The governor of Missouri still doesn’t know how websites work | Hacker News Reader

The governor of Missouri still doesn’t know how websites work

theverge.com

Many people have told him how websites work. He has decided that he does not care.

This is what it means to be an ideologue. It's not about being one party or another, it's that your own narrative supersedes reality to the point that you can't say "in general X is true, but in this case the shoe doesn't fit."

Just like PiS in Poland, the spokesman Fogiel said: We don't employ experts, as the would not realize our program.

Sounds like the UK politian Michael Gove on the run up the to Brexit vote, "I think the people of this country have had enough of experts..."

I will never not correct this quote:

> “I think the people in this country have had enough of experts... from organisations with acronyms saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong."

(My ellipsis here is to remove a bit where he got a few words in a nonsensical order, and reordered them, rather than to remove the context of the quote.)

I don't really feel this is correcting anything. There is nothing misleading about it since it's still the same point! Gove adding on some vague qualification at the end does not change the intention.

Experts almost invariably fit that qualification so it's superfluous and handwavy. If he had mentioned some specifics then it would have a different intention and I and others would leave that extraneous rambling nonsense on the quote.

Indeed it's an even more shameful quote with that bit.

I think your point assumes that all experts are always wrong, which is a point on which we disagree. Many people call themselves experts and are often wrong - though I would call such people "pundits" rather than "experts" - and it's those people we've had enough of.

From what I’ve heard, the “hack” involved decoding base64 text, which can look like decrypting cipher text.

The fact that cipher text often is base64 makes that all the more confusing.

I hope this gets sorted out, or the trial shows something substantial that hasn’t been shared so far.

All of the analogies seem to miss the mark.

This is equivalent to lawfully asking a clerk in a records office for the public information about a teacher. They give you all the information, including the social security number and then ask you to pretend they didn't tell you that.

The analogy of the locked front door is correct, except the governor got it completely wrong. The truth to that analogy is that the reporter came along to a house where the keys were left in the lock. He knocks on the door politely and says: "Hey your keys have been left in the lock. Try and come up with a solution so that this doesn't happen again and a true threat actor to your belongings would come along and steal your valuable things." I can't tell you the number of times I have alerted people to this at their front doors or their mailboxes. It happens. Every single person has responded with graceful humility. This exposes the lack of graceful humility that the governor and potentially the DA lack. This is a basic civility exchange where it's obvious these people shouldn't be in power.

EDIT: if the courts do not recognize this for what it is we are in bigger trouble than we imagine already.

> EDIT: if the courts do not recognize this for what it is we are in bigger trouble than we imagine already.

If this goes to court and the judge doesn't reject this and fine/imprison the governor and DA over malicious prosecution then we're in big trouble.

Well some people have suggested that certain laws can be cited to make this happen. The likelihood of this succeeding is slim to none. What every citizen in this country needs to understand is that everyone is divided on purpose. Political beliefs are there to divide us among many other attempts to divide us. Your political beliefs have nothing to do with the safety of the American people and if you believe otherwise you have played into that fishing expedition hook line and sinker.

EDIT: find some common ground with your fellow man and strengthen those bonds. I do it daily with people who are "set in their ways" they really aren't; They just need to be heard out about their concerns and they need to be put to rest by finding that common ground. We are all humans first and foremost and hobbies are a good way to either share your skills or learn a new one.

> EDIT: find some common ground with your fellow man and strengthen those bonds

Agreed. Never underestimate what you can learn from others.

I try to find common ground usually. Far out contrarian views tend to make me pause and evaluate the value given.

Agreed; none of the analogies I've seen are really close. I have a couple of attempts:

Analogy 1: the reporter got a letter from DESE, and noticed that there was confidential information printed on the inside of the envelope.

Analogy 2: the reporter got a letter from DESE, and noticed there was a block of intra-office info (document ID, routing codes, etc) at the bottom, and that contained confidential information.

In either case, the critical thing is that the information was sent to him, just in a form/place people don't normally read.

I like analogy #1 the best so far. People could be sending each other letters with confidential information on the insides of envelopes (particularly if it's under the part that is glued together) without realizing it, and taking the envelope apart would reveal it.

Another (digital) analogy is when departments sent out PDFs with black rectangles drawn over text, and someone just opened it up in a PDF editor and deleted the rectangles.

I think "inside the envelope" is still too obscure. Maybe better (but getting strained) to say the reporter had a secretary who usually opens his mail and only sends him a summary of his correspondence based on keywords he's interested in. But when he opens his own mail one day, he sees it has confidential information included in it, which his secretary has not been forwarding because it doesn't match the keywords.

Overall, I agree with the person who said analogies make it more confusing.

Sometimes analogies caue more confusion then they clarify. I think this is one of those cases. The underlying issue isn't complicated, we should just tell people what it is directly.

“Doesn’t know” is inaccurate. It would be more accurate to say he “Has been told, but obstinately persists in his idiocy”

While this is stupid, i don't see anything indicating he doesn't know how websites work.

He seems to want to prosecute the behaviour in question. Yes that's stupid, but i don't see anything indicating he doesn't understand the underlying concepts. Hell, computer laws are so vauge,its not even out of the question that this meets the definition of "hacking".

Just because you disagree with what someone is doing doesn't neccesarily mean they just don't understand.

His use of the word "decrypted" shows at least some lack of understanding. The SSNs were in base64 as I understand it so "decoded" would make sense but as we all know these two concepts are vastly different. He uses the locked analogy but there is no key or lock in this scenario.

The governor of Missouri is right, legally. Just look at the weev case.

You think the law is a out determining what's legal or not--in theory that is true, but it's a farce.

In reality what happens is we decide who needs to be charged, then pull out the dusty tome of laws and figure out what crime to charge them with.

(In this case the journalist will be fine, because there ist actually energy to get pursue it, but next time that might not be true).

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