511–520 of 783 posts
For all the times Hacker News criticizes personal "anecdata", nitpicks the tiniest flaw in methodology, and demands statistical significance for every trivial matter, when it comes to politics they sure are willing to run the gossip mill without an ounce of critical thought.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
AMI picked the wrong person. Jeff, literally, has tons of money, extremely respected in the business world. Forget about the embarrassment, if he secretly capitulates to this, then the real blackmail material would be the capitulation, not the photos. Cause if the owner of Washington Post bowed down to blackmail, every article published in the article will be called into question. And who gives a shit if a billionair…
Looking at descriptions of those photos, I honestly don't understand why it's even such a big deal. And I suspect that it's not nearly as big of a deal to Bezos as the blackmailers thought it would be. Perhaps a little projection at play.
Whatever you think about Jeff, this is the correct way to handle such things. We should all have the same character in such a situation (despite how the situation arose; in this case via an affair). Jeff has MANY other issues of moral disfortitude (we all do to some degree, though not at these scales). However, this particular event is to be applauded and emulated.
Then imagine if the material was about this other woman before he got his divorce.
Then imagine if the material contained actual borderline illegal stuff or something like photos of his nieces on a beach holiday.
He got lucky - many many others would capitulate.
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Nuh-huh. What happens is something approximately like this: Saudi military intelligence puts through a request via appropriate channels to the Five Eyes for a tap on some low-profile woman's phone, claiming it's necessary in pursuit of a counter-terrorism objective. This ends up with GCHQ rather than NSA (NSA spies on Brits, Brits spy on Americans, they work at adjacent desks and share info: this is the traditional w…
No no no. The UK has laws that facilitate surveillance of its citizens. The UK spying on US citizens in the USA is something that I would put into a risk category two (more??) orders of magnitude above brexit or suez. I'm sorry, but it would be lunatic recklessness, and to what advantage?
(You're looking at the present-day for context, but these agencies run on protocols that have built up over many decades, dating back to the Cold War.)
It seems like a lot of people are not reading between the lines of this post. Bezos apparently believes that he was hacked by either the US or Saudi government and that now one or both of those governments are using the National Enquirer as an attack dog against him. That accusation is much bigger than any other piece of this story. EDIT: Here [1] is a reporter from the Washington Post backing that up. The Bezos' cam…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nuh-huh. What happens is something approximately like this: Saudi military intelligence puts through a request via appropriate channels to the Five Eyes for a tap on some low-profile woman's phone, claiming it's necessary in pursuit of a counter-terrorism objective. This ends up with GCHQ rather than NSA (NSA spies on Brits, Brits spy on Americans, they work at adjacent desks and share info: this is the traditional w…
No no no. The UK has laws that facilitate surveillance of its citizens. The UK spying on US citizens in the USA is something that I would put into a risk category two (more??) orders of magnitude above brexit or suez. I'm sorry, but it would be lunatic recklessness, and to what advantage?
"proceed with whatever budget he needed to pursue the facts in this matter" That's the richest guy in the world saying "I don't give a XXXX what it costs, find out who did it." It's also the moment in your life when, if you get the result that guys wants, he'll be glad to write you a cheque for $20,000,000 and will be happy to do so and he won't be interested in why the number is that high.
That gave me chills, and the phrase, If you’re going to shoot the king, you’d better be goddamned sure you’re going to kill him flashed through my mind. Well, they missed spectacularly, and now the man who has a rocket company for fun is clearly pissed.
I mean come on, you are literally taking on the richest person on earth and didn't even evaluate implications!? Just to belabor the point, he's not only the richest person right now, he's among the top 15[1] wealthiest persons of human civilization. And you are threatening him with, what, a bunch of nudish images and adult text messages!?
> and now the man who has a rocket company for fun is clearly pissed.
This had me laughing for a long time!!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_historical_...
Edit: Added wikipedia reference.
What struck me was how brazen AMI was about the blackmail. Then I realized: they were comoftable doing it that way, putting it in writing, because in nearly every other time they've done this, it worked.
I wonder how this appears in their financial filings? I hardly think they have a line item for extortion.