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Comment by oropolo | Hacker News Reader

Why isn't it front-page news on HN rather than being flagged? Is it just because Musk's "DOGE" is in the title? I think it's pretty significant that a number of agencies have handed root access to people who shouldn't have it and have made changes that could have significant unintended consequences. This is could end up being a case study in why you don't allow unfettered access even when ordered by the incoming regime (be it POTUS or CEO) because there be dragons and the new people don't know where they are yet.

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> Why isn't it front-page news on HN rather than being flagged? Is it just because Musk's "DOGE" is in the title?

Essentially yes. Certain users are flagging because they don't want any discussion related to DOGE on HN. See for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43036254.

LOL... wow! I thought the "national cyberattack" and the root override/hijacking was far more relevant than the connection with the organization which shall not be named which is nominally led by he who shall not be named.

It's very sad and a stark commentary on the current state of Hacker News that a post by Bruce Schneier on cyber security is still flagged over an hour after it was posted.

[flagged]

The flagging system has good intentions, but seems like it was designed assuming good faith behavior from users. It does not appear to be resistant to partisan brigading.

I think it's working as intended in terms of HN not being a place for partisan issues and discussion in the vast majority of cases. There's literally an automatic downvoting of submissions where the comment to vote ratio is too high. It's not the type of discussion HN wants or is intended for.

This is one of the unspoken assumptions of online communities, that will cease to be true, and lead to the implosion or imposition of rules on HN, which will lead to its fracturing.

There is no running away from certain conversations, especially when your information ecosystem is intentionally made partisan. The flavor of american political discourse is architechtured to achieve very clear rhetorical and emotional goals.

At best, HN can choose how it wants to handle the schism. For that everyone needs to realize it is coming.

HN has tackled this just fine for a very long time. I think it will be ok.

Want to make a predictive bet ?

> good intentions, but seems like it was designed assuming good faith behavior

Are you talking about HN or the constitution and our resultant system of government?

His first sentence is:

> In the span of just weeks, the US government has experienced what may be the most consequential security breach in its history

Which is a ridiculous level of hyperbole and just factually not even close to accurate. Solarwinds, the 2014 OPM breach, snowden leaks, chelsea manning leaks, the DNC email leak, moonlight maze - there's a massive list of real, consequential security incidents that are nowhere nearly as bad as Elon and whatever his dumb team are doing.

The key words being "may be." The fact is that a bunch of kids working for an essentially unofficial department of the government were given root access to all sorts of systems with no oversight. We simply have no idea how deep the damage goes.

Okay, so he's speculating without evidence, which is effectively the definition of hyperbole, which makes for really boring and uninteresting reading

You seem to have a different definition of hyperbole to most people. I think everyone here understands the security implications of physical access to a server, the protocols that are usually put in place surrounding that and the reasons for them being there. The servers gave been compromised. We know that. To downplay the dangers of that surely makes someone guilty of the kind of misrepresentation that you're concerned about

There are so, so many posts on HN about this and they're getting flagged, I would guess, because people can see this content on literally any corporate news site or a million different subreddits, and there's not much value to it being on HN specifically, and the conversation around these topics is never interesting or productive. I flag it because for these reasons, and also I'm ridiculously tired of seeing 6 different posts about Trump and Elon every single day.

How many people on all those subreddits know what root access means, how many journalists havea technical understanding of what is possible with the access given to the DOGE team? How does that compare to the demographic on Hacker News?

There are any number of places people can talk about this but the same is true of literally anything that gets discussed here. What value does HN ever add? What's ever the benefit of sharing something here?

Personally speaking this is the number one place I want to see these conversations happen because I have a deep respect for the technical understanding of my peers here. It's disturbing that at such an important juncture in history so many people are jumping up to say "go elsewhere, there's nothing of value for you here."

Knowledge about the technical concepts means nothing if we're not getting real, meaningful information about what's actually happening. It's all rampant and unfounded speculation at this point.

No, common security practice would be to consider your servers compromised if an unvetted outside entity gained physical access to them. If this happened at your workplace you know that you would assume the worst because you would have no other choice. Everybody here understands that and so do you.

This is Bruce Schneier, talking about the event in the most technical, calm and even handed manner around.

I have been looking for such a post since last week!

And this is hacker news, the exact site that is absolutely about this. We haven't even gotten to the part where people see the actual code that has been slung around here.

So my other recent comment on this, I strongly disagree that this is even-handed writing

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