FBI admits that no useful information found on San Bernadino iPhone
edition.cnn.com
edition.cnn.com
Here is their evidence:
"The phone didn't contain evidence of contacts with other ISIS supporters or the use of encrypted communications during the period the FBI was concerned about."
CNN just wants eyeballs to read their headlines, they make it as clickbaity as possible. What they don't realize is they have to be on the level of Buzzfeed to make that work, and they aren't even close.
If a headline is misleading, you're correct to change it (this is in the HN guidelines), but you need to change it to one that's accurate and neutral. Yours certainly is not neutral, and it doesn't seem to be accurate either (since the absence of something can obviously still be 'useful information'). So what you've done here is out of line.
Submitting a story doesn't give you license to spin it.
I don't feel I was out of line at all.
Instead, either use the original title or (if it is misleading or linkbait) replace it with one that is accurate and neutral. That means as spin-free as you can make it, preferably using representative language from the article itself. It's pretty easy in most cases if you try. Doing this is a valuable service to the community: it presents the story in a way that allows people to receive it as information, not agitation.
Fair comment on neutrality, but your comments on accuracy is what lots of people disagree with. No less than Mike Godwin has commented on that anomaly, off HN. I'll be more careful on neutrality in future.
What would you have used as the title?
Edit: love to know the reasoning of the person following this thread. If you could step out of the shadows and comment, I'd appreciate it.
I have to come to the awkward conclusion that I reacted badly here because I was fairly called on something that broke the rules. I reasoned my way out of my responsibility to be more neutral and in the back of my mind I must have realised what I was doing wasn't the right thing to do. The fact that I felt the need to justify the title choice tends to confirm this :-(
Therefore, I owe dang and I guess ycombinator an apology: first for that last comment where I mischaracterised dang as being threatening, and secondly for the title of this post which was needlessly partisan.
I guess I react badly sometimes to being rebuked. However, that's my issue as in this case the rebuke was fair. I think in this matter my emotions got the better of me and I was in denial - I guess the only good thing about it is that I can recognise the emotion, try to take a step back from myself and then after I realise it's caused by my own behaviour I need to make amends (i.e. I feel sheepish).
So once again, apologies to dang and the wider HN community. I'll try much harder to listen to criticism and I'll ensure this sort of submission doesn't happen again.
Still, the FBI wouldn't be doing its job if it didn't review the evidence. I'm not, however, claiming that Apple should have done what the FBI wanted. I'm just saying that the FBI should have wanted it.
It is like opening Pandora's box and anyone with access to that code/iOS could access anyone's iPhone.
I'm just saying that the FBI would have been remiss to ignore the phone.
In this case the work phone didn't have any evidence on it, and breaking into the phone cause an ethical debate over the right to privacy and encryption.
It is important to know that the FBI has tools made by hackers to break into an iPhone, and Apple stood by their corporate ethics to not create any OS or tools to break into an iPhone. I think this is because Apple cares about their customers and their right to privacy.