6 ms·

Reporting on tech companies means finding people who don’t want to be found

43 points by molecule 8y ago

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
thirtyseven 8y ago
> I’m also a prolific screenshotter. The internet is an ephemeral place, so when I see something online for a story, I make sure to capture it immediately. Why are screenshots seen as the gold standard for documenting deleted content? They are easily faked.
- new299 8y ago
  I’ve searched for web archival services before, but never found anything outside of some expensive legal services. It would be great if there was a service like the waybackmachine but which could be use to archive on demand, and make those archives publicly available. The internet archive is great for this, but they also respect robots.txt and don’t guarantee that they’ll archive pages you request.
  - geggam 8y ago
    Just post some terrorist stuff on there and the NSA will do that for you
  - Klathmon 8y ago
    I know blockchain is a dirty word around here, but this is absolutely an application that can use something like Bitcoin to store hashes of a site on a specific date, giving you the closest thing you can get to "proof" that the site existed on that date with that specific content. Then you don't need "secure" storage of the actual archives, you can have as many copies as possible with as many people as possible and not worry about someone tampering with the archives.
    - elwell 8y ago
      https://github.com/ramyhardan/proof-of-existence/blob/master/contracts/ProofOfExistence.sol https://github.com/ramyhardan/proof-of-existence/blob/master...
  - matt4077 8y ago
    archive.org actually has a form for "archive it now", right there on https://archive.org/web/ https://archive.org/web/. They also address using their data in court proceedings in the FAQ. So I think they do have that use case in mind. Of course they'd be stupid to offer any guarantees without payment. That's what their service https://archive-it.org https://archive-it.org is for. Only for organisations, unfortunately. In regard to respecting robots.txt: I would consider any organisation running a bot and not respecting robots.txt as somewhat shady. ignoring it could even have consequences for admissibility in court.
  - pabs3 8y ago
    There are at least 3 locations for on-demand web archiving: https://web.archive.org/save/https://news.ycombinator.com/ https://web.archive.org/save/https://news.ycombinator.com/ https://archive.is/ https://archive.is/ https://webrecorder.io/ https://webrecorder.io/ Probably some of the other sites supported by this extension have on-demand archiving too: https://github.com/dessant/view-page-archive https://github.com/dessant/view-page-archive For archiving on your own computer, this LWN article is pretty interesting: https://lwn.net/Articles/766374/ https://lwn.net/Articles/766374/
    - new299 8y ago
      Thanks, webrecorder.io looks particularly good. I’d also forgotten about archive.is I should use that more.
  - mkj 8y ago
    There's https://tlsnotary.org/ https://tlsnotary.org/ which uses the site's own SSL signature to sign the session. No blockchain required!
- exithrowaway564 8y ago
  Lack of better options, where easy and fast are criteria.
- blotter_paper 8y ago
  You're totally correct. But if you just want to document something for your own future review, screenshots work fine. The thing is, journalism sees itself as being above citations. Journalists are primarily relying on their reputations as journalists, not evidence; the word of a journalist is supposed to be evidence, valid as a citation elsewhere. Journalists don't even record all of their interviews, a lot of them just get jotted down on paper and pieced together later. When they do record interviews, they don't include ways for the public to independently review those recordings to make sure that the written word corresponds 1:1 with what was spoken. You're supposed to trust them, even though we have plenty of examples of journalists who lied or just got sloppy. The profession needs a serious makeover. Historians used to be viewed this way, too. I'm forgetting the details, but there was an historian in the late 1800s who was actually criticised for meticulously citing his sources rather than relying on his reputation as an historian and letting historians of the future decide the merit of his work based on that.
  - stinkytaco 8y ago
    Journalism is also not peer-review. It should never be viewed as such. Anonymous sources, the tendency for people to shy away from being recorded and just the speed of the news preclude some of what you are talking about. That said, I agree that journalists should be held to account. One of the victims of the decline of print media are local news outlets who are checking each other. I've noticed a trend in my own local paper to view themselves as above reproach, the singular check on all that is evil, but not likely to correct their own mistakes. Perhaps some of what you are talking about could check that.
    - blotter_paper 8y ago
