by Mike Masnick
Techdirt. / 2016-11-04 13:40
from the this-fucking-election dept
Franklin Foer is a pretty famous reporter. But this week he totally blew a story that a ton of other media operations had passed on (for good reason), claiming that there was an internet server out there owned by Donald Trump, that was communicating almost exclusively with a server for a Russian bank. It took all of a few minutes to debunk this as technological confusion on the part of Foer, and a whole heck of a lot of confirmation bias between Foer and the security researchers who had concocted this conspiracy theory with data that they're only supposed to be using for malware research. Of course, in this stupid election season where both candidates simply love to fling ridiculous accusations at one another, Hillary Clinton herself tweeted out two separate tweets about the article, and called it "the most direct link yet between Donald Trump and Moscow."
Except, of course, that was bullshit. It was nothing of the sort. It was some confused security researchers, teaming up with a reporter who famously doesn't like the internet or technology, getting a story so ridiculously wrong that it hurts. Some of us kept waiting for Slate to correct or just pull down the story, but they didn't. They put one small update and one small correction that didn't even touch on the core elements of the story that Foer completely flubbed..........
No comments:
Post a Comment