Reporting on tech companies means finding people who don’t want to be found

There is also some interesting circuitry around the mic itself- the keyword activation chip essentially has control over the mics- they buffer input until they hear the codeword ('alexa') and then activate the main circuitry and dump the buffer into it. The upside to this is that software can't turn the mic on by itself- the chip needs to help. This isn't completely perfect though as once the software has been given control it can keep that control forever (with the caveat that lights would be on).

It's possible to use technology to our advantage without having to sacrifice privacy, we just have to demand it (and, as we all should have learned from Therac-25, hardware limits are preferable over software).

also reminds me of a parent tweeting about how her child thinks of Alexa as another person in the house, kids are growing up with every aspect of their life fully integrated with spyware-as-a-service

"We have the brightest minds of today trying to figure out how to get people to click ads on the Internet" https://gizmodo.com/senators-urge-ftc-to-investigate-manipul...

Then you don't need "secure" storage of the actual archives, you can have as many copies as possible with as many people as possible and not worry about someone tampering with the archives.

Of course they'd be stupid to offer any guarantees without payment. That's what their service https://archive-it.org is for. Only for organisations, unfortunately.

In regard to respecting robots.txt: I would consider any organisation running a bot and not respecting robots.txt as somewhat shady. ignoring it could even have consequences for admissibility in court.

https://web.archive.org/save/https://news.ycombinator.com/ https://archive.is/ https://webrecorder.io/

Probably some of the other sites supported by this extension have on-demand archiving too:

https://github.com/dessant/view-page-archive

For archiving on your own computer, this LWN article is pretty interesting:

https://lwn.net/Articles/766374/

That said, I agree that journalists should be held to account. One of the victims of the decline of print media are local news outlets who are checking each other. I've noticed a trend in my own local paper to view themselves as above reproach, the singular check on all that is evil, but not likely to correct their own mistakes. Perhaps some of what you are talking about could check that.

Each professions has the standard it deems optimal within the trade-offs of risks, costs, etc. Those obviously differ: holding journalism to the standards of a criminal trial would essentially make it impossible.

That's especially true if you require to personally inspect all the evidence. Because if you don't trust a journalist, why trust any other person?

Say the story is "Senator used campaign funds for vacation". The reporter sees bank statements to that effect.

Are (photos of) bank statements "evidence"? Because they aren't signed. And even if they were, the photo could easily be faked. You wouldn't even have a specimen to compare signatures. In a trial, they'd get someone from the bank as a witness. But you don't accept just the journalist's assurance that any quote is accurate. So... Should the guy from the bank stop by at your place?

In fact, I can't think of any evidence you can transmit over http that wouldn't just be attacked as "fake" by those motivated to believe that. Case in point: birth certificates.

Meanwhile, there is like no evidence of respected news organisations making up facts. The whole narrative of these supposed failures of "mainstream media" is essentially fiction[0].

Journalism also doesn't work like science publishing in that it relies less on synthesis of previously reported facts. Scientists also don't offer any "evidence" for the meat of their papers, i. e. the stuff that's new. Almost by definition, citations can only cover old information.

So there would be footnotes referencing election results to support the claim that "President Trump" is an accurate representation of the guy's name and title. Plus a lot of footnotes like "as told to me by XX". That wouldn't help anybody. In fact, the source is typically named in every article using interviews, and even for anonymous sources that fact is disclosed. Those references are just embedded in the text, not referenced via footnotes.

So, is this a debate about formatting?

0: The example you're thinking of happened 18 years ago. You should come up with a more recent one, or you're liable to just proof that these events are extremely rare.

On Wikipedia, you can't do that, but that's because everything we do is as anonymous editors with no reputation.

The whole thing runs on trust. It has to bottom out on people making observations in the real world, so betrayal is always possible. Trustless knowledge gathering is a fantasy for crypto-enthusiasts.

What you are misunderstanding: being patronizing does not make you convincing.

Edit: Hold on, I stand corrected. This man has a notepad he keeps in his back pocket. I don't know how I missed that photo, but this reporter is legit. He has a notepad. He probably also has a pen because I see notes written on the notepad.

All is right in the world.