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Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

If it’s a shared machine for projecting notes, chances are it has nothing stored locally.

Optimistic thinking. Chances are it has many PDF and PowerPoint files scattered on it. And probably a shared user account where the files fill up a Windows desktop.

That is so...

... realistic

yeah, i bet it has every presentation ever done sitting in good ol' ~/Documents or the desktop.

Does anyone use /Documents? That's just a folder where Apps like Acrobat put garbage files.

Well back in Win 98 I used "My documents" a lot ahah. Now on Windows 10 Documents/ is often automatically backed-up in Onedrive (it is for me) so I started using it for saving some documents that I want to back up in the cloud.

on my laptop that's the default when i do save-as. I see someone plugging in a jump drive, opening the presentation, and then doing a save-as to Documents so "it runs faster"

I'm on Mac OSX and almost all my non-programming files are in /Downloads. Maybe some other HN-ers have a better folder management technique than mine (which basically is absent), I'm curious what that is.

I have the opposite problem. I abhor things sitting in Downloads because I pretty frequently wipe out that folder to clear out the garbage.

But I struggle to follow a consistent structure, so it could be in Documents or Notes, or a random folder somewhere else because I ignored my hierarchy in a hurry.

Honestly, now if I need to make sure I keep something, I upload it to Google Drive. It sucks for privacy, but their search is good enough that I rarely need to use the hierarchy. The hierarchy is now mostly to group things I want to perform actions on together.

Honestly I make pretty heavy use of /tmp. Almost all downloads go there, along with anything that I won't be using again after the next hour. Self-cleanup whenever I reboot (which is rare).

Anything of importance, I have broad directories under Documents, and then sub folders. Or sometimes I'll put them on my fileserver with similar directory structure. The Documents folder is backed up with Spideroak.

Of course. Everyone knows everything sits in /Downloads nowadays, whether it came from the Internet or not.

It's also filled with Zoom transcripts.

almost certainly on a server hosting roaming profiles.

And if not, then they should hire me and I'll set it up for them. :D

Pelosi is old enough for typewriters being new technology, I don't trust in her having the hand over it personally.

But after the number of big hacks in the last few years I'd hope the guys in charge of general security laid down some ground rules.

I wouldn't be surprised if Pelosi doesn't really use a computer much (at work), and to the extent that she does it is completely managed by her aides.

If I had to bet:

-- someone accidentally stored something

-- that thing is no big deal, perhaps technically a secret

-- people who get ahold of it and read it will make up conspiracy theories about it

People who make up their truths that can't be disproven already have all that they need. a missing laptop.

Honestly, those people didn’t even need that. They need nothing founded in reality to make up their conspiracy theories, which is why no argument from reality can weaken them.

One of the most intelligent programmers who has been in the game since the early 80s posted the he is refusing to ever vote again till he knows his vote isn't stolen.

They WON in 2016 House Senate and Presidential and claimed MILLIONS of votes were fraud and the commission setup by Republicans found nothing and went away.

2018 They kept the Senate and lost the house by a smaller number then anticipated

2020 Republicans WON seats though it was expected to lose seats. They "Kept the Senate" just had a run off in Georgia. November 2020 was a good night for Republicans minus President Trump who is a love him or hate him person. Republicans didn't vote for Trump and is why he is out.

At that point, if you have the laptop and are willing to admit it you can just make a conspiracy document and say you found it on it.

Same chances are it has every presentation done in the last 5 years copied to the desktop, in order to give presenters their USB sticks back.

Or everything from everybody.

We just don't know.

presentation-2-Rewrite.pdf.bak.PPT

presentation-BROKEN.PPT

anotherpresentation.doc

cantopen_presentaion-dontdelete,PPT

MOMs_COOKIE_RECIPE.doc

caterpillar french fry funny.bmp

and so on...

deep-state-war-plans.doc

opening this doc opens a video of a guy singing about never giving up

That's why you jave to open deep-state-war-plans.doc:ze_real_plans

Damn alternative data streams.

Speaking of which, I always wondered why windows didn't make better use of those. Seems like it would cut down on the FS bloat.

> caterpillar french fry funny.bmp

Literally laughed out loud, as my grandma had actually sent me that comic just a month ago. It's the quintessential Forward From Grandma.

Pretty sure that one's been floating around the Internet since the 90s at least, and likely existed way before then.

These folks don't trust one another with information, so it seems unlikely that they'd pass around a laptop loaded with one anothers presentations.

These folks are also among the most tech-unsavvy people on Earth...

I don’t think it’s too much of a conspiracy theory to think that some foreign intelligence operative might have sensed a opportunity on Wednesday.

This would require them to be in the front line early. I think it's more likely that somebody was randomly there and saw the opportunity. If you look at the videos most seem to be surprised to be in some of low manner. If you have some operative in there you increase chaos by creating some small fire or something ...

Would they have had to be there early? Russian embassy isn't that far away and I think rioters were in there plenty long (wasn't it a couple hours?) for someone to walk over, pay 20 dollars for a trump flag, and walk in unnoticed. I wouldn't be surprised if our embassies and CIA outposts have people ready to take advantage of such situations in other countries.

You have to get through the crowd, and you have to be there before somebody else stole it and in time before police manages to lock down critical offices. Quite some effort.

Compare it to a random person suddenly standing in front of an unprotected laptop from those "bad politicians" ...

This laptop is probably used by staffers in their 20s and 30s. It's not like Nancy Pelosi is administrating IT security.

Uh... their staffers have been caught with their pants down on multiple occassions..

https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2018/08/01/details-chinese...

https://www.eurasiareview.com/11122020-eric-swalwells-honeyp...

So yeah, pardon if I'm not full of confidence in the levels of discretion these guys exercise.

Except cookies for a whole bunch of websites. Maybe even saved passwords in the browser, etc.

There's a lot more value to a conference room PC than residual files.

It's a machine probably on the same LAN as a lot of the meeting attendees in the conference room, probably has Bluetooth radio as well, may have wifi radios, probably has access to a calendar of meetings and attendees (as a defined room resource). Depending on how the PC is used (a room system vs the ol' conference room PC) it may also a key logger would be valuable.

Reminds me of the scene in Firefly: "let me get this straight, you put multiple high-ranking intelligence officials in the same room as a psychic??" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC9SF7TOyHQ

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