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Comment by atemerev | Hacker News Reader

I think that it is quite likely that the laptop was planted, the whole acquisition story is fake, and this is an orchestrated campaign optimized for maximum impact. I am not an idiot.

However, the contents of the laptop (emails and pictures — at least some of them) were corroborated by multiple sources. Their timings agree with the events of Ukraine affair, which led to Trump’s impeachment proceedings. I can’t say anything about the laptop; perhaps it was planted by the Russian intelligence or Trump campaign spinners. However, its contents looks real to me.

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You do realize that the mechanism you use to 'wash' disinformation is to mix it in with other legitimate (hacked) data, right? If the party you are attacking denies the validity you have a few real bits of data you can point to and use to call the other party a liar. If the party you are attacking tries to explain the nuance that there is some true and some false data in there then you use that against them to try to claim it is all true or that they are admitting that your specific bits of disinformation are true, by the time people hear the full statement it is already too late.

Seriously, it has been over four years since Clinton and the Podesta emails. How can anyone still be this naive?

Naive is buying into a jingoist narrative about how everything bad in our own country is because of the scary Russians and Chinese.

We've got billion-dollar Presidential campaigns and 100M-dollar senate campaigns, but an office floor full of internet trolls are the ones swinging the balance of power in our country? Who's naive? Take some responsibility -- if we suck, that's on us.

They are not swinging the balance of power, and at this point most of the trolls and disinformation artists are in the US working for conservative think-tanks and Republican campaigns. In case you hadn't noticed this big fat nothingburger is going nowhere. Like a lot of other new stories of late is mostly serves to separate the desperate and gullible from the rest of us.

I'm a reluctant Biden voter, but you're saying Hunter getting 600k for a bullshit job is totally above board?

If I think that's fishy, I'm desperate and gullible?

It's going nowhere, agreed, most blatant corruption goes nowhere. But I don't have to like it or defend it.

Yes, this is totally possible. And to counter the entire issue, Biden should have said something along the lines of “I don’t know this laptop; it contains some personal photos of mine, which were probably stolen by hackers, but these “emails” are fake, and neither me nor my family members have nothing to do with that”. Attempting to silence this on social media will backfire.

The stuff that has been corroborated by others (like Tony Bobulinksi) is already quite suspect, and includes implications that Biden knew about, and was even a part of, a bribery scheme with foreign governments.

It now sounds like the emails have been digitally authenticated by an outside firm: https://amp.dailycaller.com/2020/10/29/cybersecurity-expert-.... That is, they confirmed that contents of the emails match is contained in Gmail's servers.

And what evidence is there that the DNC emails were in anyway inauthentic?

No the stuff that has been corroborated did not suggest any sort of bribery scheme with foreign governments, but nice try. The only few that have been authenticated do not indicate that they have been read or even went anywhere but a spam folder. Those precious few are also the least incriminating of the bunch. For some reason you and your ilk cannot seem to provide these same DKIM headers for the entire batch of email. Why is that I wonder?

> How can anyone still be this naive?

Protecting their worldview depends on it.

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