Nice. Love malicious compliance.
Some Epstein file redactions are being undone
551–560 of 810 posts
Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone
#552Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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.
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
> You could easily replace them with an LLM if that were the case.
We're already seeing this happen.
Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone
#553Earlier quoted context omitted.
You’re absolutely correct but I think your comment also highlights something important: we don’t have a good word to represent what it is Unfortunately “hack” became a catch all word long ago. Just look at “life hacks”.
They failed to redact data. That's it. People just read the files afterwards, only formatting was wierd.
I think that doesn’t do the scenario justice. They tried to redact and did so in a way that looks visibly redacted (in screenshots many have seen) but can be uncovered.
If you say “they failed to redact data” to a layperson looking at a visibly redacted document they’re going to be confused.
Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone
#554Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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 edi…
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
Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone
#555I wonder if it's purposeful misdirection
I don't think so.
They had 30 days to process 10s of thousands of documents. The rumors floating around is they had to pull in people from other departments to work on the task.
It's pretty plausible that someone thought a black highlighter was good enough for redaction.
Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone
#556Earlier quoted context omitted.
The pendulum swings. It always does. And all the powers SCOTUS gave the executive branch will eventually be in the hands of the Loyal Opposition. If it swings as far back you might even see universal health care, sane gun laws, fair wages, campaign finance reform, reproductive freedom, science based policy making, reigning in billionaires, etc.
You act like Trump’s policies don’t have broad support with a majority of voters.
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Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone
#557Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Back when LLM chatbots were new and shiny, I was comparing the failure modes to journalism by way of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. Sure, deep investigative jounalism with real skill and effort behind it is a thing; but it is an expensive thing, and opinion pieces disguised as jounalism are much cheaper, as is reporting on other people's reports.
At the end of the day, we the audience reward the behavior unfortunately
Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone
#558Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes they may get fired, but it will be difficult to prove intent and very easy to claim incompetence. So I don’t think there will be jail time if that’s what you’re referring to.
The mal-redacted file actually points to a crime itself of redacting things it shouldn't have.
Or, if there is indeed an ongoing investigation on those two, it could be leaking that fact, right?
Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone
#559Earlier quoted context omitted.
You literally just used NATO for a grouping that does not include the US.
Can you rephrase what I said without "literally using NATO for a grouping that does not include the US"? I didn't even mention the US lol, I think you're paranoid but please, correct me ... I mean, I didn't phrase it as Trump being a part of NATO, but he's not actually a country.
Oops I guess if this is as much sense as you can make then there wasn't much point in my trying to parse your comment in the first place.
Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone
#560Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".
> 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.
So I don't know your specialty, but I'm going to make a wild guess and assume that it isn't stage magic.
State magicians have a whole range of different ways to make something seem like it's levitating, or to apparently get a signed playing card inside a fruit that they get someone in the audience to cut open to reveal.
To a magician, these things are cute, not mysterious.
To the general public… a significant percentage have problems with paged results and scroll bars. Including my dad, who developed military IFF simulation software before he retired, and then spent several years of retirement using Google before realising it gave more than three results at a time.
Would he, with experience working with the military, have made this soecific mistake about redaction? Perhaps, perhaps not, but the level of ignorance was well within his range. (I'm not better, it's just my ignorance is e.g. setting fire to resistors).
*Our* "common sense" isn't universal.