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How to Tell Us a Secret

nytimes.com

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Re: How to Tell Us a Secret

#61

Post by urda »

sbradford26 wrote: post #55
urda wrote: post #45

grep "gpg" - no results grep "pgp" - no results What in the what. Oh come on, how can you go through all this effort writing how share secrets with them, and there's zero mention of an actual public key?

All of the more detailed information is on a tips page that they link to. https://www.nytimes.com/tips

That's good to see they have it then! Shame they don't call it out on the actual article page.

To the user downvoting me: yeah sorry the original comment still stands and is 100% accurate. If you have something meaningful to add to the conversation actually add it.

Re: How to Tell Us a Secret

#62

Post by [deleted] »

YinglingLight wrote: post #36
rock_hard wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have not found this to be true. There is tons of NYT articles that are factually wrong and have never been updated.

Absolutely. What happened to investigative journalism? Shoutouts to https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/ Cut through layers of agenda pushers and give me facts.

[deleted]

Re: How to Tell Us a Secret

#63

Post by ac4tw »

CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #51
ac4tw wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

myth_buster, lisper, & newscracker make interesting points. In researching WhatsApp a while ago, I came across this in a Quora post "But one more point I want to stress here is that, though whatsapp is allowing end to end communication , it does not necessarily mean they can not analyse the encrypted data. in cryptography we call it Searchable Encryption." ( https://www.quora.com/Now-that-WhatsApp-can-no-longer-read-…

You can reverse engineer any Android app in very little time. Professionals use frameworks like Lobotomy, but you can get by with dex2jar and JD-GUI for most of it. It not being open source is a political argument, not a technical one. EDIT: I ended up doing just that. It took roughly 5 minutes (most of that was making sure I had my PATH for Java set up correctly on this machine) to get decompiled Java code ready to…

"It not being open source is a political argument, not a technical one."

If I can compare the open source to the reverse engineered code to see what I'm really using/getting, that seems like a technical advantage. Also, all of the reverse engineered code I've worked with has been difficult and time consuming to digest (missing var names, comments etc); open source gives me a technical advantage in analyzing and understanding the code. Lastly, looking at a companies open source lets me assess their technical sophistication and practices which also seems like a technical advantage.

I haven't spent much time thinking on this subject, but the political aspect seems to be the line of thinking that says: you will engender trust by making a project open source.

Is your reasoning similar?

Also are there good tools for reverse engineering iOS deployments?

Re: How to Tell Us a Secret

#64

Post by aidenn0 »

urda wrote: post #61
sbradford26 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of the more detailed information is on a tips page that they link to. https://www.nytimes.com/tips

That's good to see they have it then! Shame they don't call it out on the actual article page. To the user downvoting me: yeah sorry the original comment still stands and is 100% accurate. If you have something meaningful to add to the conversation actually add it.

They mention it indirectly on the article page, as they do mention encrypted e-mail, and on their tips page, PGP is the only method suggested for encrypted e-mail.

Re: How to Tell Us a Secret

#65

Post by idlewords »

ac4tw wrote: post #43
myth_buster wrote: post #9

WhatsApp, with more than 1.2 billion active users, is one of the easiest ways to send secure information. “With WhatsApp, it’s as simple as sending a text message — but it’s encrypted,” Mr. Dance explained. I'm not a security expert but I think this is not exactly the best practice. This may have been true pre-fb acquisition but there has been changes to how WhatsApp behaves, especially server side storage. Also the…

myth_buster, lisper, & newscracker make interesting points. In researching WhatsApp a while ago, I came across this in a Quora post "But one more point I want to stress here is that, though whatsapp is allowing end to end communication , it does not necessarily mean they can not analyse the encrypted data. in cryptography we call it Searchable Encryption." ( https://www.quora.com/Now-that-WhatsApp-can-no-longer-read-…

Whether or not it's open source is irrelevant to the trust issue. You would still have to look at the binary to check whether its behavior matches that of the putative source code. Either way, you end up examining the behavior of the compiled code.

