Comment by pwg
2 months ago
The journalist writing the story has the same level of technical knowledge about how to "redact" properly in the digital realm as the individuals doing the redaction. To the journalist, with zero knowledge of the technical aspects, viewing the "redacted" document, it appears to be "redacted", so when someone "unredacts" it, the action of revealing the otherwise hidden material appears to be "magical" to them (in the vein of the Arthur C Clarke quote of: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic").
To the journalist, it looks like "hackers at work" because the result looks like magic. Therefore their editor attaching "hacks" to the title for additional clickbait as well.
To us technical people, who understand the concept of layers in digital editing, it is no big deal at all (and is not surprising that some percentage of the PDF's have been processed this way).
I would consider it gross negligence on the journalists part to not know the technical details here.
It’s really not that hard; as someone else on this thread pointed out even my grandma knows this…
You can find out the technical details in one quick search.
How someone like this gets a paying job as a journalist is beyond me.
>How someone like this gets a paying job as a journalist is beyond me.
You seem highly confused on what a journalists job is in this era. Very few publishers are about correctness. It's about speed of getting the article out and getting as many eyeballs as possible to look at the ads in the article.
Or as the saying goes, A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.
But there is a more-powerful combo we’re beginning to see: journalists can take a story and prompt their way into a list of missing perspectives. The Lindbergh baby, for example.
You could easily replace them with an LLM if that were the case.
Although I don’t completely disagree with your cynical take I don’t think that’s actually the case for most of the Guardians journalists, they do a lot of quality reporting too
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Gell Mann Amnesia ftw
My wife was a reporter with a top tier news agency in DC and I was shocked how they divvied up topics.
At best, it was "you're good with computers, go report on this hearing on cybersecurity" but more commonly, it was "who has this morning open? You do? Great. Go cover this 9am on the Israel-Palestine negotiations and what the implications are. We'll do a segment in the 11am hour."
It's important to understand who becomes a journalist in this age.
It's people who are very good with words, and at talking to anyone and everyone about anything, both is a friendly and confrontation way.
They also have almost no understanding of math, science or technology. If they did, they'd get better paying jobs.
Journalism used to be a well paid prestigious career that attracted brilliant people. There is not enough money in what's left of that industry to do that anymore.
I agree they have no understanding of math, science or technology. But I disagree with your assessment of motivations to get "better paying jobs", most people who went into journalism I knew were in brownstones right out of college. They didn't need the money, they inherited it, it was the lifestyle they were after.. that's why we get the journalism we do..
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I think you have the source of the problem wrong. It's just rich kids who don't actually need the salary, and want to align to a point of view that gets them a contract to write a book, so they get invited to the right parties. They don't know anything, or care about anything.
Journalism school is "eye-wateringly" expensive:
> J-school attendees might get a benefit from their journalism degree, but it comes at an eye-watering cost. The price tag of the Columbia Journalism School, for instance, is $105,820 for a 10-month program, $147,418 for a 12-month program, or $108,464 per year for a two-year program. That’s a $216,928 graduate degree, on top of all the costs associated with gaining the undergraduate prerequisites. (Columbia, it seems important to say, is also the publisher of Columbia Journalism Review, the publication you’re now reading.)
https://www.cjr.org/special_report/do-we-need-j-schools.php
> It's people who are very good with words,
They are also not good with words.
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I don't think you have an understanding of job specialization.
I know some journalists. They are smart people. However, they are not experts in math, science, or technology. They are experts in journalism. This wasn't any different at any time in the past.
Haha. I was a journalist for many years. I went to UC Berkeley. I likely currently have a far better paying job than you and have invented technical concepts that founded the LLM.
Me thinks the fool speaks of himself.
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>some of the file redaction can be undone with Photoshop techniques, or by simply highlighting text to paste into a word processing file.
That's the first sentence of the article, and that's all there is to it.
Journalists report, they don't analyze.
The error is consumers believing journalist news is anything but uninformed, hot take heresy; spun in the most sensationalistic way.
They are hired to get eyeballs for advertisers. Not to be accurate, thorough truthful, or unbiased.
