Comment by pwg

Comment by pwg 3 hours ago

The journalist writing the story has the same level of technical knowledge about how to "redact" properly in the digital realm as the individuals doing the redaction. To the journalist, with zero knowledge of the technical aspects, viewing the "redacted" document, it appears to be "redacted", so when someone "unredacts" it, the action of revealing the otherwise hidden material appears to be "magical" to them (in the vein of the Arthur C Clarke quote of: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic").

To the journalist, it looks like "hackers at work" because the result looks like magic. Therefore their editor attaching "hacks" to the title for additional clickbait as well.

To us technical people, who understand the concept of layers in digital editing, it is no big deal at all (and is not surprising that some percentage of the PDF's have been processed this way).

sallveburrpi 3 hours ago

I would consider it gross negligence on the journalists part to not know the technical details here.

It’s really not that hard; as someone else on this thread pointed out even my grandma knows this…

You can find out the technical details in one quick search.

How someone like this gets a paying job as a journalist is beyond me.

Reply View 19 replies

pixl97 2 hours ago

>How someone like this gets a paying job as a journalist is beyond me.
You seem highly confused on what a journalists job is in this era. Very few publishers are about correctness. It's about speed of getting the article out and getting as many eyeballs as possible to look at the ads in the article.
Or as the saying goes, A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.

Reply View | 5 replies
- sallveburrpi 2 hours ago
  
  You could easily replace them with an LLM if that were the case.
  Although I don’t completely disagree with your cynical take I don’t think that’s actually the case for most of the Guardians journalists, they do a lot of quality reporting too
  
  Reply View | 4 replies
  
  Cpoll an hour ago
  
  > You could easily replace them with an LLM if that were the case.
  We're already seeing this happen.
  
  Reply View | 0 replies
  
  nickthegreek an hour ago
  
  The journalist should have used the LLM to explain how this wasn’t a hack but a common mistake made by untrained workers.
  
  Reply View | 0 replies
  
  ben_w an hour ago
  
  Back when LLM chatbots were new and shiny, I was comparing the failure modes to journalism by way of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect.
  Sure, deep investigative jounalism with real skill and effort behind it is a thing; but it is an expensive thing, and opinion pieces disguised as jounalism are much cheaper, as is reporting on other people's reports.
  
  Reply View | 1 reply
  
  Forgeties79 an hour ago
  
  At the end of the day, we the audience reward the behavior unfortunately
  
  Reply View | 0 replies
BurningFrog an hour ago

It's important to understand who becomes a journalist in this age.
It's people who are very good with words, and at talking to anyone and everyone about anything, both is a friendly and confrontation way.
They also have almost no understanding of math, science or technology. If they did, they'd get better paying jobs.
Journalism used to be a well paid prestigious career that attracted brilliant people. There is not enough money in what's left of that industry to do that anymore.

Reply View | 3 replies
- Avicebron 29 minutes ago
  
  I agree they have no understanding of math, science or technology. But I disagree with your assessment of motivations to get "better paying jobs", most people who went into journalism I knew were in brownstones right out of college. They didn't need the money, they inherited it, it was the lifestyle they were after.. that's why we get the journalism we do..
  
  Reply View | 0 replies
- tsunamifury 4 minutes ago
  
  Haha. I was a journalist for many years. I went to UC Berkeley. I likely current have a far better paying job than you and have invented technical concepts that founded the LLM.
  Me thinks the fool speaks of himself.
  
  Reply View | 0 replies
- pessimizer 14 minutes ago
  
  I think you have the source of the problem wrong. It's just rich kids who don't actually need the salary, and want to align to a point of view that gets them a contract to write a book, so they get invited to the right parties. They don't know anything, or care about anything.
  Journalism school is "eye-wateringly" expensive:
  > J-school attendees might get a benefit from their journalism degree, but it comes at an eye-watering cost. The price tag of the Columbia Journalism School, for instance, is $105,820 for a 10-month program, $147,418 for a 12-month program, or $108,464 per year for a two-year program. That’s a $216,928 graduate degree, on top of all the costs associated with gaining the undergraduate prerequisites. (Columbia, it seems important to say, is also the publisher of Columbia Journalism Review, the publication you’re now reading.)
  https://www.cjr.org/special_report/do-we-need-j-schools.php
  > It's people who are very good with words,
  They are also not good with words.
  
  Reply View | 0 replies
kiba 2 hours ago

To us, it's a life skill. To a non-technical person, it's black magic.
Some folks had to be taught on how folder structures work because they grew up with the appliance we called a "phone" as opposed to a real computer that also happened to be known as a "phone".

Reply View | 5 replies
- phantasmish 2 hours ago
  
  I can assure you that plenty of people who were using computers before smartphones, and who have used them every day at work for decades, also do not grasp what we could consider the very basics of file management.
  
  Reply View | 0 replies
- p-e-w 2 hours ago
  
  > To us, it's a life skill. To a non-technical person, it's black magic.
  I’m sorry, but “this text is black on black background; the actual letters are still there” isn’t “black magic” unless someone is being deliberately obtuse.
  
