Snowden: NSA just lost control of its Top Secret arsenal of digital weapons

Post by doktrin » Sat, Apr 08, 2017, 10:08 PM UTC

atemerev wrote: post #103

benwilber0 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the author seems to be well versed in the memes of the US political discourse that's not exactly hard for anyone that payed even a little attention during the very controversial US political season in 2016. Same with Brexit. The terminologies and crux issues have been widely debated on the social web. I would say it has actually been very difficult to escape

Right. However, things like "caucus" and "SCOTUS" are really unlikely to be written by a Russian, on any English knowledge level. We do make mistakes, but our mistakes are different. In this text, there are too few common mistakes, and too many strange things.

Post by gbuk2013 » Sat, Apr 08, 2017, 10:10 PM UTC

atemerev wrote: post #94

throwaway71958 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, there's no Russian first-language bias in that text for sure. Another argument in favor of the opinion that this was written by an American: the author seems to be well versed in the memes of the US political discourse. Someone from outside the US is unlikely to even know or care about Trump's "movement", or who "Bannon" is, or "drain the swamp", or "white privilege" etc. They're also unlikely to abbreviate "Ne…

Yes, exactly. While those are still somewhat plausible (I am Russian, and I might have occasionally used all of these ironically), it was "POTUS" and "SCOTUS" that made me 99% sure that this text was written by an American (or at least a US insider). You guys love your acronyms.

Post by PhasmaFelis » Sat, Apr 08, 2017, 10:13 PM UTC

cyphunk wrote: post #110

A good time to remember the official US Intelligence Community statement and policy/lie on 0days, as given post-heartbleed: When Federal agencies discover a new vulnerability in commercial and open source software – a so-called “Zero day” vulnerability because the developers of the vulnerable software have had zero days to fix it – it is in the national interest to responsibly disclose the vulnerability rather than t…

Post by hnaparst » Sat, Apr 08, 2017, 10:16 PM UTC

throwaway71958 wrote: post #40

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #26

It's pretty fascinating to read the Shadow Broker's posts. They have to write something, since they can't just say "I work for Russia and we're reminding America that they're not invulnerable." So they have to come up with all sorts of contrived reasons about why they're doing this, complete with broken english to fool stylometry detection that walks the fine line between being believable and preposterous. Someone sp…

As a Russian myself, I can tell you with certainty that there are mistakes in that text that a Russian ESL speaker would never make, and verb tenses are a bit too good for an unskilled speaker. Due to the combination of these two factors, I bet this was written by a native English speaker who thinks he/she knows the mistakes a Russian would make. They're wrong.

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Apr 08, 2017, 10:21 PM UTC

diminoten wrote: post #120

throwaway71958 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To my ear, this obfuscation sounds Middle Eastern, due to the frequent use of "-ing" in verbs whether it belongs there or not. I know an Iranian guy who does this a lot.

The whole point is to feed it through translation services dozens of times until the meaning remains but the actual word selection is super poor and completely unidentifiable. It's weird to me that you're trying to push this to blame another group so quickly, especially with an 8 day old account.