openly false commercials ("Everyone will be taxed," claimed a Hispanic woman, for example) and bombarding phones with similar text messages. They also set up two rival referendums restricting the use of taxation, Propositions 41 and 42. If either one receives more votes than "Prop 40," it will kill it. Google co-founder Sergey Brin has led the effort. He personally put $100 million on the table. "At the rate they're going," predicted Zucman, "they should spend a total of $400 million before November 3. That's unprecedented. They're scared, and they're right to be!"
The fight is unequal, but that does not discourage him. When he launches, like a rocket, into his activist enthusiasm, his cheeks flush and no objection can stop him. According to him, whether it succeeds, the battle over Proposition 40 could change the face of the world – nothing less. "If it passes, people will realize that we can raise $100 billion without triggering an economic collapse, and that will launch a global movement. Other US states, other countries will follow. Don't forget that the conservative tax revolution that swept the world in the 1980s started here, in 1978, with Proposition 13, which limited the possibility of tax increases."
And if the "yes" vote does not win? "Then this episode will have exposed to the whole world the many tactics used by the ultra-wealthy to protect their money and their power." According to Zucman, that would be a first step.
The next day, he's meeting the leader of the camp supporting Proposition 40, Dave Regan, at the headquarters of SEIU-UHW, in the neighboring city of Oakland. The union boss is a burly 60-year-old man, wearing a plaid shirt with his sleeves rolled up. His office is gray, as are the armchairs. The two men discussed the maneuvers of Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor of California (and a likely candidate for the 2028 presidential election), who is opposed to Proposition 40.
They assessed the state of affairs. The coffers were empty: "We spent $25 million just to collect signatures. There's nothing left for TV spots. We're making do with social media." The polls still show the "yes" side in the lead, but the billionaires' advertising campaign is starting to have an effect: The margin is shrinking. "True, but it hasn't flipped," Regan reassured himself. He thanked his visitor from France for persuading six Nobel laureates to join the cause. He did not rule out defeat, but, whatever happens, members of the organization will remain proud to have launched "a movement that will not stop."
Gabriel Zucman and centimillionaire Saikat Chakrabarti, former adviser to left-wing Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in Berkeley. IAN BATES FOR M LE MAGAZINE DU MONDE
A meeting with centimillionaire Saikat Chakrabarti, co-founder of the Justice Democrats organization which launched the career of politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a conference alongside Saez and Robert Reich, US secretary of labor under Bill Clinton who has become something of a guru for the left: Zucman pressed on with his tour, tireless. "He has the determination of a top-level athlete," his wife had warned, labor economist Claire Montialoux, with whom he has three children.
Zucman did not inherit his activism. He was born into a well-to-do Parisian family. Many of his relatives were doctors, some were antique dealers and on his mother's side, there were timber industry entrepreneurs. One particularly influential grandmother was Dr. Elisabeth Zucman (1930-2019), a communist who raised national awareness in France about the issue of multiple disabilities. "A left-wing family, but not an activist one," summed up his brother Guillaume, who worked in several ministers' offices under President Emmanuel Macron, to the skeptical gaze of his older brother.
As a high school student, Gabriel was not particularly interested in politics. Hardworking and curious about everything, he followed a path of academic excellence: preparatory classes at prestigious institutions including Paris's Henri-IV high school and then the Ecole Normale Supérieure. There, he met economist Thomas Piketty, an expert on inequality. "He came to see me, very determined, very mature, to ask if I would supervise his master's," recalled the author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century. "I put him to work on the statistics of the ISF [France's wealth tax], an area where there had been very little research at the time."
Zucman was still searching for his path at the time. He did a six-month internship at the brokerage firm Exane, then another at the Finance Ministry. He tried to understand the financial crisis that shook the world in 2008. Piketty persuaded him to return to academia. The student embarked on a doctoral thesis under Piketty's supervision, focusing on fortunes hidden in tax havens. He immersed himself in international financial data. "He fell into it and never came out," Piketty joked.
In their offices in the 14th arrondissement's Boulevard Jourdan, where the Paris School of Economics is located, the economist and his doctoral student spent months poring over public and private wealth data from several countries, going back to the early 18th century. "We divided up the countries. It was an enormous task. Between 2010 and 2012, we were together all the time," Piketty recalled with nostalgia. Their article, "Capital is Back: Wealth-Income Ratios in Rich Countries 1700–2010," showed that wealthy countries were returning to levels of wealth accumulation similar to those seen at the end of the 19th century. The U-shaped curve caused a sensation.
