Comment by yetihehe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yetihehe | Hacker News Reader

The whole article sounds funny.

"VirusTotal had no immediate comment."

"[...], Kaspersky denied using this technique. It said it too had been a victim of such an attack in November 2012, when an "unknown third party" manipulated Kaspersky into misclassifying files [...]"

"The former Kaspersky employees said Microsoft was one of the rivals [...] They declined to give a detailed account of any specific attack."

"In a subsequent interview on Wednesday, Batchelder declined to comment on any role Kaspersky may have played in the 2013 printer code problems or any other attacks. Reuters has no evidence linking Kaspersky to the printer code attack."

"Avast Chief Operating Officer Ondrej Vlcek told Reuters in April that he suspected the offenders were well-equipped malware writers and "wanted to have some fun" at the industry's expense. He did not respond to a request on Thursday for comment on the allegation that Kaspersky had induced false positives."

So, no one says it's Kaspersky, someone called "former employees" says it was, but can't provide any example...

Not a bit coincidental that said firm seems to be the only antivirus firm in recent memory (unless I'm mistaken) that seems to be able or willing to uncover government-level shenanigans. No, not a bit coincidental at all.

edit: And of course this http://www.wired.com/2015/06/kaspersky-finds-new-nation-stat... from two months ago.

First, security breach; now, an attack on their reputation?

It's also not coincidental at all that Kaspersky steers clear of exposing any shenanigans by Moskow. I mean, Eug himself claims Russia produces not only the best programmers but also the best exploit writers.... But surprisingly no exposés on them.

Hmmm.

That's also because Eug probably doesn't like the taste of polonium in his tea.

Or maybe Russia just doesn't spend as much on this stuff as western governments do.

There have been exposes by western AV firms too, but not as many and not as good. If there was obviously Russian govt malware out there, it'd surface sooner or later. We've seen American, Chinese, British, French, Israeli ...... seems odd that there's no Russian yet. But then I get the impression that Russian spying is overblown anyway. They seem to mostly focus inwards these days, or focus only on the former Soviet satellite states. USA has a much more aggressive global agenda.

>Not a bit coincidental that said firm seems to be the only antivirus firm in recent memory (unless I'm mistaken) that seems to be able or willing to uncover government-level shenanigans.

like in that joke (an American says "we have freedom - we can criticize Reagan freely", and Russian responds "we have freedom too as we can criticize Reagan freely too") - Kaspersky was pretty active in uncovering StuxNet, i.e. shenanigans of the US/Israel governments :)

Pure propaganda/fluff piece to damage the company. The media has been going hard against Kaspersky in coordination with government agencies.

The first and foremost "target" here is not only Kaspersky (i.e. Russian tech/security industry) but Russia itself.

Notice again the title ;)

so, the whole article is bunk because it is based on anonymous sources and did not get responses from all parties involved, but then because the headline has the word "Russia" in it, that's firm evidence of secret US government collusion with a major news outlet.

No, it's a bunk because it provides zero evidence but plenty of innuendos and unfounded allegations/accusations, and yes it's infinity more plausible a secret plan between the us gov and a us based media corporation than a reputable antivirus vendor like Kaspersky sabotaging its rivals.

Does Reuters often write "pure propaganda/fluff pieces"? Or is this piece special?

No, it just reports. The agencies and the governments make the agenda (unfortunately).

That said, Reuters IMHO is the top reporting authority worldwide along with AP.

> The agencies and the governments make the agenda (unfortunately).

Pretty hefty accusation on the integrity and journalistic ethics of the Associated Press. Do you have a reliable and credible source for this claim?

> journalistic ethics

no one takes this seriously.

Every day, nothing special about it:

http://ca.reuters.com/article/topNews/idCATRE6A840J20101109

I don't see how an interview with Bush about his book has anything to do with propoganda.

"pure propaganda/fluff pieces"

if you don't see how this matches either description fair dues to you.

The Bush story is fluff, but the grandparent comment was talking about "fluff AND propaganda", which obviously doesn't apply to the Bush article. (I assume it didn't mean "fluff OR propaganda" because obviously that wouldn't apply to the Kaspersky article).

> Asked by Winfrey whether he regretted the decision to invade Iraq based on unfounded intelligence that leader Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, Bush admitted feeling "terrible" and "sickened" about being wrong the weapons, but blamed Hussein.

I consider this to be propaganda. First time I've seen reuters accidentally a word too. Down further in my estimation!

Reporting on his comments in a book interview with Oprah is hardly "propaganda"! Good on Oprah for bringing up the topic. Everyone knows he's responsible for the fiasco of the Iraq war and there were no WMDs. Oprah prodded him as much as was appropriate, then left it at that. Reuters was just repoting on the interview. I'm pretty certain if you bothered to look you'd probably find lots of Reuters stories where they probe Bush much deeper on this issue and give him a thrashing. (I haven't looked myself, but I'd be very surprised if that wasn't the case).

Anyway, if you think that is propaganda you should perhaps visit Russia to see what real propaganda looks like.

No true scotsman eh? There's no doubt that both military industrial complexes engage in propaganda.

Plenty here for you to peruse, enough to satisfy the 'often' condition, while simultaneously not always being 'on message'.

http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/tag/george-w-bush/

Reuters is pretty known for propaganda and deliberate disinformation of the public.

e.g. http://blogs.roosevelt.edu/hsilverman/files/2011/11/Reuters-...

The article is about how Reuters biases public perception in favor of Palestinians and it's written by Henry I. Silverman who may or may not have an agenda of his own. That's the thing, everyone has an agenda. Just because someone is calling someone out on something that does not mean that they themselves are not motivated by their own agenda.

Meh, it was an "example given". How much do you want? Another famous one would be MH17 and Fedotov. Also you should read the definition of agenda, you clearly misused it. ("the things that must be done"[1]). The word you were looking for was motive.

That Reuters isn't a reliable source of information isn't a matter of motive or "agenda", it is common sense within educated circles.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenda

"Political agenda, the set of goals of an ideological group. In this context it is often used in a negative sense..."

"Pretty known" according to one study (which in itself appears to be the opinion of one person).

I tried to find their reporting to the build up to iraq war - if they did it would be there. But I found nothing - seems like everything has been scrubbed from google :( On reuters / iraq in range 2003-2004 google finds nothing hosted on their domain.

"Kaspersky has won wide respect in the industry for its research on sophisticated Western spying programs and the Stuxnet computer worm that sabotaged Iran's nuclear program in 2009 and 2010" Can't rule out a campaign to smear them. No hard evidence in the report. Just speculation.

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