Don't believe anything from Assange until it's confirmed by the tech companies themselves. Ask the security teams at each of these companies if they received any information from Wikileaks. From the people I know at the affected companies, no one has heard anything yet. Assange should not get the benefit of our trust.
Please make a list of firms which have provided these comments denying that Wikileaks has provided them with information while claiming to have done so. This way others are able to confirm your comment. Otherwise it's really hard to take your comment seriously.
I would ask the same in the opposite direction. Please make a list of companies that have positively confirmed they're receiving help from Assange. So far, there is no public evidence beyond a tweet from Wikileaks.
I know it's not normally a good idea to comment about voting and comment position, but there are a lot of people talking about this issue on HN and this comment is one of the few written by someone directly engaged with these issues. If Dan says he hasn't heard anything from any security team he's familiar with, that's not dispositive, but given how connected Dan is, it's certainly a real data point.
I say this because it would make sense to vote a comment like this down if it was just a random opinion. I agree: "don't trust Assange" is kind of a banal sentiment (I share it, but I wouldn't claim it was interesting enough to showcase). But that's not all Dan is saying.
(I haven't heard anything either but, I mean, I've only known about this for about 3 minutes now).
Very few people at these companies would have any idea about the vulnerabilities and even less would know where the reports came from. Big tech companies realize that they employee a lot of people and heavily restrict who can know about the reported vulnerabilities,me specially before they're patched. To think that those "privileged" people would tell you about it is asinine, especially regarding this very high profile event.
"Companies to get" implies future tense, not past. Thus it makes sense the companies have not received them yet. But I agree that confirmation from the companies once they receive would be very nice.
"Assange" the person may not be trustworthy, but Wikileaks the organization he created is, so far, beyond reproach. They have never released false data.
Yet every time there's a significant release, politics-as-team-sport morons conclude that since their team has been shown in a bad light, it's all a pack of lies. This is how the media can lead us around by the noses: our memories rarely span the last week.
You can mislead and shape narrative with editorialized releases. It's the goal of most propaganda efforts to only use true statements.
I find it troubling that people conclude they're "beyond reproach" just because the facts are true.
That doesn't make them non-biased, mean they're not intending to distract or mislead, say anything about their framing, analysis, or editorial content, etc.
Like here: a suspiciously timed leak of sensitive US documents which largely seem to be intended to scare and distract, not show legitimate wrong-doing.
Misleading implies falsehood of some sort, but they're releasing the actual paperwork absent anything other than an introductory statement about the collection of as a whole, which does not equate to "framing, analysis, or editorial content" in my mind.
Negligence counts as wrong-doing to me. The leaks prove that the CIA has lost control of their malware cache. And on the positive side, it gives the affected parties the means to patch their code.
'not releasing false data' doesn't make you beyond reproach. That's like saying some doxxer is beyond reproach because they never got someone's address wrong.
Apparently "beyond reproach" was the wrong wording above, but now I'm unable to edit it.
That said, given how often "trustworthiness" is used as a mental shortcut for "believing anything they publish", it's still a knee-jerk worth fighting against. None of Wikileaks' released documents in their history have proven to be false, and so they are still reliable as a source.
No argument there. But the response is typically not to what they publish, it's to the combination of the data and their added spin. It's not 'video from an already widely reported incident' it's 'Collateral murder'. And onwards.
