5 ms·

I'd love to hear what exactly folks consider to be wrong with that. I've seen this sort of criticism in a few places before, but especially in cases such as th

by tekacs 10y ago

I'd love to hear what exactly folks consider to be wrong with that. I've seen this sort of criticism in a few places before, but especially in cases such as this where someone from the company responded and talked of making change, being on top of happenings like this seems like a reasonable thing to do. It certainly seems better than the old 'ask random people for their opinion' approach of conventional huge media. I'm struggling to find links to posts about this, but it's not too hard to point to cases, both mentioned online and through my friends, where utterly unqualified opinions were sourced based on journalists using indicators like 'owning a domain name' as proof of a person's authority on a topic. Edit: at least on HN and social media you can verify the full text of what someone said after the fact and oftentimes even look up their background!

RBerenguel 10y ago
Well, as a commenter above points out, Ben didn't "tell TechCrunch", but posted a comment here. It would be far more reasonable to, after seeing a comment by X here addressing important topic Y, the news outlet contacted X about Y, and wrote something about that exchange. Not just copying the comment and making it look as some exchange.
- tekacs 10y ago
  It /was/ an exchange, between the folks the article mentions it was between. Completely agree with the sibling commenter and you about 'told TechCrunch'. Yours and the sibling comments most-all refer to this point, so just replying once to that - yes certainly misrepresentation is bad, but copy/pasting comments together from Hacker News need not be, as the grandparent poster suggested. Dismissing it as 'modern journalism' with the snide comment in the grandparent post was just lazy.
iomike 10y ago
That's not journalism.
danieldk 10y ago
I'd love to hear what exactly folks consider to be wrong with that. Ben Newhouse's answer left quite a few questions open. How about poking him or Dropbox a bit more? For instance, competing products (OneDrive, Resilio Sync, etc.) provide similar functionality without placing SUID 'backdoors'. Given that OneDrive's client is distributed via the app store, I'd guess that it even uses OS X sandboxing. What about asking a security expert (or perhaps Apple) to comment? A good journalist doesn't just literally relay information, but provides context/interpretation. (Of course, it's in TC's right to do this, but it doesn't add much to the conversation.)
- radicalbyte 10y ago
  I thought that Tech Crunch was "social blog"? So of course there won't be any real journalists there.
- tekacs 10y ago
  All valid points, although perhaps it's more in their interest to publish soon/rapidly/without dedicating much effort to every post that they put out? What you're describing may be in line with what we expect from conventional journalists, but media put out starting at once a day is a different medium with different constraints, is it not? Don't the even faster media forms (intra-day news on TV, radio) have more people on board to help make that process happen quickly?
breatheoften 10y ago
it's highly misleading to quote someone saying "told TechCrunch" rather that citing actual context for the quote. Misattributing like this implies a stronger and more deliberate relationship between the information source and journalist than actually existed.
maxerickson 10y ago
Not much wrong at all with quoting a comment or twitter (maybe it's lazy). Misrepresenting those quotes as a direct discussion? Horrible, because it is misrepresentation. It seems pretty likely that TechCrunch reached out and confirmed the comments though, so that wouldn't be a misrepresentation.
mhurron 10y ago
> Edit: at least on HN and social media you can verify the full text of what someone said after the fact Anyone else seeing humour in putting this statement in an edit that was not in the original post?
- tekacs 10y ago
  Haha quite. :) Was going to comment on that but left it out. Nonetheless the internet is still dramatically better at preserving originals [1] than exchanges between journalists and individuals. Aren't journalists notorious for misrepresenting what people say in those exchanges? Whether there's any accuracy to that or not we can't tell, because of that lack of permanence in many such cases (modulo voice recorders). [1]: See for example the various deleted Tweet archives.
Dylan16807 10y ago
The haphazard stringing of comments leaves a pretty mixed-up message about what the actual issue is. There's no coherent overview of what is going on by TechCrunch. The traditional "ask random people" part comes after the explanatory segment, which makes it much less of a problem.
- tekacs 10y ago
  Admittedly it's the fourth paragraph, but this is an overview: > ... while allegations that Dropbox was creating a spoof dialogue box to phish users’ passwords proved to be incorrect, critics continued to slate its implementation of an official OS X security dialogue box that they said appeared designed to mislead users into handing over their admin passwords in order to grant Dropbox root access to the system via the Mac’s Accessibility permissions list. It's an awful overview, for sure, but it is present. Similarly, the 'ask random people' part in the article /does/ come after the explanatory segment. It's just that the explanatory segment quotes HN comments /from the company being talked about/ and isn't very good. ;)

