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Comment by arctics | Hacker News Reader

I scrolled over the dossier and there nothing significant there, most of it is bunch of things he said, his investments, property, donations, tickets, taxes and so on.

Most of the information can be found online, this is just complied into one PDF file.

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What PDF reader would you trust to open and run a document reportedly produced by Iranian intelligence?

I used Firefox.

My Nintendo Switch

Any reader that has only bothered to implement pdf object processing and page rendering. Or just any pdf reader that doesn't have pdf javascript implemented

Rather than a PDF reader, how about a PDF sanitizer? I've heard of Dangerzone [1][2], though I've never used it.

[1] https://github.com/freedomofpress/dangerzone

[2] https://dangerzone.rocks/

>> complied

compiled

Yeah, the only novel info in this story is the twitter suspension. Very counter productive if Elon was trying to suppress this.

This is why no major media outlet ran this story when the hackers offered the documents a month or two ago: there's literally nothing in it. It's a standard opposition research report. The Harris campaign has a document just like it on their own Google Drive. It isn't even directionally interesting; it records every line of attack the GOP could imagine Vance facing (they missed "childless cat ladies", though!), and so calls out places where Vance is in line with Trump as well as places he isn't.

All the real stories about this piece are going to be from people like Klippenstein and Musk beclowning themselves over it.

Is Klippenstein self-beclowning? He readily admits in the piece that it's pretty much a nothingburger.

He is using it as advertising. Saying he will publish what others won’t so subscribe to me.

Is that a bad thing?

The omission of the "Childless Cat Ladies" comment is arguably pretty newsworthy since it has a bunch of implications, most notably being its the attack line that likely drew blood so to speak (the other a potential campaign blind-spot for how to communicate with female voters, a demographic the Trump campaign has struggled with)

It's just so stacked in conditionals, and the document doesn't even prove whether they didn't consider it a problem or just didn't know about it. I'm not saying it's some tragedy that this document got published, but it makes perfect sense to me that big newsrooms didn't think there was anything in here worth becoming a mouthpiece for some anonymous "Robert" guy. Independent journalists have more flexibility in this kind of thing because they don't have to develop and enforce editorial policies.

Presumably newspapers will have more to say about the dossier now that it's already public.

Right, the argument being that the Trump campaign oppo folks are redpilled and unable to apply a cynical eye to arguments made from outside their echo chamber.

And I guess that's possible, but I think the simpler explanation is just that they're lazy. Trump himself was going to pick whoever he wanted, everyone knew it. There's no point in going the extra mile to support a process you know is going to be ignored. So check the boxes you need to and move on.

Streisand effect.

The dossier doesn't matter. The fact they are blocking it does.

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