To us, it's a life skill. To a non-technical person, it's black magic.
Some folks had to be taught on how folder structures work because they grew up with the appliance we called a "phone" as opposed to a real computer that also happened to be known as a "phone".
I can assure you that plenty of people who were using computers before smartphones, and who have used them every day at work for decades, also do not grasp what we could consider the very basics of file management.
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> To us, it's a life skill. To a non-technical person, it's black magic.
I’m sorry, but “this text is black on black background; the actual letters are still there” isn’t “black magic” unless someone is being deliberately obtuse.
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Most journalists are ex. English majors (or some other non-technical degree). I would not expect any (even the supposed tech. journalists) to understand the technology they report upon to the level that us here on HN understand that same technology.
Their job is to write coherent articles that gather views, not truly understand what it is they are writing about. That's why the Gell-Mann Amnesia [1] aspect so often crops up for any technical article (hint, it also crops up for every article, but we don't recognize the mistakes the journalist makes in the articles where we don't have the underlying knowledge to recognize the mistakes).
[1] https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/
I’m my experience most posters on HN are don’t under technology either. So they both don’t understand people or technology putting them two steps behind a journalist.
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It's not a hard technical concept to grasp that placing a stick-it onto some thing doesn't make the thing behind it disappear.
No, it is not. But given the abysmal lack of technical knowledge of the "typical computer user" they don't see the redacted PDF's as "having black stick-it notes stuck on top of the text". They see the PDF as having had a "black marker pen" applied that has obliterated the text from view.
When someone then shows them how to copy/paste out the original text, because the PDF was simply black stick-it notes above the text, it appears to them as if that someone is a magical wizard of infinite intelligence.
This. Similar issue if you introduce someone to how you can "view source" and then edit (your view of) a website. They're like "omg haxors!"
True story: one time I used that technique to ask for a higher credit card limit than the options the website presented. Interestingly enough, they handled it gracefully by sending me a rejection for a higher amount and an acceptance for the maximum offered amount (the one I edited). And I didn't get arrested for hacking!
Using view-source to accomplish something could be considered hacking in the old school MIT sense* of curious exploration of some place or thing for clever purposes.
*: disclaimer, I didn't attend MIT, but did hang out with greybeards on 90s IRC
> "view source" and then edit (your view of) a website.
Yes, but you see it says "view source" not "edit page live". Don't really see why it wouldn't be "omg" for them.
I have helped someone get an executive job at a Fortune 500 company... by teaching them how to use the dev tools and edit the DOM to replace text and images.
They had been asked for an assignment as part of the interview process, where they were supposed to make suggestions regarding the company's offers. They showed up on the (MS teams) interview having revamped what looked like the live website (www. official website was visible in the browser bar).
The interviewers gave them the job pretty much on the spot, but did timidly ask at the end "do you mind putting it back though, for now?", which we still laugh about 5 years later
The journalist is not necessarily responsible for the title. Editors often change those and they don’t need to get the approval of the journalist. The editor knows what they are doing and that it will irk some tech folks.
I seriously doubt the journalist doesn’t understand exactly how this “hack” worked too. Right in the first paragraph, “simply highlighting text to paste into a word processing file.”
A lot of people in the thread here are calling them a non-technical English major who doesn’t understand the technology. Word processors also happen to be the tools of their trade, I am sure they understand features of Word better than most of the computer science majors in this thread…
Agreed - not sure why so many are being so critical here. They probably didn't write the title and for better or worse "hack" has now become a common word casually used by many to mean "workflow trick" or similar.
As far as creating a click bait title, yep, the editor knows what they are doing, and most likely picked the word for the click bait factor.
But I'd also bet the editors technical knowledge of how this "revelation" of the hidden material really works is low enough that it also appears to be magic to them as well. So they likely think it is a 'hack' as well.
> The journalist writing the story has the same level of technical knowledge ...
You are supposing. The article doesn't read like that at all. Your post smells of exceptional tech elitism.
Typical quality of The Guardian unfortunately. Don't read their energy reporting if you're at all literate about any of those topics. Any time they do a story on fusion I just about have an embolism.