Made me laugh. Fun article, also really love the genre of "bored smart person goes too deep on something that the end result is obvious by common sense but proving it requires surprising amount of ingenuity and scrappiness"
And a great example that truth is complicated, expensive and uncomfortable. It's much easier to postulate an evil nation-state entity with a bad plan (without evidence) than to dig through the thicket of this article. It's much cheaper as well, certainly in terms of time and knowhow. And it's also much more comfortable to claim you're the victim and have uncovered a conspiracy, rather than realize this was just the result of the patchwork typical of engineering.
Kudos to the author.
The worst thing is this creates an environment where most people are either completely credulous and buy into everything or completely incredulous and think everything is unfounded. It's just exhausting to have a healthy level of skepticism these days, and maybe 1 out of 1000 times (number source: from thin air) something that sounds insane actually has some truth to it.
It's scary because if even those in the know are not resistant to such BS, who else is going to shield the general public from populism-fueled pushes to anarchy or worse? Detoriation of trust in media is one of the building blocks of that, and if even the experts of subject areas are fooled and/or don't care enough, all hope may be lost.
The silver lining though is that the HN submission got pushback in terms of comments and an eventual flagging.
Corporations cannot be trusted. Proprietary software is bad enough but proprietary drivers is on a whole new level. You really have no idea what those things are doing unless you reverse engineer them.
Here are example of corporations essentially pwning your computer with their "justified and trustworthy" software:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/fs-labs-flight-simulator-pas...
Shipped a browser stealer to users and exfiltrated on an unencrypted channel the usernames and passwords of users they deemed to be "pirates".
https://old.reddit.com/r/Asmongold/comments/1cibw9r/valorant...
https://www.unknowncheats.me/forum/anti-cheat-bypass/634974-...
Screenshots your computer screen and exfiltrates the picture to their servers.
https://www.theregister.com/2016/09/23/capcom_street_fighter...
https://twitter.com/TheWack0lian/status/779397840762245124
https://fuzzysecurity.com/tutorials/28.html
https://github.com/FuzzySecurity/Capcom-Rootkit
The driver literally provided privilege escalation as a service for any user space executable.
As far as I'm concerned anyone who trusts these corporations with kernel level access to their computers is out of their minds. I don't trust firmware but at least it's contained in some isolated device.
The first is what the original claim was, screaming "Russians!" and "Chinese!" at the same time with poor technical understa ding.
The second is what actually happened. It's no worse than inserting a CD-ROM and installing a driver. As bad as that is, and to be criticised in its own right, it's qualitatively different from the first.
Let's not muddy the waters by conflating the two and make the (IMO legitimate) criticism of one of them wade into a conspiracy theory about the other.
There are no "conspiracy theories" here. It's not a theory, it's really happening. It's not a conspiracy, they don't even think what they're doing is wrong. Corporations see themselves as utterly justified in everything that they do in the name of profit. There are no limits they wouldn't cross. Nothing is sacred to them. Not morals, not you, and certainly not your computer and the personal information stored in it.
Trust them at your peril.