  Reply View | 3 replies
  
  tsunamifury a minute ago
  
  Please explain to me, in detail, without saying an LLM how expert manifolds work.
  I’m guessing to you, it is also black magic.
  
  Reply View | 0 replies
  
  ben_w an hour ago
  
  So I don't know your specialty, but I'm going to make a wild guess and assume that it isn't stage magic.
  State magicians have a whole range of different ways to make something seem like it's levitating, or to apparently get a signed playing card inside a fruit that they get someone in the audience to cut open to reveal.
  To a magician, these things are cute, not mysterious.
  To the general public… a significant percentage have problems with paged results and scroll bars. Including my dad, who developed military IFF simulation software before he retired, and then spent several years of retirement using Google before realising it gave more than three results at a time.
  Would he, with experience working with the military, have made this soecific mistake about redaction? Perhaps, perhaps not, but the level of ignorance was well within his range. (I'm not better, it's just my ignorance is e.g. setting fire to resistors).
  *Our* "common sense" isn't universal.
  
  Reply View | 1 reply
  
  p-e-w 18 minutes ago
  
  Your analogy fails because the purpose of stage magic is concealing what’s going on. That’s not what happened here. Someone just made a really stupid mistake that even non-technical folks can accidentally discover.
  There are undoubtedly some people who would be fooled by this, but you don’t have to be technical in order to not be one of them.
  
  Reply View | 0 replies
pwg 2 hours ago

Most journalists are ex. English majors (or some other non-technical degree). I would not expect any (even the supposed tech. journalists) to understand the technology they report upon to the level that us here on HN understand that same technology.
Their job is to write coherent articles that gather views, not truly understand what it is they are writing about. That's why the Gell-Mann Amnesia [1] aspect so often crops up for any technical article (hint, it also crops up for every article, but we don't recognize the mistakes the journalist makes in the articles where we don't have the underlying knowledge to recognize the mistakes).
[1] https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/

Reply View | 0 replies
Fricken 2 hours ago

>some of the file redaction can be undone with Photoshop techniques, or by simply highlighting text to paste into a word processing file.
That's the first sentence of the article, and that's all there is to it.

Reply View | 0 replies
[removed] 2 hours ago

[deleted]

Reply View | 0 replies

seba_dos1 3 hours ago

It's not a hard technical concept to grasp that placing a stick-it onto some thing doesn't make the thing behind it disappear.

Reply View 1 reply

pwg 2 hours ago

No, it is not. But given the abysmal lack of technical knowledge of the "typical computer user" they don't see the redacted PDF's as "having black stick-it notes stuck on top of the text". They see the PDF as having had a "black marker pen" applied that has obliterated the text from view.
When someone then shows them how to copy/paste out the original text, because the PDF was simply black stick-it notes above the text, it appears to them as if that someone is a magical wizard of infinite intelligence.

Reply View | 0 replies

skeltoac 3 hours ago

The journalist is not necessarily responsible for the title. Editors often change those and they don’t need to get the approval of the journalist. The editor knows what they are doing and that it will irk some tech folks.

Reply View 2 replies

streetnoodles 32 minutes ago

I seriously doubt the journalist doesn’t understand exactly how this “hack” worked too. Right in the first paragraph, “simply highlighting text to paste into a word processing file.”
A lot of people in the thread here are calling them a non-technical English major who doesn’t understand the technology. Word processors also happen to be the tools of their trade, I am sure they understand features of Word better than most of the computer science majors in this thread…

Reply View | 0 replies
pwg 2 hours ago

As far as creating a click bait title, yep, the editor knows what they are doing, and most likely picked the word for the click bait factor.
But I'd also bet the editors technical knowledge of how this "revelation" of the hidden material really works is low enough that it also appears to be magic to them as well. So they likely think it is a 'hack' as well.

Reply View | 0 replies

SilasX 2 hours ago

This. Similar issue if you introduce someone to how you can "view source" and then edit (your view of) a website. They're like "omg haxors!"

True story: one time I used that technique to ask for a higher credit card limit than the options the website presented. Interestingly enough, they handled it gracefully by sending me a rejection for a higher amount and an acceptance for the maximum offered amount (the one I edited). And I didn't get arrested for hacking!

Reply View 2 replies

sebastiennight an hour ago

I have helped someone get an executive job at a Fortune 500 company... by teaching them how to use the dev tools and edit the DOM to replace text and images.
They had been asked for an assignment as part of the interview process, where they were supposed to make suggestions regarding the company's offers. They showed up on the (MS teams) interview having revamped what looked like the live website (www. official website was visible in the browser bar).
The interviewers gave them the job pretty much on the spot, but did timidly ask at the end "do you mind putting it back though, for now?", which we still laugh about 5 years later

Reply View | 0 replies
sillyfluke 2 hours ago

> "view source" and then edit (your view of) a website.
Yes, but you see it says "view source" not "edit page live". Don't really see why it wouldn't be "omg" for them.

Reply View | 0 replies

seg_lol 2 hours ago

> The journalist writing the story has the same level of technical knowledge ...

You are supposing. The article doesn't read like that at all. Your post smells of exceptional tech elitism.

Reply View 0 replies