More on Backdooring (or Not) WhatsApp

1. Between this incident, and the recent revelation that a Forbes contributor pretended to author a puff piece pre-written by Jeffrey Epstein's PR team [0], maybe the default reaction to any Forbes contributor piece should be "wait for confirmation from other outlets".

2. I love that Facebook's first official response to Schneier's prior blog post was a HN comment, causing Schneier to remark, "surely there is a more official news channel that Facebook could have chosen to use"

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/21/business/media/jeffrey-ep...

>Blame accepted. But in general, this is the sort of thing we need to watch for

And imo Bruce is still an authority to report it. We all make mistakes. His transparency is breathtakingly refreshing in the era of 'fake news' and talking head blogs.

Bruce unfortunately calls the blog post a "Forbes essay" which it isn't, although it's an easy mistake to make.

The trouble is the Forbes blogging network has almost nothing to do with Forbes proper but the forbes.com domain lends these blogs a credibility they haven't earned.

For the record, any Forbes link that starts with /sites/ should be treated the same as you would any random blog.

Original HN post: 351 upvotes. Retraction: 50 upvotes so far.

Curious to see how this will net out.

At least another person has learned what is a Forbes contributor.

But now people knows that big tech co. are researching it and that it can be done