by tekacs 10y ago

RBerenguel 10y ago

Well, as a commenter above points out, Ben didn't "tell TechCrunch", but posted a comment here. It would be far more reasonable to, after seeing a comment by X here addressing important topic Y, the news outlet contacted X about Y, and wrote something about that exchange. Not just copying the comment and making it look as some exchange.

tekacs 10y ago
It /was/ an exchange, between the folks the article mentions it was between. Completely agree with the sibling commenter and you about 'told TechCrunch'. Yours and the sibling comments most-all refer to this point, so just replying once to that - yes certainly misrepresentation is bad, but copy/pasting comments together from Hacker News need not be, as the grandparent poster suggested. Dismissing it as 'modern journalism' with the snide comment in the grandparent post was just lazy.

iomike 10y ago

That's not journalism.

danieldk 10y ago

I'd love to hear what exactly folks consider to be wrong with that. Ben Newhouse's answer left quite a few questions open. How about poking him or Dropbox a bit more? For instance, competing products (OneDrive, Resilio Sync, etc.) provide similar functionality without placing SUID 'backdoors'. Given that OneDrive's client is distributed via the app store, I'd guess that it even uses OS X sandboxing. What about asking a security expert (or perhaps Apple) to comment? A good journalist doesn't just literally relay information, but provides context/interpretation. (Of course, it's in TC's right to do this, but it doesn't add much to the conversation.)

radicalbyte 10y ago
I thought that Tech Crunch was "social blog"? So of course there won't be any real journalists there.
tekacs 10y ago
All valid points, although perhaps it's more in their interest to publish soon/rapidly/without dedicating much effort to every post that they put out? What you're describing may be in line with what we expect from conventional journalists, but media put out starting at once a day is a different medium with different constraints, is it not? Don't the even faster media forms (intra-day news on TV, radio) have more people on board to help make that process happen quickly?

breatheoften 10y ago

it's highly misleading to quote someone saying "told TechCrunch" rather that citing actual context for the quote. Misattributing like this implies a stronger and more deliberate relationship between the information source and journalist than actually existed.

maxerickson 10y ago

Not much wrong at all with quoting a comment or twitter (maybe it's lazy). Misrepresenting those quotes as a direct discussion? Horrible, because it is misrepresentation. It seems pretty likely that TechCrunch reached out and confirmed the comments though, so that wouldn't be a misrepresentation.

mhurron 10y ago

> Edit: at least on HN and social media you can verify the full text of what someone said after the fact Anyone else seeing humour in putting this statement in an edit that was not in the original post?

tekacs 10y ago
Haha quite. :) Was going to comment on that but left it out. Nonetheless the internet is still dramatically better at preserving originals [1] than exchanges between journalists and individuals. Aren't journalists notorious for misrepresenting what people say in those exchanges? Whether there's any accuracy to that or not we can't tell, because of that lack of permanence in many such cases (modulo voice recorders). [1]: See for example the various deleted Tweet archives.

Dylan16807 10y ago

The haphazard stringing of comments leaves a pretty mixed-up message about what the actual issue is. There's no coherent overview of what is going on by TechCrunch. The traditional "ask random people" part comes after the explanatory segment, which makes it much less of a problem.

tekacs 10y ago
Admittedly it's the fourth paragraph, but this is an overview: > ... while allegations that Dropbox was creating a spoof dialogue box to phish users’ passwords proved to be incorrect, critics continued to slate its implementation of an official OS X security dialogue box that they said appeared designed to mislead users into handing over their admin passwords in order to grant Dropbox root access to the system via the Mac’s Accessibility permissions list. It's an awful overview, for sure, but it is present. Similarly, the 'ask random people' part in the article /does/ come after the explanatory segment. It's just that the explanatory segment quotes HN comments /from the company being talked about/ and isn't very good. ;)