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Comment by ffpip | Hacker News Reader

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ffpip·

BBC article states "BBC has contacted Cellebrite and Signal for comment"

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55412230

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The Signal blog post says from the beginning that:

> Since we weren’t actually given the opportunity to comment in that story

So it may just mean they were not given enough time to respond before publication, or even that they were contacted post-publication. In the race to front page "breaking news" the responses are expected to be published as updates to the story.

Yeah, all that is needed is to send a quick email to a company, then publish. There are no standards for how long one has to wait.

I imagine this is quite common behavior with journalist when they want "breaking news"

I've been on the receiving end of these calls. "This is so and so reporter from X News and we're running a story about X. Please call us back before 2pm so we can get a response."

It's 1:30pm.

And the original blog post by Cellebrite does claim to have 'cracked' the encryption, doesn't it? So the BBC's headline isn't exactly inaccurate.

So what? There's plenty of dubious blogs claiming all manner of things. The actual accomplishment isn't noteworthy (they wrote a scraper). If it were encryption-breaking, it would indeed be noteworthy, and thus worthy of fact-checking or at least waiting for Signal's rebuttal of "lolwut, no, that's nonsense".

"Accuracy" is moot here: BBC's headline is misinformation.

No, it didn't. It specifically stated that access to the Android keystore was needed to get at the stored Signal data.

There's a blog post claiming the Earth is flat. Would the BBC publish an article on it outside of satire?

How and when they contacted cellebrite/signal is important, but even when you see "refused to comment" there really isn't a timestamp for when contact was attempted/initiated. Is there a reason for this?

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