Hacker News Reader

Comment by joaomacp | Hacker News Reader

Out of curiosity: why is China not mentioned in the article's title, when the first sentence states a "Chinese state-sponsored hacking operation"?

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Leaving essential information out of the headline is a common clickbaiting tactic.

It took my vouch to un-dead your comment, useful because I couldn't reply to it otherwise. I'm morbidly fascinated as to how the top two comments on this submission were marked dead in the first place, but considering it took a vouch to automatically bring it back to life, there's a hint of a Flag brigade on this thread.

To answer your comment: because the title of the submission "Airbus Suppliers Hit in State-Sponsored Attack" and the title of the article "Airbus Suppliers Hit in State-Sponsored Attack" are identical, and that's totally fine. Changing the title of the submission to include a detail from the article actually editorializes the submission, which is not ideal for HN or the audience here.

I took the comment to mean, why does the original article's title not have 'Chinese' in the title.

In these days of click-bait "news", it's a valid question.

The user you're replying to has been leaving a trail of dead comments since https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14150381

If it's marked as [dead] but not [flagged], the comment was killed automatically. No reason to suspect brigading.

Please don't post insinuations of astroturfing or similar manipulation ("Flag brigade") without evidence. If you're concerned about abuse, please follow the site guidelines and email hn@ycombinator.com so we can look into it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Hm, I didn't bucket flag-brigading into the astroturfing bucket (specifically because they're quite different - one suppresses speech whereas the other purports to be grassroots speech). Your point is well taken, but going forward dang, there's value in adding the "or similar manipulation" qualifier to the current iteration of guidelines:

> Please don't make insinuations about astroturfing. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried, email us and we'll look at the data.

Hopefully this comment is viewed as both the acknowledgement as well as the constructive feedback it's intended to be.

For sure it's constructive. I'll see about expanding the wording.

Edit: ok, done. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Out of curiosity, why did you omit the word 'possible' from the sentence you quoted.

These days state-sponsored has become a euphemism for Chinese.

Nah. For example Sony was hacked by North Korea. CIA was repeatedly hacked by Russia (Vault 7, director emails). And yes, every high-tech US corporation is sucked dry of secrets by China (Micron, Intel, Supermicro, Waymo, Boeing, etc.)

China wins by a huge margin.

It depends on who the boogeyman de jour is.

It was North Korea for a while, with every major hack blamed on them, then it was Russia, and now it's China - lo and behold, they get the blame for every major hack.

Now, I'm not saying it wasn't China - what I'm saying is that Western governments make it like "the body who cried wolf".

Don't forget about Iran.

As a data point, China's "hacker army" has 50k-100k people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_cyberwarfare

The supporting link for that figure describes China's hackers army as a myth (in the header), and as a loose coalition of civilians in the body:

>"That revelation, along with a separate story in the Financial Times that a freelancer wrote the Aurora code, is focusing attention on China’s loose web of cowboy hackers. And SharpWinner — the leader of a coalition including anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000 civilian members …" //

The rest of the Wikipedia page, amongst other things, describes a structured make up (military, PLA, civilian).

Assuming the numbers were true, how does that compare to USA's, or other countries?

"Airbus Suppliers Hit in State-Sponsored Attack" would imply China is 100% known to be the hacking operation, and that China was convicted of doing such a thing in a court. This is not true, and would be grounds for libel.

"Airbus Suppliers Possibly Hit in Chinese State-Sponsored Attack" is less attractive as a headline.

Is there any way you can "libel" a country outside of sedition? Worrying about publishing something that might be seditious in China seems like splitting hairs, since the body of the article directly points the finger at Chinese hackers.

Libel against a country?

That's like slandering the ground.

Reminds me of Xerxes, king of Persia had the ocean whipped after a storm destroyed his bridge.

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