Dropbox responds to accusations its Mac desktop client hacks OS X security

https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/09/dropbox-responds-to-accusations-its-mac-desktop-client-hacks-os-x-security/

by doener • 10 years ago

68 39 10 years ago

techcrunch.com

microtonal2• 10 years ago

Modern-day tech journalism: cut and paste together some quotes from Hacker News comments.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12464730

tekacs5• 10 years ago

I'd love to hear what exactly folks consider to be wrong with that.

I've seen this sort of criticism in a few places before, but especially in cases such as this where someone from the company responded and talked of making change, being on top of happenings like this seems like a reasonable thing to do.

It certainly seems better than the old 'ask random people for their opinion' approach of conventional huge media.

I'm struggling to find links to posts about this, but it's not too hard to point to cases, both mentioned online and through my friends, where utterly unqualified opinions were sourced based on journalists using indicators like 'owning a domain name' as proof of a person's authority on a topic.

Edit: at least on HN and social media you can verify the full text of what someone said after the fact and oftentimes even look up their background!

RBerenguel• 10 years ago

Well, as a commenter above points out, Ben didn't "tell TechCrunch", but posted a comment here. It would be far more reasonable to, after seeing a comment by X here addressing important topic Y, the news outlet contacted X about Y, and wrote something about that exchange. Not just copying the comment and making it look as some exchange.

microtonal2• 10 years ago

I'd love to hear what exactly folks consider to be wrong with that.

Ben Newhouse's answer left quite a few questions open. How about poking him or Dropbox a bit more? For instance, competing products (OneDrive, Resilio Sync, etc.) provide similar functionality without placing SUID 'backdoors'. Given that OneDrive's client is distributed via the app store, I'd guess that it even uses OS X sandboxing.

What about asking a security expert (or perhaps Apple) to comment?

A good journalist doesn't just literally relay information, but provides context/interpretation.

(Of course, it's in TC's right to do this, but it doesn't add much to the conversation.)

breatheoften• 10 years ago

it's highly misleading to quote someone saying "told TechCrunch" rather that citing actual context for the quote. Misattributing like this implies a stronger and more deliberate relationship between the information source and journalist than actually existed.

maxerickson• 10 years ago

Not much wrong at all with quoting a comment or twitter (maybe it's lazy).

Misrepresenting those quotes as a direct discussion? Horrible, because it is misrepresentation.

It seems pretty likely that TechCrunch reached out and confirmed the comments though, so that wouldn't be a misrepresentation.

mhurron• 10 years ago

Edit: at least on HN and social media you can verify the full text of what someone said after the fact

Anyone else seeing humour in putting this statement in an edit that was not in the original post?

Dylan168073• 10 years ago

The haphazard stringing of comments leaves a pretty mixed-up message about what the actual issue is. There's no coherent overview of what is going on by TechCrunch. The traditional "ask random people" part comes after the explanatory segment, which makes it much less of a problem.

MichaelBurge• 10 years ago

It's not just tech journalism. I think I've seen the New York Times spin an article whose summary is "Somebody tweeted something".

Perceptes• 10 years ago

And yet, here it is on the front page.

coldtea3• 10 years ago

Modern-day tech journalism: cut and paste together some quotes from Hacker News comments.

What people seem to be oblivious to is that "modern day journalism" also brings in much much less than "old day journalism" did -- and it's the masses who cause this, since they don't seem to particularly care to pay for content of higher quality, and ad revenue is not that big to compensate.

So don't expect competent fact-checking departments (if they exist at all), journalists paid to follow a story for weeks or even days, and other such niceties in 2016.

The same goes for people who invariantly ask online outlets "don't you have editors" etc for typos and such.

Don't these people know that even traditional media like newspapers have been dropping most of their editors and proof-checkers? Tons of online media often have none at all, or just one or a couple to handle tons of posts per day.

Karunamon3• 10 years ago

Why is it always an external failure rather than an internal one whenever a media outlet of some kind screws up?

We can't follow the most basic of journalism standards? Can't afford it, sorry.

We told an outright lie? We couldn't hire fact checkers, sorry.

Our front page is covered in low-quality clickbait trash? Nobody wants to pay for news, sorry.

This kind of blameshifting comes off very familiar to anyone who's heard large movie/music companies blaming their marketing/promotion/quality failures on piracy.

nicky0• 10 years ago

[...] Dropbox’s Ben Newhouse, from its desktop client team, told TechCrunch.

TechCrunch, FYI: quoting an HN comment doesn't really count as "told TechCrunch".

labrador• 10 years ago

I'm assuming TechCrunch contacted Mr Newhouse to verify that he wrote that HN response, so he did tell TechCrunch. It would be a bigger journalistic problem if they didn't verify with Mr Newhouse and just took text from some commenter purporting to be Mr Newhouse.

vmasto• 10 years ago

It still doesn't count as "told TechCrunch".

maroonblazer• 10 years ago

Or that he gave that statement to TechCrunch prior to posting it on HN. It appears there's just a 3 hour time difference between his HN post and the TC story being published.

Doctor_Fegg• 10 years ago

Ben Newhouse will 100% have had to get clearance from Dropbox management for a statement like that. So if that's the line that management has agreed, it's not really surprising that the same statement is given to other outlets too.

ubanholzer• 10 years ago

«[...] Dropbox’s Ben Newhouse, from its desktop client team, told TechCrunch.»

He wrote this on HN..

exmuslim• 10 years ago

"Joutnalists" really have their work cut out for them these days, quoting Reddit and HN comments is hard!

ptaipale• 10 years ago

If they actually pick a comment from HN and then verify the authenticity and expand on it by interviewing the author, then I think they are really doing their job.

onewhonknocks• 10 years ago

Hanlon's razor, gents. Maybe Ben just sent TechCrunch the exact message he posted here.

IANAD• 10 years ago

Please stop with the razors. Someone will get cut.

lucb1e• 10 years ago

Tomorrow: TechCrunch responds to accusations of copying from Hacker News and calling it "Mr. X told us"

I actually think Ben just told TC the same as he told us, so no foul play by TC or anything. They're just not reporting anything new at all.

matt_morgan• 10 years ago

Sounds like more or less nobody at Dropbox knew how that stuff was getting done either.

stephenr• 10 years ago

So whether this is just the HN comment copy/pasted or if they followed up, I don't care. There are much bigger issues in tech journalism to worry about.

Even more concerning is the actual response.

Basically the comments on the earlier HN thread and then the quotes on the article show their point of view being that what they did isn't a problem, just that they got found out and it paints them in a justifiably negative light.

This is one of the exact reasons why I very much prefer to get apps from the Mac App Store: Sandbox enforced; No setuid; No privilege escalation; No futzing with the OS UI.

Dylan168073• 10 years ago

"However, the company’s justification for utilizing the Accessibility route to gain root access did little to impress some critics."

That.. no. They use root to gain access to Accessibility!

f_allwein• 10 years ago

Not so bad, actually. At least Dropbox has commented on it and is ideally working on making some improvements. Plus, a big tech site has picked up on the story, so a lot more people are aware of it now. And finally, it looks like HN played a role in raising this issue.

Still not an ideal situation, but could have been worse.

Dropbox responds to accusations its Mac desktop client hacks OS X security

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