      Yeah, I totally understand and agree with your reservations. I do think there should be an outlet for Deep Throat situations (as in Mark Felt, not Linda Lovelace). But if a journalist is claiming that something was said by a named source, there should be evidence of that in the vast majority of situations. If a journalist claims something was posted on the surface web, there should be independent archives that back the claim up.
  - 8y ago
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- ceejayoz 8y ago
  I suspect it's less "this is proof" and more "I won't remember the exact wording if that gets deleted".
- lj3 8y ago
  Everything can be easily faked. So what? Screenshots have the benefit of being easy to capture, store and share. Websites are very unreliable in this regard. They can be edited on the fly, are hard to store and are even easier to fake. Any archive or caching site can be purged of captured content. It's much harder to suppress an image once it's been passed around.
throwaway080383 8y ago
I'm surprised that despite being able to concisely explain why Apple is preferable to Google due to the privacy implications of their respective business models, they're perfectly content with a Google Home in their kitchen! Maybe I'm paranoid, but isn't it obvious how the whole Home Speaker story ends? "We're not spying on you, we're learning your behaviors to offer a better experience!"
- stinkytaco 8y ago
  I don't have any smart speakers in my house, but I can also see how a rational person might accept the trade-off. Aggregate data to support advertising isn't necessarily evil, nor is using that data to improve service. In fact, you could argue that's what a good business should be doing: evaluating customer needs and adjusting to meet them.
  - Apocryphon 8y ago
    Rational people are also emotional, and apathy is the default emotion. Recognizing that many products are privacy invasive becomes the same as realizing that they are produced in ways that harm the environment, or hurt workers. A fact acknowledged but accepted in exchange for the benefits they offer.
    - stinkytaco 8y ago
      If you're equating giving up personal data to harming the environment or workers, I'm afraid I don't agree. One of these actions is under your control, is a trade off we make simply to live in society, and even provides some benefits to users and society. To bank, to get mail, to shop online, to support services we like, to receive communications, etc, etc. Privacy is also something you can control, rather than something that is being perpetrated on other people or places that do not have agency in the matter. There is a place for privacy regulation and education, but it's not the same as environmental or human damage.
      - Apocryphon 8y ago
sometimesage 8y ago
Does anybody else think this article is at least 90% native advertising?
- shaki-dora 8y ago
  Hey, a conspiracy theory. Great start for a new account! What you are misunderstanding: Companies and products are part of what's often called "the real world". As such, journalists are allowed to mention them in articles, because nothing in the real world cannot be the subject of journalism. And in the same way that they sometimes offer positive opinions on politicians, or 200 year old books, or tomorrow's weather, it can happen that a story reflects positively on a product or company. Accusing the NYT of corruption may seem like just a platitude to you, and spreading it as nothing of consequence. Because you're one of the smart people that see through all the propaganda that the mainstream media is brainwashing us with. To a journalist it's kinda like accusing a physician of murder. It also gnaws at a rather important foundation of democracy. That's why you should come with some sort of rational for your theory. As a lesser point: it would be rather stupid if the NYT could be bought by a bunch of startups. Because every single one of the people involved with these transactions would have the power to ruin the Times. It's absurd to believe that they would regularly engage in such practices and manage to keep it secret in the current political climate. It's also absurd that they would risk their existence for whatever meagre sums a few mentions in an article could be worth.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
    > What you are misunderstanding: Companies and products are part of what's often called "the real world". What you are misunderstanding: being patronizing does not make you convincing.
    - matt4077 8y ago
      > What you are misunderstanding: being patronizing does not make you convincing. At least they had arguments... Being patronizing while making good arguments should be just as convincing as good arguments alone. Unless you're letting emotions cloud your judgement.
isoskeles 8y ago
I find it funny that the article opens with how pen and paper are some of his most reliable tools. Then it goes on to talk about several apps and taking screenshots on an iPhone. I want to know how the pen and paper were so notable. What is being done with the trusty pen and paper?! Please! Tell me! I did ctrl-f and found no further mention of pen and paper. I feel duped. I feel like the pen and paper were only mentioned in an effort to define this journalist's personal brand as cool and analog. Let's talk about that pen and paper. Why did you waste my time by mentioning those words for me to read and then dropping the subject entirely?

