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fleg writes:
"The Guardian is reporting that while the author of The Snowden Files was writing it, paragraphs started self-deleting."
From the article:
By September the book was going well - 30,000 words done. A Christmas deadline loomed. I was writing a chapter on the NSA's close, and largely hidden, relationship with Silicon Valley. I wrote that Snowden's revelations had damaged US tech companies and their bottom line. Something odd happened. The paragraph I had just written began to self-delete. The cursor moved rapidly from the left, gobbling text. I watched my words vanish. When I tried to close my OpenOffice file the keyboard began flashing and bleeping.
[ED Note: Some of author's claims are of course unverifiable, but his insiders view of the early days of the story are interesting even so.]
(Score: 5, Funny) by me on Friday February 21 2014, @10:36AM
Sometimes the keys on my keyboard get stuck when I press them. Could it have happened with his delete key?????????????????
(Score: 5, Funny) by SGT CAPSLOCK on Friday February 21 2014, @11:21AM
I think the TAB key got stuck down. In his brain.
It must've auto-completed a hallucination!
(Score: 2, Funny) by baldrick on Saturday February 22 2014, @07:16AM
that would be the ACID TAB key
... I obey the Laws of Physics
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 21 2014, @11:34AM
nah he wacks off too often and when the shit gets into your keyboard it starts trying to delete whatever bullshit you're trying to write and replace it with midget porn stories
(Score: 4, Interesting) by mrdavis on Friday February 21 2014, @02:38PM
When his computer began to lag because of the constant input from a stuck backspace key, OpenOffice would not close even after repeatedly mashing the keyboard with his fist in frustration. Then for some strange reason the keyboard broke... Or no, it had to be someone at the NSA, instead of just destroying his work and safely removing what they perceived as a threat, hacked his computer with a VNC client to delete things one character at a time.
Based on the stories I've been reading, I think Soylent News pulled over a disproportionate number of the conspiracy crowd. Given the circumstances that's not surprising.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Friday February 21 2014, @04:00PM
From this thread, it looks more like we've pulled in a disproportionate number of the Cold Fjord crowd.
(Score: 1) by velex on Friday February 21 2014, @11:47PM
Maybe, maybe not. I think the thing that set off my bullshit detector was the description of a laptop keyboard "flashing and beeping."
I'm sure a lot of us here have done or do end-user support. You have to really work on your listening skills and imagination, but you also have to be aware that a lot of people primarily use magical thinking (contagious magic/sympathetic magic) when using computers. There's also a good deal of anthropomorphizing and assignment of agency or intention to things that a computer does. There are a lot of end users who are more comfortable assigning intention to the symptoms of a bug rather than formulating a test case. Also, granted, this sounds too much like something out of a movie scene where a hacker is being l337 and writing a Visual Basic GUI to track someone's IP address with 5 monitors that can only display green on black.
So, I suppose the thing I have about the "flashing and beeping" is that it's not a very helpful description of what probably really happened. Were the caps/num/scroll-lock indicators flashing? Is it one of those illuminated keyboards, and was that light flashing? Was nothing flashing and the unexpected beeping merely caused him to imagine it? (Sure, never say and end user is lying, but some end users have a tenuous grasp on reality and overactive imaginations.) Was backspace stuck down, and was the beeping happening because the OS was getting too many keypresses?
I don't think I'd discount that some TLA could have installed spyware (VNC or something more sophisticated), but I think I'd tend to agree with other comments that if a TLA was really interested in removing information from his book, they would have done it in a better way. Perhaps it was intimidation, but I'll just leave this XKCD [xkcd.com] here.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Saturday February 22 2014, @07:59AM
Yeah -- after I read the article and he said that he was working offline, I became quite a bit more skeptical. For this to happen while offline sounds like he forgot about a bluetooth keyboard his cat was sleeping on.
(Score: 2, Funny) by DECbot on Friday February 21 2014, @06:10PM
You know, I think NSA hacked my PC once.... and then I realized that I had rested my coffee cup on the HOME/END/PAGE UP/PAGE DOWN INSERT/DELETE keys and in my fit of terror, knocked the coffee up over, splashing coffee across the entire keyboard. Once dowsed in coffee, it started flashing and my pc beeped continuously until I unplugged it. That coffee saved my ass from the NSA--who bribed the keyboard manufacturers to put back doors in their products. That's why I now use a homemade key-er and I tap out Morris code to a homemade Morris code to ASCII translator I created from an Excel macro.
But I'm starting to think my mouse might be hacked too. It always moves on its own when the subway train passes overhead. That's when it's communicating back to its masters.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2, Interesting) by neagix on Friday February 21 2014, @07:18PM
(Score: 1) by rufty on Friday February 21 2014, @05:25PM
That was my first thought on reading it.
(Score: 1) by edIII on Friday February 21 2014, @09:14PM
That happens a LOT to me. I bet he is using a wireless keyboard.
For some reason it's very easy for the input to slow down by 99% for a second or two, and then all of the sudden start typing out everything stored in the buffer.
On my wireless keyboard it's the E key. It will put out 40 of those bastards in a row sometime.
He mentioned the mouse. I bet he is using Windows. If his system is having problems everything can slow down, but all of those inputs, mouse events, and clicks are stored.
He was just spazzing out on his system, it came back, and started to do *everything* he asked it to do while spazzing out :)
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 21 2014, @11:48PM
Yes. This happened to me right before the fucking NSA broke the cupholder on my laptop. Assholes.