Remember, you're on Hacker News. Thanks to people like the author, the average person thinks you and I are criminals. Because, hackers.
You may be right about omitting that tone in general, but considering the feelings of media hacks is not a big motivator.
This hardly seems like a reasonable characterization. The author got a technical detail wrong. How does that connect him to people who vilify "hackers"? He didn't even use that term.
If you're in the media, don't talk about things you don't understand!
Is it preferable for a newspaper to report on a new medical study and publish Yet Another(tm) "Researchers at [University] find cure to cancer" story, or, is it better for the newspaper to refrain from talking about the medical paper entirely?
Personally, I have to go with the later. Given the choice between botched reporting and no reporting, I'll go with no reporting. It is better to be uninformed than misinformed. It is easier to correct 'uninformed' and the state of 'uninformed' is easier for self-aware people to recognize in themselves.
Consider the fallout caused by the media botching the reporting of the FTL neutrino anomaly. People lost their jobs because reporters could not be arsed to do theirs.
Second, if you're a journalist, you are pretty much guaranteed not to be an expert in the fields you report on, because you're a journalist, and not a networking engineer, or a software developer, or a doctor, or a lawyer, or a professional in whatever other field you might be reporting on. Journalists have an obligation to report factually and correctly to the best of their ability, but they are not infallible.
Also, the technically incorrect piece of this article seems pretty minor. I don't understand why some people are getting so worked up about it.
Because the effort it would have taken to not make the mistake is so minimal (Google: BGP, first result is wikipedia, read for a few minutes), that it carries rather unfortunate implications for the author and their attention to detail, and by extension their qualifications as a journalist.
Journalists have an obligation to report factually and correctly to the best of their ability, but they are not infallible.
With the above in mind, I'll bet you $large_amount_of_cash this is never corrected.
And you would be correct. It won't get corrected because no one cares, and no one cares because it is inconsequential.
"And for years it[either man-in-the-middle or BGP attacks] has been understood to be possible in theory, but never seen in practice[!?!]. That changed earlier this year when someone — it’s unclear who — diverted Internet traffic from some 150 cities around the world through networks in Belarus and Iceland."
It is worth noting how wrong that is but being accurate when you point to someone else's wrong stuff is one of the first principles.