Comment by 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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
> 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).
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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..
Hmm, why is it sad and scary?
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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.
> 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.
fundamentally, 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.
Fun considering the history too [https://www.risidata.com/index.php?/Database/Detail/cia-troj...]