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Comment by ErrantX | Hacker News Reader

The emails don't read 'fake,' writes Henry Blodget

Really. How exactly? Blodget appears to qualify this claim (in the Business Insider article) by basically saying "well, they haven't been proven fake yet, so we are suspicious that means they are real".

Ahem.

To me (bearing in mind I'm theoretically supposed to be good at this stuff :D) they look like they are probably faked. The language similarities between the two examples are extremely telling; for example, the odd punctuation (or lack of) visible in both emails strikes me as identical.

I think "suspicious until proven real" is the right approach here.

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From the business insider article "[if they were fake] we imagine DLA Piper's investigators would already have exposed it"

I agree w/Biz Insider - A big tech law firm that is almost certainly working on contingency rather than billing $500/hr is a fair indication that there's some meat to this case.

Yes... but still sceptical. I'd like to know what due diligence was done, and by whom. And exactly what they did (i.e. to the computers, these emails etc.).

It would certainly be possible to fool someone that such emails were legit depending on what sort of verification job they did.

hardrive data and forensic analysis from this time period exist as part of the Winklevoss lawsuit.

Are these emails from those HDD's?

If not, where are they from?

Have they been subjected to forensic investigation?

Has the source been substantiated?

Was the due diligence done on these emails, specifically?

I'm a cynic about such things though :)

Come to think of it this way. If there is even a 10% chance that this is true and the settlement would be at least in the range of $200M to $1B (wild guess), and the lawyer's fee is 30%, that's an expected payoff of $60M to $300M. Nothing to sneeze at.

Even if they lose, think about it, DLA probably already have some spin about how they are just being "professional" about due diligence and doing the best they could for their client. No loss in reputation.

I disagree. If these are proved to be fake, then DLA will have this reputation of being ambulance-chasers. It would definitely hurt their reputation.

Plus, the legal costs of pursuing a case like this is likely to be extremely high. If the evidence is so weak to be thrown out even before it comes to court, then I don't think they would pursue it.

I disagree.

The emails from Ceglia are laden with a bunch of grammatical and spelling errors. While the supposed emails from Zuck sound more polished, robotic and have neither grammatical nor spelling errors.

The tone of the two are very different.

Exactly what I was thinking - that to have been fake, he maintained character of MZ quite well. Further, I would doubt that he would have known exactly the whereabouts of MZ during that period. So to be able to know and make claims as to when he was where, refer to the other people and make up stories about wanting to drop the site, take down the server and the fact that his parents could cover his college, all while in character is quite an accomplishment.

BTW, I wrote this in Zuckerberg's voice as portrayed by paul ceglia via DLA Piper dispositions.

There are some missing comma commonalities between the two that I find compelling.

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