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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: 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.