SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the move-along-nothing-to-see-here dept.
Lagg writes:
"We're in a climate where it's easy to accuse a company of spying on you by various means with a distinct possibility that you could be right, but sometimes a reality check is needed. A Reddit user recently posted a thread accusing Valve of writing code for VAC that iterates your DNS cache and sends the hashed entries to their server. The proof provided of this was a prettied disassembly (that was not easily reproducible due to how VAC loads symbols) that showed only that VAC was indeed iterating the DNS cache, which any knowledgeable programmer understands is not exactly an uncommon thing to do, as no socket code was to be seen. Today, Gabe Newell responded to these allegations by confirming that no they do not in fact snoop your cache entries.
There are probably a few things to learn from this, including not trusting a screenshot of code that looks complex without actually understanding what it's doing. A lack of any level-headed investigation is a bad idea and it's important to handle these situations before they snowball into a mob (as Redditors are bound to do)."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by isostatic on Tuesday February 18 2014, @09:08AM
(Disclaimer, I work in the "lame stream media")
This is why I get so annoyed by people saying "we don't need the news, we've got twitter"
Now don't get me wrong, news, especially 24 hour news, runs with rubbish too, but there is at least a little bit of fact checking behind it. The news machine does employ knowledgeable, dependable correspondents, who do tend to filter rumour. When I was in the office in Bangkok recently, I heard a lot of stuff coming in about the protests, which was later reported on twitter, but not reported by us. A couple of days later it was proven that the rumour was a load of rubbish.
Breaking news: A greater than B!
Then 12 hours later
Breaking news: A not greater than B!
(Score: 1) by cormacus on Tuesday February 18 2014, @07:51PM
I think the perception that the 24-hour news cycle doesn't in fact do any better fact checking than people microblogging on Twitter is one of the main drivers behind that statement ("I don't need the news, I have Twitter")
(Score: 1) by isostatic on Tuesday February 18 2014, @11:05PM
Sure, there's a perception, but certainly in my organisation it's really not true, and from the limited first hand, and greater second hand, experience it's not true for a lot of the competition. Certainly not foreign news (where I work)