Lads, I’ve been trying to be good. Apart from a blip around Halloween, when chocolate comes at you with the attention-seeking rage of Donald Trump, I’ve been really trying to get the diet in order. I’ve been watching my stats, logging every morsel into a carb-tracking app that produces little coloured graphs and I’ve got a tracker on my wrist linked to an AI-enabled app that tells me how I’m doing at every possible moment.

It’s helpful and exhausting at the same time. Brown bread has been benched. Pasta is on probation. There have been experiments with couscous and quinoa and ferments. We’re a long way from microwave chips and Donegal Catch. So when I read that SuperValu had been hit by a cyberattack on its fridges, with chilled and frozen products pulled from the shelves of 13 stores on Monday morning (Lucan, Blanchardstown, Waterford and Bray among them) and Musgrave saying the trouble was confined to a “specific model” of refrigerator, my first thought, God forgive me, was whether I could hire the hackers to help with the diet.

The willpower is grand at lunchtime, you see. It’s eight o’clock at night when the wheels come off. Imagine a fridge that simply locks itself after the Six One News, with a little message on the door telling me I’ve had my carbs for the day and should go and read a book. And if I did manage a night-time raid for peanut butter toast, the toaster could give me a small, character-building electric shock and send me up the stairs with a rumbling tummy and a new respect for the system.

Of course, what I am describing here is a hellish posthuman dystopia of self-optimisation. Which is the last thing the good people of West Cork need to be reading over their Frosties. But the more connected we get, and the more we lean on the Internet of Things, the more we seem to be exposed to these sorts of malicious attacks.

In France last month, fridges across around 700 supermarkets, Intermarché and Carrefour among them, were hacked through the remote temperature controllers that contractors use, and the attackers set off long defrost cycles that warmed everything up until the food was ruined and, in some places, fires broke out. Sacrebleu!

Raiders of the crypto

It’s not confined to the supermarkets either, as you all know. Last week, the FBI says a North Korea-linked group called TraderTraitor was behind the theft of $6 billion from the crypto exchange Binance.

Experts reckon it could be the biggest crypto heist ever and works out at nearly a quarter of North Korea’s estimated annual GDP. For Irish context, it’s about the size of two children’s hospitals and a couple of bike sheds.

Kim Yo Jong, sister of Kim Jong Un, dismissed it as “absurd rhetoric”, which is more or less what I say to the app when it berates me about Hobnobs. The difference being that they allegedly walked off with six billion and I can’t get a single biscuit past my own phone.

Then on Sunday night and Monday morning, the government emergency apps in both Ukraine and Russia were hacked to send out phony alerts. Russia’s went out at about a quarter to three in the morning across 33 regions. The Ukrainian ones included a warning about an imminent nuclear threat, and the English-language versions were riddled with spelling and grammar mistakes, which you’d think would be the first thing an evil mastermind would get someone to check. If I ever take over the world with some sort of Dr. Evil plot, let me tell you the spelling and punctuation will be flawless.

I really loved the Ukrainian response though. They more or less ignored it and filled social media with photos of their pets lying around completely unbothered, along with a picture of Kyiv’s mayor Vitali Klitschko and a note saying it was handy having a former boxing champion in charge. They’re a hardy bunch.

No way Don says Norway

Speaking of nation-state level trolling, hats off to the Norwegians this week. At a rally in Michigan, Donald Trump, still sore about the Nobel peace prize going to the former judge Navi Pillay instead of himself, described Norway as a “s**thouse country”.

The Norwegian foreign minister had to remind him that the Nobel committee is independent of the government, which he knows well. But our Donald loves to dish it out.

The official tourist body Visit Norway responded with a page showing off the country’s designer roadside toilets under the slogan “Norway makes s**t houses great again!” It’s worth a look – a lot of these designer bogs are built along the national scenic routes by proper architects, including one at the Stegastein viewpoint over the Sognefjord. In this rather spectacular example, black-tinted glass lets you take in the fjord from the throne without anyone seeing in. Now there’s an example we can follow in Ireland, and I think West Cork can be the leader. Designer potties overlooking Dunmanus Bay? Now there’s an initiative I could get behind. I’m looking forward to receiving your sketches and ideas.