Then Zucman crossed the Atlantic, drawn by the research of Saez, a close associate of Piketty. The two became very close, delving together into wealth inequality in the US. They meticulously quantified its spectacular rise, revealing to the world a phenomenon that had previously gone largely unnoticed.
"It was through our work that our radicalism on the subject emerged," they said in unison. Both researchers enjoy getting their hands dirty with data. Each built their reputation through work on data and the development of methodologies to process them. "Emmanuel works like a monk, 10 hours a day, seven days a week," Zucman said of Saez. "Gabriel has worked like an ascetic for 15 years," Zucman's wife said.
In academic articles, the two men documented the surge in wealth inequality in the US and highlighted for the first time that, at the top of the social ladder, the overall tax rate was lower than that paid by working and middle-class Americans. In 2019, they co-authored The Triumph of Injustice, a best-selling book offering solutions. At that time, they took their first step into the US political arena, providing their ideas to two of the candidates in the 2020 Democratic primaries, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
Zucman with Robert Reich, secretary of labor under Bill Clinton, and his colleague Emmanuel Saez during a debate on Proposition 40 in Berkeley, on September 29, 2026. IAN BATES FOR M LE MAGAZINE DU MONDE
Although they share the same passion for painstaking scholarly work, Saez could not be more different from Zucman. He was born to a father from northeastern Spain, an executive at the telecommunications company Telefónica, and a mother who taught Spanish. They settled in the French Basque Country. In a pink surfer's T-shirt, he is tall, and his arms, which move expressively as he speaks, seem even longer. He smiles kindly and looks at you intently. Within the university, he is also held in high esteem, even by economists who completely disagree with him.
This is the case for Enrico Moretti, who has an office in the same corridor. He considers Proposition 40 "dangerous," saying it could "drive away some major entrepreneurs, reduce California's appeal and ultimately weaken tax revenues." That does not stop him from calling Saez "one of the giants of Berkeley." A somewhat reserved giant. "He is a kind and gentle man, who found in Berkeley an extension of the Basque coast where he grew up," mathematician Cédric Villani, who was his friend at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, told us. While Zucman does not shy away from the spotlight, Saez prefers to stay in the background. "Unfortunately, these days, the media approach me to defend this tax," he regretted. He does so "out of duty," because he believes in it.
On September 30, Zucman crossed the bay without his colleague to defend the billionaire tax at Stanford University. With its majestic Mission Revival-style buildings and tall trees, the campus looks very different from Berkeley's. There, you can see empty robot taxis and ultra-light bicycles. The air smells of eucalyptus and opulence. The university lies at the heart of Silicon Valley, the tech ecosystem. It houses the Hoover Institution, where libertarian economists are leading the fight against Zucman and Saez's ideas. According to them, Prop 40 would create an exodus of entrepreneurs and, ultimately, result in lost revenue for the state budget.
The roughly 150 students attending the lecture, eating pizzas provided for the occasion, did not go easy on the speaker, listing objections to taxing high-net-worth individuals. Zucman fielded their questions with casual ease. To make his point, he gave concrete, striking examples: "Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk declared, in some years, almost no income and therefore paid almost no tax. In fact, one year, Bezos paid so little that he qualified for a child tax credit!" He also delivered a few punchlines: "If someone who doesn't pay any taxes moves to Nevada, who really cares, right?"
Gabriel Zucman at a signing session after the conference on Proposition 40 held in Berkeley, on September 29, 2026. IAN BATES FOR M LE MAGAZINE DU MONDE
At the end, several students of different nationalities came up onto the stage in the lecture hall. When the economist described the Hoover Institution's apocalyptic forecasts as "nonsense," one of them, who was affiliated with the center, became agitated: "You have no grounds to dismiss the possibility that major taxpayers will leave! What about the dynamics dictated by rational expectations [a libertarian theory according to which economic actors adjust their behavior to economic policies by anticipating their impact]? There are Nobel laureates who have demonstrated this."
Weary of the debate, the economist deployed his friendly face and his data as shields: "These threats of exodus are common, but, in reality, they never happen." The researcher remained courteous, but on substance, he did not budge one inch. This doesn't always sit well with his colleagues, who used to enjoy debating with him. "He has gone from a historical and quantitative analysis of inequalities to an activist approach. And he is now trapped by the public persona he has become. That makes scientific debate more difficult," said Antoine Levy, another French economist at Berkeley, who is strongly opposed to his colleague's ideas but still maintains a good relationship with him.