43 points by molecule 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

> I’m also a prolific screenshotter. The internet is an ephemeral place, so when I see something online for a story, I make sure to capture it immediately. Why are screenshots seen as the gold standard for documenting deleted content? They are easily faked.

new299 8y ago
I’ve searched for web archival services before, but never found anything outside of some expensive legal services. It would be great if there was a service like the waybackmachine but which could be use to archive on demand, and make those archives publicly available. The internet archive is great for this, but they also respect robots.txt and don’t guarantee that they’ll archive pages you request.
- geggam 8y ago
  Just post some terrorist stuff on there and the NSA will do that for you
- Klathmon 8y ago
  I know blockchain is a dirty word around here, but this is absolutely an application that can use something like Bitcoin to store hashes of a site on a specific date, giving you the closest thing you can get to "proof" that the site existed on that date with that specific content. Then you don't need "secure" storage of the actual archives, you can have as many copies as possible with as many people as possible and not worry about someone tampering with the archives.
  - elwell 8y ago
    https://github.com/ramyhardan/proof-of-existence/blob/master/contracts/ProofOfExistence.sol https://github.com/ramyhardan/proof-of-existence/blob/master...
- matt4077 8y ago
  archive.org actually has a form for "archive it now", right there on https://archive.org/web/ https://archive.org/web/. They also address using their data in court proceedings in the FAQ. So I think they do have that use case in mind. Of course they'd be stupid to offer any guarantees without payment. That's what their service https://archive-it.org https://archive-it.org is for. Only for organisations, unfortunately. In regard to respecting robots.txt: I would consider any organisation running a bot and not respecting robots.txt as somewhat shady. ignoring it could even have consequences for admissibility in court.
- pabs3 8y ago
  There are at least 3 locations for on-demand web archiving: https://web.archive.org/save/https://news.ycombinator.com/ https://web.archive.org/save/https://news.ycombinator.com/ https://archive.is/ https://archive.is/ https://webrecorder.io/ https://webrecorder.io/ Probably some of the other sites supported by this extension have on-demand archiving too: https://github.com/dessant/view-page-archive https://github.com/dessant/view-page-archive For archiving on your own computer, this LWN article is pretty interesting: https://lwn.net/Articles/766374/ https://lwn.net/Articles/766374/
  - new299 8y ago
    Thanks, webrecorder.io looks particularly good. I’d also forgotten about archive.is I should use that more.
- mkj 8y ago
  There's https://tlsnotary.org/ https://tlsnotary.org/ which uses the site's own SSL signature to sign the session. No blockchain required!
exithrowaway564 8y ago
Lack of better options, where easy and fast are criteria.
blotter_paper 8y ago
You're totally correct. But if you just want to document something for your own future review, screenshots work fine. The thing is, journalism sees itself as being above citations. Journalists are primarily relying on their reputations as journalists, not evidence; the word of a journalist is supposed to be evidence, valid as a citation elsewhere. Journalists don't even record all of their interviews, a lot of them just get jotted down on paper and pieced together later. When they do record interviews, they don't include ways for the public to independently review those recordings to make sure that the written word corresponds 1:1 with what was spoken. You're supposed to trust them, even though we have plenty of examples of journalists who lied or just got sloppy. The profession needs a serious makeover. Historians used to be viewed this way, too. I'm forgetting the details, but there was an historian in the late 1800s who was actually criticised for meticulously citing his sources rather than relying on his reputation as an historian and letting historians of the future decide the merit of his work based on that.
- stinkytaco 8y ago
  Journalism is also not peer-review. It should never be viewed as such. Anonymous sources, the tendency for people to shy away from being recorded and just the speed of the news preclude some of what you are talking about. That said, I agree that journalists should be held to account. One of the victims of the decline of print media are local news outlets who are checking each other. I've noticed a trend in my own local paper to view themselves as above reproach, the singular check on all that is evil, but not likely to correct their own mistakes. Perhaps some of what you are talking about could check that.
  - blotter_paper 8y ago
    Yeah, I totally understand and agree with your reservations. I do think there should be an outlet for Deep Throat situations (as in Mark Felt, not Linda Lovelace). But if a journalist is claiming that something was said by a named source, there should be evidence of that in the vast majority of situations. If a journalist claims something was posted on the surface web, there should be independent archives that back the claim up.
- 8y ago
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
ceejayoz 8y ago
I suspect it's less "this is proof" and more "I won't remember the exact wording if that gets deleted".
lj3 8y ago
Everything can be easily faked. So what? Screenshots have the benefit of being easy to capture, store and share. Websites are very unreliable in this regard. They can be edited on the fly, are hard to store and are even easier to fake. Any archive or caching site can be purged of captured content. It's much harder to suppress an image once it's been passed around.

