Re: Has anyone really cracked anything recently?

From: Joe Peschel (jpeschel_at_no.spam.org)
Date: 09/25/03 

Date: Thu, 25 Sep 2003 19:03:57 -0000

"Douglas A. Gwyn" <DAGwyn@null.net> wrote in
news:IradnQO_yIB-bPKiU-KYgw@comcast.com:

> Joe Peschel wrote:
>> Paul wrote: "The story about the laptop hard disk full of H-bomb
>> secrets being left behind a Los Alamos xerox machine doesn't make me
>> too optimistic."
>> You took that as an opportunity to heckle the news media, by
>> advising, "don't believe much of what you read" and referring to it
>> as "so-called."
>
> It *is* so called the "news media".

Because you say so? :-)

My turn now!
 
>And their coverage is
> largely driven these days by concern over *entertainment
> value* at the expense of insight and conveying an accurate
> impression of the facts, as has often been remarked (and
> usually deplored) by many people who work in that business.

Quite a few people who work as journalists, myself included, do object to
the disproportionate mix of news and entertainment. I see more of what you
are concerned about, however, in broadcast media and in Usenet than in the
print media.

>
>> Paul doesn't say which report he's referring to, so it's difficult to
>> ascertain much about the original story. But you have, as I've said,
>> blamed the messenger, and you've done so without even knowing which
>> story Paul was talking about.
>
> I'm quite familiar with the story he was referring to,

You can't be quite familiar with the story Paul referred to: he cited
neither the publication, date, and page, nor did he quote the excerpts from
or even the headline of the story.

>as
> well as having inside information about what actually went
> on, which differs from the impression left on Paul and the
> rest of the general public by the so-called "news media".

If you say so, but you weren't the source quoted in the story. Maybe you
should've been quoted, but you obviously weren't.

Sometimes the impression left on the public is the wrong one because the
quoted source, not the messenger, was wrong. We don't know that this is the
case here, but maybe it was, because, as I've said, Paul doesn't cite or
quote article.

Let's pretend we have this headline and this quote from a news story.

"Cryptographer Says Book Cipher Harder Nut Than DES.

"Part five of Simon Singh's cryptanalysis challenge was about breaking a
book code (it turned out to be the hardest of the ten parts,) according to
cryptographer Paul Rubin."

If Paul represents himself as the spokesman for the contest, there is no
way that a journalist would refuse to quote him. There's also very little
chance that the journalist is an expert on this subject, so it's unlikely
that he'd consult another expert.

Who is responsible for the misinformation: the source or the messenger?

I've had a few people complain about my stories, too. Like you, they felt
the public was being misinformed. After one of my stories was published,
one software vendor complained that I failed to quote his security expert
about the strength of his encryption program. I felt the quote was
superfluous because my other source cracked the encryption. The guy wanted
a retraction. He didn't get it.

> This kind of thing happens over and over, in various forms;
> The splashy coverage that catches the public eye tends to
> leave a public impression of the events that is misleading
> and/or inaccurate, with any corrections (when they occur at
> all, which is rare for television media) buried in tiny
> items deep within the newspaper with nothing like the
> fanfare of the original story. Examples are all over the
> place; indeed in practically every one of the hundreds of
> cases where I've had in-depth information about the events
> being reported, such distortion of the truth has occurred.

See my example above. (And Paul -- sorry guy. it was the first example that
came to me...)

J 

-- 
__________________________________________
When will Bush come to his senses?
Joe Peschel 
D.O.E. SysWorks                                 
http://members.aol.com/jpeschel/index.htm
__________________________________________

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