What he doesn't say is that the keyboard stopped flashing and beeping after he threw a biscuit at his cat.
I saw this a couple days ago. I thought it was rather silly.
Writing The Snowden Files: 'The paragraph began to self-delete'
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Re: Writing The Snowden Files: 'The paragraph began to self-delete'
#12Just because you are paranoid doesn't mean 'they' are not out to get you!!
If the events happened as described 'they' were trying to spook him or 'psych' him out.
Re: Writing The Snowden Files: 'The paragraph began to self-delete'
#13This is a pretty embarrassing piece; it reads like something you'd find on a conspiracy forum. 1. Keyboards don't beep. 2. There are lots of more reasonable explanations for text getting deleted than "state agency wanted to play a juvenile prank on me and be glaringly obvious about it". A stuck key, an intermittent short across some of the leads caused by the coffee he spilled all over his keyboard (conjecture on my…
Windows beeps when you're pressing keys at the same time or just holding them down. I don't know the exact situations but I remember a "hot keys" notification popping up. Let's consider the article is true and words were being deleted as he wrote them. How ridiculous is that? A. disconnect from the internet. B. The whole manuscript could be deleted with a few keystrokes if wanted. Why would someone sit there and dele…
The Windows beep is usually from a speaker connected to your motherboard. There is no speaker located on the majority of keyboards, meaning no beeps.
It's not ridiculous to think words would begin to get deleted, but it is ridiculous to say some government organization would sit there and watch him type to remove some content. Why would any organization spying on him make it so obvious, and pointless. If he wanted to hide it from them he would just go to another computer.
I run into this self'deleting in words once a month. I have no idea how I activate it, but when i type it deletes what's in front of it. It's a frustrating feature that I haven't defeated, but I don't think the government is watching my computer, seeing what I type on Hacker News.
Re: Writing The Snowden Files: 'The paragraph began to self-delete'
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
Windows beeps when you're pressing keys at the same time or just holding them down. I don't know the exact situations but I remember a "hot keys" notification popping up. Let's consider the article is true and words were being deleted as he wrote them. How ridiculous is that? A. disconnect from the internet. B. The whole manuscript could be deleted with a few keystrokes if wanted. Why would someone sit there and dele…
The Windows beep is usually from a speaker connected to your motherboard. There is no speaker located on the majority of keyboards, meaning no beeps. It's not ridiculous to think words would begin to get deleted, but it is ridiculous to say some government organization would sit there and watch him type to remove some content. Why would any organization spying on him make it so obvious, and pointless. If he wanted to…
Pretty sure that's the Insert key that turns on "overtype".
Re: Writing The Snowden Files: 'The paragraph began to self-delete'
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
Windows beeps when you're pressing keys at the same time or just holding them down. I don't know the exact situations but I remember a "hot keys" notification popping up. Let's consider the article is true and words were being deleted as he wrote them. How ridiculous is that? A. disconnect from the internet. B. The whole manuscript could be deleted with a few keystrokes if wanted. Why would someone sit there and dele…
The Windows beep is usually from a speaker connected to your motherboard. There is no speaker located on the majority of keyboards, meaning no beeps. It's not ridiculous to think words would begin to get deleted, but it is ridiculous to say some government organization would sit there and watch him type to remove some content. Why would any organization spying on him make it so obvious, and pointless. If he wanted to…
(I have no idea what your technical expertise is like; please don't take offense to this.)
Have you noticed whether the blinking cursor has changed from a vertical line to a block? If it has (or, maybe, even if it hasn't, depending on OS + other factors), it's possible you've accidentally hit the "Insert" key on your keyboard, which toggles whether text is inserted or overwrites other text.
It's an ancient feature that very few people consciously use any more and still results in the occasional call in to our shop from a bewildered client.
Hitting the "Insert" key again should fix the problem next time.
Re: Writing The Snowden Files: 'The paragraph began to self-delete'
#16This is a pretty embarrassing piece; it reads like something you'd find on a conspiracy forum. 1. Keyboards don't beep. 2. There are lots of more reasonable explanations for text getting deleted than "state agency wanted to play a juvenile prank on me and be glaringly obvious about it". A stuck key, an intermittent short across some of the leads caused by the coffee he spilled all over his keyboard (conjecture on my…
Windows beeps when you're pressing keys at the same time or just holding them down. I don't know the exact situations but I remember a "hot keys" notification popping up. Let's consider the article is true and words were being deleted as he wrote them. How ridiculous is that? A. disconnect from the internet. B. The whole manuscript could be deleted with a few keystrokes if wanted. Why would someone sit there and dele…
True. I was being maybe a little pedantic.
Accidentally toggling Sticky Keys is fairly common, and also causes beeping on keypresses.
Re: Writing The Snowden Files: 'The paragraph began to self-delete'
#17This is a pretty embarrassing piece; it reads like something you'd find on a conspiracy forum. 1. Keyboards don't beep. 2. There are lots of more reasonable explanations for text getting deleted than "state agency wanted to play a juvenile prank on me and be glaringly obvious about it". A stuck key, an intermittent short across some of the leads caused by the coffee he spilled all over his keyboard (conjecture on my…
My keyboard beeps, and because it has cherry mechanical switches, I've had the delete key stick. But what is most common is when I'm using a virtual machine and for what ever reason focus is switches momentarily to the VM and then back out again and the VM saw the key up event but the host OS only saw the key down. And I get a zillion characters. Or more likely everything things 'alt' is down or and arrow key. I have to manually go push the keys to re-sync the host OS to the state of the keyboard. That is really annoying!
Re: Writing The Snowden Files: 'The paragraph began to self-delete'
#18The cursor moved rapidly from the left, gobbling text. I watched my words vanish. When I tried to close my OpenOffice file the keyboard began flashing and bleeping. To me and Occams razor that sounds more like a stuck key than the NSA openly deleting stuff in a manuscript while you're writing it.
More to the point, "keyboards flashing and beeping" is pretty much the polar opposite of what a professional organization like NSA would do. They would shred/unlink the file after its closed so that you'd never be the wiser. But on the other hand, they wouldn't be in this guy's computer anyways because even if NSA were out to oppress him, he's pretty far back at the end of the ol' pri. queue. "Oh, no, not a manuscrip…
It actually sounds a lot more like a CIA intimidation tactic.
Re: Writing The Snowden Files: 'The paragraph began to self-delete'
#19This is a pretty embarrassing piece; it reads like something you'd find on a conspiracy forum. 1. Keyboards don't beep. 2. There are lots of more reasonable explanations for text getting deleted than "state agency wanted to play a juvenile prank on me and be glaringly obvious about it". A stuck key, an intermittent short across some of the leads caused by the coffee he spilled all over his keyboard (conjecture on my…
One the hand, the "self-deletion" seems very fishy, coming from a layperson's assumptions about computers and hacking, so I lean towards innocuous explanations, if not utter bullshit.
But to play devil's advocate, I wouldn't rule out the possibility of a gaslighting-style psychological attack. If the author was deeply infiltrated with the right malware, the keyboard stunt could done, and would achieve one of two things:
1. The writer is so unsettled or terrified that he abandons the project ("the chilling effect").
2. The writer foolishly goes public with the incident, making him look like a liar or a lunatic to the tech crowd, and probably everybody else too.
Food for thought.
(As I think about it, this is also exactly the sort of prank that a 14-year-old with a malware toolkit would find hilarious.)
Re: Writing The Snowden Files: 'The paragraph began to self-delete'
#20Why on earth would a malicious party manually delete characters while the author is watching? If you don't care about being observed - as the author suggests - then in order to destroy his work, you'd just delete the truecrypt partition.