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Comment by darklajid | Hacker News Reader

I couldn't bear reading that article.

The story could've been good, but the style of writing is neither witty nor clever and when I arrived at reserved seats in the front row at Black Hat I closed the tab with a quick sigh of relief afterwards. Horrible.

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Has HN turned into a literary club? Despite trying to make it a spy novel, I thought this article was one of the better stories read on HN.

I agree, aside from being interesting, this was a well written story. What's everyone's problem with the writing style? You have to be kidding me.

some geeks seem to have the misconception that you can't be entertained and educated at the same time. I suspect this is the same group who hates analogies.

I liked it a lot too, and, obviously, I'm on Barnaby Jack's side of the vulnerability research fence, not the ATM vendor's. I even thought the style was amusing.

Agreed. I came here wanting to say I thoroughly enjoyed the writing style. Technical details coupled with great entertaining writing? Count me in. I already read enough dry technical tumblrvomit as it is.

Typically the vendor side of a publicized security exploit never releases details to this extent, ESPECIALLY in the financial sector. It's a very interesting perspective to get to read in detail.

Obviously my statement was purely subjective (style of writing).

That said: What details did you take away from the article? I'm serious. I just went back and skimmed the rest. It seems this is really a long version of 'someone found an exploit, we fixed it, he presented it in public and we handled the aftermath'. No details at all. The most technical bit was the 'Now we're so much more secure by requiring signed code', and that was it?

You can buy an ATM and have it shipped to your house.

Apparently, there is little meaningful verification that an ATM is secure before people start using it.

The target was randomly chosen, and a second company's ATM was breached in a completely separate fashion.

This was simply a publicity stunt for a security research company.

etc.

I was mostly interested in hearing what happens on the vendor side after an exploit is disclosed, but you're right.. there wasn't a lot of specifics.

I would estimate that a security coder for an atm doesn't cross over with a good writing style very often. Doesn't mean it wasn't worth the read!

Agreed, after about six paragraphs he dials it down slightly but there's still a lot of text which I found painful to read.

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