Re: How to Tell Us a Secret

#66

Post by CiPHPerCoder »

ac4tw wrote: post #63
CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can reverse engineer any Android app in very little time. Professionals use frameworks like Lobotomy, but you can get by with dex2jar and JD-GUI for most of it. It not being open source is a political argument, not a technical one. EDIT: I ended up doing just that. It took roughly 5 minutes (most of that was making sure I had my PATH for Java set up correctly on this machine) to get decompiled Java code ready to…

"It not being open source is a political argument, not a technical one." If I can compare the open source to the reverse engineered code to see what I'm really using/getting, that seems like a technical advantage. Also, all of the reverse engineered code I've worked with has been difficult and time consuming to digest (missing var names, comments etc); open source gives me a technical advantage in analyzing and under…

There is one tangible benefit to open source: reproducible builds. Everything else comes down to personnel, budget, and scheduling.

I'm not an Apple consumer, I don't know anything about iOS in particular.

Re: How to Tell Us a Secret

#67

Post by dredmorbius »

reificator wrote: post #35
myth_buster wrote: post #9

WhatsApp, with more than 1.2 billion active users, is one of the easiest ways to send secure information. “With WhatsApp, it’s as simple as sending a text message — but it’s encrypted,” Mr. Dance explained. I'm not a security expert but I think this is not exactly the best practice. This may have been true pre-fb acquisition but there has been changes to how WhatsApp behaves, especially server side storage. Also the…

Please don't use the code formatting for quotes. It makes them nearly unreadable on mobile.

HN could fix this trivially. It's been requested numerous times. They refuse. For years.

Sigh.

Re: How to Tell Us a Secret

#68

Post by reificator »

dredmorbius wrote: post #67
reificator wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't use the code formatting for quotes. It makes them nearly unreadable on mobile.

HN could fix this trivially. It's been requested numerous times. They refuse. For years. Sigh.

True, it would probably be a small change, and it'd be nice to have code blocks readable on mobile.

However, the generally accepted quote syntax on HN does not use code blocks in the first place.

  > *Quote goes here*

Re: How to Tell Us a Secret

#69

Post by Loughla »

qubex wrote: post #5
code4tee wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s the job of (real) journalists. I would imagine the vast majority of content submitted to the Times via these channels never appears in print because it doesn’t pass scrutiny and/or isn’t relevant.

Somebody illustrious and learned once said something to the effect that “if somebody tells you it's raining outside, and somebody else tells you the sun is shining, your job as a journalist isn't to report that some people say one thing whereas others say something else, your job as a journalist is to go look out the window and report what the weather is actually doing ”. What we have now is (mostly) talk-shows rough…

>What we have now is (mostly) talk-shows roughly passed off as genuine journalism, but really it's pretty obvious that it's the lowest common denominator kind of gossip-spreading.

And the problem is compounded in that the internet, for all of its glories, has also taught folks that their opinions/beliefs/dogma are just as valuable as actual facts.

I don't know what, how, or why. But the only two things different now to, say, the 80's in terms of bullshit journalism is its ability to reach people directly in a 'one-on-one' setting and its ability to be echoed with no challenge in online forums and the like.

Re: How to Tell Us a Secret

#70

Post by shaki-dora »

mdex wrote: post #52
KZeillmann wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you look at 24 hour cable news, I'm sure that's what you see. It's entertainment passed on as journalism. There's still good journalism going on if you know where to look. The New York Times, the Washington Post, for example, are incredibly informative and useful sources for news.

Neither the NYT or Washington Post questioned the Bush admin and intelligence communities claims about why the USA was going to war with Iraq even though it was public knowledge that the 9/11 attackers were all Saudis and it had nothing to do with 9/11. But the media helped them spin the Iraq war as part of the war on terrorism, even though Iraq was not exporting terrorism to the West, not until after they destabiliz…

Your talking point is old enough to have finished high school by now, maybe it’s time to come up with a second example?

And, by the way, the NYT fired the reporter and an editor over that mistake, wrote numerous articles on how it happened, and instituted new rules to prevent similar things happening in the future.

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