It is extremely rare for a top-level economist to cross over in this way and become an activist. But it would be a mistake to imagine Zucman as a lone wolf. He is less a Don Quixote than a Robin Hood, relying on a band of allies – a "tax force." These include Saez and Piketty, of course, but also Camille Landais and Nobel laureates Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz and Esther Duflo. And, above all, the researchers at the International Tax Observatory, which he founded just before his return to France and is funded by European grants.
Based at the Paris School of Economics, the observatory already has 40 staff members, including 30 researchers. Zucman insisted that it include a public policy team to monitor developments and promote the researchers' proposals in the media and political debates in different countries. This was an innovation in the academic world. "I have to admit that at first I felt like I was inventing my own job," recalled Quentin Parrinello, the head of this team, who came from Oxfam France, where he was in charge of advocacy for "tax justice and inequalities."
Finally, to strengthen his strategy and communication, Zucman brought on board a man who has become essential to his operation: Pierre Natnaël Bussière, 32. This behind-the-scenes adviser, always on the move, accelerated the economist's transformation by making his messages go viral on social media, Instagram in particular. His career path has been truly unusual.
Born in Ethiopia to military parents, he was adopted as a child by a couple living in the Puy-de-Dôme region of central France. After studying law, this admirer of the philosopher Claude Lefort began a doctoral thesis in political theory, "The Wild Public Sphere: Democracy in the Digital Age," at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, while also launching a strategy and communications consulting firm with his partner. He co-founded the left-wing political party Place Publique in 2018 with current presidential candidate Raphaël Glucksmann. Bussière became the driving force behind Place Publique's 2024 European election campaign, the success of which owes much to him. He later distanced himself when he realized that "Glucks" was shifting toward the political center.
A summit against oligarchy in November
Bussière challenged Glucksmann. Now, he's pushing Zucman. His obsession: making the economist's messages more effective. When the term "Zucman tax" appears in the press, he gleefully plays it up ("I would have preferred the Arnault tax," Zucman grumbled). Bussière also came up with the provocative title for the economist's latest work: Les milliardaires ne payent pas d’impôt sur le revenu et nous allons y mettre fin ("Billionaires Don't Pay Income Tax, and We Are Going to Put an End to That," 2025).
On a marble bench at the foot of the chiming campanile on the Berkeley campus, he recalled: "We decided to publish this book over drinks, after a debate organized in September 2025 with Philippe Aghion [Nobel Prize-winning economist, who is very opposed to the tax, but has great respect for his young colleague]. I suggested the title, then Gabriel wrote this little book in just a few days." The two men share a love for intellectual sparring in a Blitzkrieg style. According to his friend and fellow high school and École Normale Supérieure student Alexandra Roulet, a former adviser to Macron at the Elysée, "By letting his communications team coach him, Gabriel simplifies his message, which makes it divisive. At the risk of being counterproductive, because it reduces the chances of reaching a cross-party agreement on these issues of tax optimization."
Gabriel Zucman at the University of California, Berkeley, on September 29, 2026. IAN BATES FOR M LE MAGAZINE DU MONDE
The next step for Zucman and his associates is organizing the Summit Against the International Oligarchy, scheduled for November 21 at the Théâtre de la Concorde in Paris. The economist has invited many prominent figures, including Senator Sanders, several ministers and a collection of Nobel laureates. The conference is set to conclude with the signing of a manifesto advancing three proposals to rein in the power of billionaires: a wealth tax, of course, a mechanism to limit shareholder interference in the media and an international public fund to oversee the capital of artificial intelligence companies.
Bussière has already crafted his narrative: "The Lippmann Colloquium [Walter Lippmann was an American intellectual who died in 1974], held in 1938 in Paris, marked the beginning of neoliberalism, which ended up dominating the world from the 1980s onward. Who knows, maybe we can spark the same thing with the November 21 summit, to bring about a different, more humane model."
Before catching his flight home, Zucman once again let himself be filmed by Bussière and his team. They set up their camera on San Francisco's Billionaires' Row, a stretch of three city blocks − or rather, three blocks of extravagant mansions located in the heart of the upscale Pacific Heights neighborhood, with sweeping views of the bay, the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz Island. Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Steve Jobs (Apple), Larry Ellison (Oracle), Jeremy Stoppelman (Yelp) and many other ultra-wealthy individuals live there. Backing up the analyses by Zucman and Saez on the explosion of wealth, this small neighborhood was still called Millionaire's Row just about 15 years