throwaway080383 8y ago

I'm surprised that despite being able to concisely explain why Apple is preferable to Google due to the privacy implications of their respective business models, they're perfectly content with a Google Home in their kitchen! Maybe I'm paranoid, but isn't it obvious how the whole Home Speaker story ends? "We're not spying on you, we're learning your behaviors to offer a better experience!"

stinkytaco 8y ago
I don't have any smart speakers in my house, but I can also see how a rational person might accept the trade-off. Aggregate data to support advertising isn't necessarily evil, nor is using that data to improve service. In fact, you could argue that's what a good business should be doing: evaluating customer needs and adjusting to meet them.
- Apocryphon 8y ago
  Rational people are also emotional, and apathy is the default emotion. Recognizing that many products are privacy invasive becomes the same as realizing that they are produced in ways that harm the environment, or hurt workers. A fact acknowledged but accepted in exchange for the benefits they offer.
  - stinkytaco 8y ago
    If you're equating giving up personal data to harming the environment or workers, I'm afraid I don't agree. One of these actions is under your control, is a trade off we make simply to live in society, and even provides some benefits to users and society. To bank, to get mail, to shop online, to support services we like, to receive communications, etc, etc. Privacy is also something you can control, rather than something that is being perpetrated on other people or places that do not have agency in the matter. There is a place for privacy regulation and education, but it's not the same as environmental or human damage.
    - Apocryphon 8y ago

sometimesage 8y ago

Does anybody else think this article is at least 90% native advertising?

shaki-dora 8y ago
Hey, a conspiracy theory. Great start for a new account! What you are misunderstanding: Companies and products are part of what's often called "the real world". As such, journalists are allowed to mention them in articles, because nothing in the real world cannot be the subject of journalism. And in the same way that they sometimes offer positive opinions on politicians, or 200 year old books, or tomorrow's weather, it can happen that a story reflects positively on a product or company. Accusing the NYT of corruption may seem like just a platitude to you, and spreading it as nothing of consequence. Because you're one of the smart people that see through all the propaganda that the mainstream media is brainwashing us with. To a journalist it's kinda like accusing a physician of murder. It also gnaws at a rather important foundation of democracy. That's why you should come with some sort of rational for your theory. As a lesser point: it would be rather stupid if the NYT could be bought by a bunch of startups. Because every single one of the people involved with these transactions would have the power to ruin the Times. It's absurd to believe that they would regularly engage in such practices and manage to keep it secret in the current political climate. It's also absurd that they would risk their existence for whatever meagre sums a few mentions in an article could be worth.
- yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
  > What you are misunderstanding: Companies and products are part of what's often called "the real world". What you are misunderstanding: being patronizing does not make you convincing.
  - matt4077 8y ago
    > What you are misunderstanding: being patronizing does not make you convincing. At least they had arguments... Being patronizing while making good arguments should be just as convincing as good arguments alone. Unless you're letting emotions cloud your judgement.

isoskeles 8y ago

I find it funny that the article opens with how pen and paper are some of his most reliable tools. Then it goes on to talk about several apps and taking screenshots on an iPhone. I want to know how the pen and paper were so notable. What is being done with the trusty pen and paper?! Please! Tell me! I did ctrl-f and found no further mention of pen and paper. I feel duped. I feel like the pen and paper were only mentioned in an effort to define this journalist's personal brand as cool and analog. Let's talk about that pen and paper. Why did you waste my time by mentioning those words for me to read and then dropping the subject entirely?