
More on Backdooring (or Not) WhatsApp - Deimorz
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/08/more_on_backdoo.html
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danso
1\. Between this incident, and the recent revelation that a Forbes contributor
pretended to author a puff piece pre-written by Jeffrey Epstein's PR team [0],
maybe the default reaction to any Forbes contributor piece should be "wait for
confirmation from other outlets".

2\. I love that Facebook's first official response to Schneier's prior blog
post was a HN comment, causing Schneier to remark, "surely there is a more
official news channel that Facebook could have chosen to use"

[0] [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/21/business/media/jeffrey-
ep...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/21/business/media/jeffrey-epstein-
media.html)

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nimbius
>Blame accepted. But in general, this is the sort of thing we need to watch
for

And imo Bruce is still an authority to report it. We all make mistakes. His
transparency is breathtakingly refreshing in the era of 'fake news' and
talking head blogs.

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ChrisSD
Bruce unfortunately calls the blog post a "Forbes essay" which it isn't,
although it's an easy mistake to make.

The trouble is the Forbes blogging network has almost nothing to do with
Forbes proper but the forbes.com domain lends these blogs a credibility they
haven't earned.

For the record, any Forbes link that starts with /sites/ should be treated the
same as you would any random blog.

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cm2012
Original HN post: 351 upvotes. Retraction: 50 upvotes so far.

Curious to see how this will net out.

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andrewflnr
46 upvotes in two hours, by my count. Give it some time. :)

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tgsovlerkhgsel
It's already off the front page.

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MikusR
At least another person has learned what is a Forbes contributor.

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andrerm
But now people knows that big tech co. are researching it and that it can be
done

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viraptor
What do you mean by "can be done"? Copying the message to 2 destinations is
always possible. Doing this in the client makes it not break the e2e from
user's point of view. I don't think this required any research.

