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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: 3, Insightful) by MachineShedFred on Friday February 21 2014, @04:13PM
I guess I'd like to know why the NSA would go through all the trouble to delete it letter by letter, instead of just crashing the word processor, and then writing zeros over the file.
Why get rid of a paragraph in RAM when you can blow the whole book off the disk, easier?
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday February 21 2014, @05:04PM
I don't know, but if I were writing a book about the NSA and my computer did that, I'd freak out. I'm not sure everyone would have had the courage to finish the book faced with domething like that.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org