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What happens when the NYT and New Yorker make mistakes

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Re: What happens when the NYT and New Yorker make mistakes

#71

Post by rst »

ViViDboarder wrote: post #58
denimnerd42 wrote: post #4

I wish the NYT would clarify or retract this piece/headline https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/06/us/politics/russia-cyber-... > Widely Used Software Company May Be Entry Point for Huge U.S. Hacking > Russian hackers may have piggybacked on a tool developed by JetBrains, which is based in the Czech Republic, to gain access to federal government and private sector systems in the United States. My company has banned Jetbr…

Out of curiosity, what would you want to see clarified? They said that it “may” be an entry point for the SW hack and, according to some National Security folks, it is being investigated. Is there reason to believe this is incorrect in some way? It may be premature and amount to nothing if Team City had nothing to do with the breach, but it doesn’t appear to be misleading or false. If it was, I’d imagine JetBrains wo…

The weasel-wording still left most readers with a clear impression that flaws in JetBrains software were directly implicated in the hack, and many US companies proceeded on that basis.

But it wasn't -- the attackers had reconfigured the build servers to add malicious code to product builds, but their malware was targeting MSBUILD.EXE processes on startup, and would have worked just the same if SolarWinds wasn't using JetBrains at all, and those processes were started instead by Jenkins, CircleCI, or a human typing at a command line. Here's a technical writeup:

https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/sunspot-malware-technical-a...

As to the lawsuit: JetBrains is not based in the US; a lawsuit would probably take years to reach resolution, and be a massive, expensive distraction.

Re: What happens when the NYT and New Yorker make mistakes

#73

Post by john_moscow »

>Most educated people believe that premier news outlets are inherently trustworthy.

The switch from printed to online distribution changed the game completely.

If you are selling printed copies, you are physically limited in how much text you can cram into a single issue. So, publishers (in non-yellow segments) compete on the ability to create well-researched informative content that will be relevant to a large group of readers. You want your readers to trust you as a reputable source, so they will keep buying your issues.

With digital ad-sponsored distribution the competition is about churning out as much low-quality clickbait as possible. If you spend time researching the topic and validating your sources, while your competitor hires 5 fresh graduates to write 5 slightly different nonsensical articles on the same topic, you will quickly be out of business. You don't care that most of your readers will forget what they read in less than an hour. You don't care that the most clickbaity articles end up being the most divisive. You are now competing for 30 seconds of attention from 10 million of readers, and that's the only way to win that competition.

Re: What happens when the NYT and New Yorker make mistakes

#74

Post by 38491239821398 »

notimetorelax wrote: post #36
whoisstan wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly I just had an unrelated discussion on goodreads about that. The first mentioned author of the NYT article is supposedly a cybersecurity expert. The article lacked any evidence and called the company russian and obscure, they edited that but it’s still on archive.org https://web.archive.org/web/20210106195835/https://www.nytim... I left a goodreads comment on the NYT authors latest cybersecurity book cal…

This makes me wonder, 3 branches of government exist to balance each other out. Journalism stands on its own, what’s the counter balance to journalism?

Theoretically, the judicial branch, via defamation law.

Re: What happens when the NYT and New Yorker make mistakes

#75

Post by jrochkind1 »

denimnerd42 wrote: post #4

I wish the NYT would clarify or retract this piece/headline https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/06/us/politics/russia-cyber-... > Widely Used Software Company May Be Entry Point for Huge U.S. Hacking > Russian hackers may have piggybacked on a tool developed by JetBrains, which is based in the Czech Republic, to gain access to federal government and private sector systems in the United States. My company has banned Jetbr…

I remember that one. They did change the headline in fact. The original version erroneously said

    Russian Software Company May Be Entry Point for Huge U.S. Hack
They changed "Russian" to "Widely Used"... Oddly the version the wayback machine caches has "Russian" in the headline as well as "based in the Czech Republic" in the first sentence.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210106195835/https://www.nytim...

It is clearly an alarmist "yellow journalism" kind of article, I agree. The headline swap is a bit revealing; they never would have framed the article this way in a similar situation for a U.S. company, even if "may be entry point for huge hack" would be just as accurate.

I'm not sure there is anything technically incorrect in the current version of it though.

Also holy cow is Internet Archive doing god's work, I'm gonna go send em some money right now.

