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"If you want to try it, be aware that it requires Intel Pentium 166MHz or above." Made me laugh. Fun article, also really love the genre of "bored smart person
by klik99 2y ago
"If you want to try it, be aware that it requires Intel Pentium 166MHz or above."
Made me laugh. Fun article, also really love the genre of "bored smart person goes too deep on something that the end result is obvious by common sense but proving it requires surprising amount of ingenuity and scrappiness"
- er4hn 2y agoDon't forget `I was ready to head over to the Dark Web (amazon.com) and purchase one of the dongles just to dump the contents of the memory chip.`
- fishstock25 2y agoTotally agree. And a great example that truth is complicated, expensive and uncomfortable. It's much easier to postulate an evil nation-state entity with a bad plan (without evidence) than to dig through the thicket of this article. It's much cheaper as well, certainly in terms of time and knowhow. And it's also much more comfortable to claim you're the victim and have uncovered a conspiracy, rather than realize this was just the result of the patchwork typical of engineering. Kudos to the author.
- klik99 2y agoYeah, the insane takes spread faster but it takes more time and resources to look into it than just come to conclusions early. The worst thing is this creates an environment where most people are either completely credulous and buy into everything or completely incredulous and think everything is unfounded. It's just exhausting to have a healthy level of skepticism these days, and maybe 1 out of 1000 times (number source: from thin air) something that sounds insane actually has some truth to it.
- fishstock25 2y agoYeah, for a substantial fraction of people, this case will stick to their minds as "oh the chinese .. again" It's both sad and scary. It was even submitted to HN. Flagged by now, but still. Many people won't have read this follow-up, especially since it doesn't come as a 1-sentence TL;DR..
- dgfitz 2y agoHmm, why is it sad and scary?
- prerok 2y agoNot the OP, but I think I get the "sad and scary" part. It seems as though there is some vilification going on and that's happened before with very sad outcome.
- fishstock25 2y agoIt's sad because the HN crowd is technically maximally (?) literate and should be one of the last communities to even remotely buy the debunked story. It's scary because if even those in the know are not resistant to such BS, who else is going to shield the general public from populism-fueled pushes to anarchy or worse? Detoriation of trust in media is one of the building blocks of that, and if even the experts of subject areas are fooled and/or don't care enough, all hope may be lost. The silver lining though is that the HN submission got pushback in terms of comments and an eventual flagging.
- Cthulhu_ 2y agoTo add, there's a huge politically motivated anti-China movement going on right now, to the point where anything Chinese sounds scary or suspicious. This has been going on for years now, but only came to my awareness with the Huawei scare (as of today, no evidence was found that they did come loaded with backdoors and the like - but do correct me if I'm wrong, this is based on what I remember, not researched facts). I mean I don't trust the Chinese, but neither do I trust the Americans so it's choose your flavour of evil. Anyway that said, I'm sure it's politically and economically motivated, as for decades China has played catch-up in the global economy and they are rapidly overtaking, with financial interests worldwide. The US is trying to slow them down by trying to keep e.g. chip technology out of their hands, but other than that all they can do is to stop Chinese companies from earning money in the US.
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- mschuster91 2y agoThe problem is that good journalism doesn't have funding. Otherwise this shit would never have made it into a newspaper, maybe outside of a really shitty yellow rag.
- DaiPlusPlus 2y ago> The problem is that good journalism doesn't have funding. The BBC and Reuters can be posited as counterexamples to your assertion. They’re good journalists and well-funded (and not primarily by advertising either).
- prerok 2y agoHmm... but do you think that they would produce such an article, funding the research into it? From what I can tell, they would report accurately once these findings were published but would not find a researcher to dig into the claims before publishing that someone (named) said that these chips are at fault.
- mschuster91 2y agoBBC is under constant threat of getting defunded, it's almost a meme at this point, and on top of that is generally under constant attack. Reuters doesn't do much local or regional stuff.
- immibis 2y agoWhich firm's journalist was it that just got arrested at a press conference for asking questions about Israel?
- DaiPlusPlus 2y agoEjected, not arrested: https://news.yahoo.com/news/antony-blinken-kicks-journalist-asking-213345748.html https://news.yahoo.com/news/antony-blinken-kicks-journalist-...
- pwagland 2y agoSadly, this is just another example of "A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth puts on its shoes." That doesn't mean that every sensational thing is a lie, but verifying the truth definitely takes time!
- DSMan195276 2y agoI would also add, it's not _unreasonable_ to be wary of something when a tool like a virus scan pops up a warning. The jargon used to explain what the executable is doing is gibberish to any 'normal' user, there's no way for them to know it's listing stuff you'd more or less expect it to be doing. Of course, there's a bit of a jump from that to making bold claims about what it's doing, but the initial concern was understandable.
- pammf 2y agoTruth lies somewhere in between. It's also a generalization to think everything related to the “evil-nation” postulation is nothing beyond a conspiracy theory. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Edit: quoted evil-nation since it’s a debatable term usually applied to any country not politically or culturally aligned with some intelligence activity presence.
- lazide 2y agoFun considering the history too [https://www.risidata.com/index.php?/Database/Detail/cia-trojan-causes-siberian-gas-pipeline-explosion https://www.risidata.com/index.php?/Database/Detail/cia-troj...]
- fishstock25 2y ago> Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Correct. Not more, not less. Question is what the default assumption is. With enough BS thrown around, the public seems to tend to tilt to "something is fishy" without any (non-debunked) evidence having ever been presented. Doesn't mean it never will be, but until then, a lot of debunked falsehoods shouldn't create more bias than just silence. Sadly, something always sticks.
- lazide 2y agofundamentally, it’s a ‘liberal’ (assume good intent/turn the other cheek) vs ‘conservative’ (cover your ass) approach. In the literal, not political meaning. With enough problems, enough people get burned that of course this is where it goes.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ryukoposting 2y agoIt's fun, but I think this kind of thing is important because it underscores the xenophobia in the original post. A flash chip on a circuit board? Hoo boy, must be Chinese spyware! That isn't to say Chinese spyware isn't a problem. But, if you don't have the baseline technical competence to detect it, it's bad to go running around yelling "CHINA CHINA CHINA!" That's how our politicians pick up a bogus news story and use it as an excuse to enact stupid policies. It's bad for society.
- lazide 2y agoWell, the CIA did it to Russia in the 80’s and blew up a pipeline…. [https://www.risidata.com/index.php?/Database/Detail/cia-trojan-causes-siberian-gas-pipeline-explosion https://www.risidata.com/index.php?/Database/Detail/cia-troj...] Also Stuxnet [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet]