Hacker News Reader

Comment by spenvo | Hacker News Reader

There is new reporting that a hacker has breached the parent company, TeleMessage, including live data being passed across servers in production.

https://www.404media.co/the-signal-clone-the-trump-admin-use...

It was marked as a DUPE of this discussion, despite being a major new development https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43890034 Hopefully that decision can be reconsidered

View on HN

You can just link the new development in an ongoing story that's already on the front page, just like you did. The alternative would be a second front page thread which splits the discussion and is worse all-round.

That's a fair point, and it's your call - however, if the new (major) development is covered in this way then 1) users on the front page won't see mention of it at headline level and 2) the discussion of that development on HN will be affected by/limited to the time-decay of a post that is 12 hours older. I understand that there are tradeoffs at play, it really comes down to if the development at hand is big-enough to justify another post, and, again, that's your call.

I concur. An analysis of potential risks and vulnerabilities is a different beast from actual proof that the app has indeed been hacked. I call for the other discussion to be restored.

Edit: Wanted to respond to the top-level comment but you get the point.

It's not my call, I'm just explaining how HN typically works. If you want some story handled differently, you should send an email to hn@ycombinator.com. But 'two or more things about the same thing on the fp at the same time' is a big barrier to overcome, it almost never happens.

There is mod commentary on 'people might miss things because of the title' as well, it's mostly 'it's ok for people to click through the story or thread to figure things out' and that's also a fairly longstanding 'how HN works most of the time' thing.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

The operating assumption here is that people are smart enough to follow the developments in the story themselves - in the the thread and outside.

> The data includes apparent message contents; the names and contact information for government officials; usernames and passwords for TeleMessage’s backend panel; and indications of what agencies and companies might be TeleMessage customers.

http://archive.today/HqMvy

It's insane that this isn't front page news. This takes the original Signalgate breach to an order of magnitude higher level of severity.

There seems to be a coordinated and consistent campaign to bury submissions from 404 Media on HN. Hopefully something can be done about that, too.

In August last year I got this from dang when reporting a dead 404 link: "The site 404media.co is banned on HN because it has been the source of too many low-quality posts and because many (most?) of their articles are behind a signup wall."

Not that I've really seen the low quality and the signup requirement doesn't stop other domains. There's quite a few things that originated from 404, so I hope HN gets over whatever it was that annoyed them originally.

The main issue is the (sometimes) hard signup wall. I've been a moderator on HN for longer than 404media has existed, and I know from experience that this changes from time to time or article to article. Other paywalled sites that appear on HN (WSJ, NYT etc) have a porous paywall; you can (almost) always get around it by using an archive site like Archive.today.

If it's a good article (contains significant new information and can be a topic of curious conversation) and a paywall workaround works for that article, we'll happily allow it.

If they do their own, original, investigative reporting, you may want to be a bit more permissive.

Since HN doesn't really facilitate any workarounds anyway and we've been doing manual archive links and content reposting as needed in other cases... I suspect we can handle 404 as well as a community.

Even porous paywalls can have a marked effect on story performance on HN.

The New York Times tightened its paywall markedly in August 2019, with a net effect that appearances in the top-30 stories on HN's front-page archive (the "Past" links in the site header) fell to ~25% of their previous level.

I'd asked dang at the time if HN had changed any of its own processes at the time. Apparently not.

I suspect then that this reflects frustrations and/or inability to access posted articles behind the paywall.

See: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36918251> (July 2023)

How does this happen when signal itself is open source?

They used an internal fork delivered via MDM. There are no guarantees that Signal can make about the software running on those phones and per the reports it’s a lot of phones.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com