It'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.
In the absence of further information, I would totally choose to believe the story.
Corporations cannot be trusted. Proprietary software is bad enough but proprietary drivers is on a whole new level. You really have no idea what those things are doing unless you reverse engineer them.
Here are example of corporations essentially pwning your computer with their "justified and trustworthy" software:
The driver literally provided privilege escalation as a service for any user space executable.
As far as I'm concerned anyone who trusts these corporations with kernel level access to their computers is out of their minds. I don't trust firmware but at least it's contained in some isolated device.
To 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.
Not 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.
It'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.
In the absence of further information, I would totally choose to believe the story.
Corporations cannot be trusted. Proprietary software is bad enough but proprietary drivers is on a whole new level. You really have no idea what those things are doing unless you reverse engineer them.
Here are example of corporations essentially pwning your computer with their "justified and trustworthy" software:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/fs-labs-flight-simulator-pas...
Shipped a browser stealer to users and exfiltrated on an unencrypted channel the usernames and passwords of users they deemed to be "pirates".
https://old.reddit.com/r/Asmongold/comments/1cibw9r/valorant...
https://www.unknowncheats.me/forum/anti-cheat-bypass/634974-...
Screenshots your computer screen and exfiltrates the picture to their servers.
https://www.theregister.com/2016/09/23/capcom_street_fighter...
https://twitter.com/TheWack0lian/status/779397840762245124
https://fuzzysecurity.com/tutorials/28.html
https://github.com/FuzzySecurity/Capcom-Rootkit
The driver literally provided privilege escalation as a service for any user space executable.
As far as I'm concerned anyone who trusts these corporations with kernel level access to their computers is out of their minds. I don't trust firmware but at least it's contained in some isolated device.
To 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.
Not 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.