Re: What happens when the NYT and New Yorker make mistakes

#76

Post by rst »

cyberlurker wrote: post #65
denimnerd42 wrote: post #4

I wish the NYT would clarify or retract this piece/headline https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/06/us/politics/russia-cyber-... > Widely Used Software Company May Be Entry Point for Huge U.S. Hacking > Russian hackers may have piggybacked on a tool developed by JetBrains, which is based in the Czech Republic, to gain access to federal government and private sector systems in the United States. My company has banned Jetbr…

I have a similar experience, where Jetbrains is effectively banned. Do you have any updated source that I could circulate to clear their name?

Writeup of the actual attack malware running on the build servers:

https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/sunspot-malware-technical-a...

It attacked MSBUILD.EXE processes on startup, and it didn't matter if they were started by TeamCity or by a homebrew script in Powershell.

Re: What happens when the NYT and New Yorker make mistakes

#77

Post by dhbanes »

underseacables wrote: post #19

“ Most educated people believe that premier news outlets are inherently trustworthy.” Let’s stop right there. I think the last 8 years have shown the media to have lost significant amounts of public trust. I would say that most educated people inherently believe that the media should not automatically receive benefit of the doubt any longer.

8 years? I’m old enough to remember Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

Re: What happens when the NYT and New Yorker make mistakes

#78

Post by Pils »

branweb wrote: post #44
underseacables wrote: post #19

“ Most educated people believe that premier news outlets are inherently trustworthy.” Let’s stop right there. I think the last 8 years have shown the media to have lost significant amounts of public trust. I would say that most educated people inherently believe that the media should not automatically receive benefit of the doubt any longer.

yeah it's a questionable claim for sure. This was a widely cited poll that asserted for the first time ever, the majority of Americans mistrust the mainstream media: https://www.axios.com/media-trust-crisis-2bf0ec1c-00c0-4901-... You'll note that trust varies widely by political party, with 18% of Republicans trusting the media vs 57% of Democrats. So the post in the op seems to equate "educated" with "democrat" perh…

> This was a widely cited poll that asserted for the first time ever, the majority of Americans mistrust the mainstream media

A poll released by the largest PR firm in the world[0], famous for their work with Walmart, GEO Group, Keystone XL, etc.

Why would the creators of "Working Families for Walmart" ever try to manufacture consent? One wonders.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edelman_(firm)

Re: What happens when the NYT and New Yorker make mistakes

#79

Post by aksss »

branweb wrote: post #44
underseacables wrote: post #19

“ Most educated people believe that premier news outlets are inherently trustworthy.” Let’s stop right there. I think the last 8 years have shown the media to have lost significant amounts of public trust. I would say that most educated people inherently believe that the media should not automatically receive benefit of the doubt any longer.

yeah it's a questionable claim for sure. This was a widely cited poll that asserted for the first time ever, the majority of Americans mistrust the mainstream media: https://www.axios.com/media-trust-crisis-2bf0ec1c-00c0-4901-... You'll note that trust varies widely by political party, with 18% of Republicans trusting the media vs 57% of Democrats. So the post in the op seems to equate "educated" with "democrat" perh…

It surprised you that MSNBC, NYT, and NPR have primarily left-leaning audiences? Their coverage leans left like Fox News leans right, particularly MSNBC. If you asked the surveyed Republicans how much they trust Fox News specifically, I’m sure the stats would be a mirror image. Similarly, democrats trust a news industry which, outlet-for-outlet, is more aligned with what they want to hear. After all, it’s never “our” news we mistrust, it’s the other guys!

Truthfully, I think the smart folks on both sides of the aisle know the news media is a for-profit business whose interests are tangential to telling the truth.

Re: What happens when the NYT and New Yorker make mistakes

#80

Post by jonnyone »

tehwebguy wrote: post #29

Headline, abstract and URL edits to NYT are tracked by @nyt_diff on Twitter, it can be very interesting to see: https://twitter.com/nyt_diff Not sure if they only catch front page article changes or what. Newspaper article content is a big game that’s worth tracking, but what’s more difficult (probably nearly impossible right now) is local television news. Tons of news is pushed through to a wide audience and then it…

That looks like a great follow, thanks.

Speaking of Twitter, their "trending" section introduces yet another level of possible editorializing/bias. They have started to try and summarize trending topics in a digestible way, but this introduces the perceived authority of their interpretation. I haven't seen anything particularly egregious on their part, but it's definitely something to be aware of.

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