Comment by klik99

3 months 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"

30 comments

klik99

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er4hn  3 months ago

Don'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  3 months ago

Totally 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.

  • DSMan195276  3 months ago

    I 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.

  • klik99  3 months ago

    Yeah, 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.

    • pwagland  3 months ago

      Sadly, 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!

    • mschuster91  3 months ago

      The 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.

      5 replies →

    • fishstock25  3 months ago

      Yeah, 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..

      11 replies →

  • pammf  3 months ago

    Truth 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.

ryukoposting  3 months ago

It'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.