These kind of stories are useful to understand to what extent the media has turned into an echo chamber. Everybody has to have (or comment on) the same stories than everybody else has, so fast copying (with or without attribution) has become a de-facto practice in every news outlet out there.

Good for Motherboard to wait and check. Unfortunately this means we will see this article now in all the outlets that published the previous one with a hand-washing disclaimer ("remember that article SOMEONE ELSE wrote that we talked you about last week, well...")