Haystack and the Myth of the Boy Wizard

Jamie sent in an interesting writeup about The Myth of the Boy Wizard. No, it's not about Hogwarts, but rather about Haystack and its creator, Austin Heap. Last summer the media covered the programmer, the software, and its supposed effect on Iranian censorship. But as is often the case, truth is less interesting than reality. What happened is that the story managed to press some magic buttons, and the media ran with it. This one is worth a read.

Comments

Re:Not surprising

[Darkness404]

The problem is then the people in management don't understand it so they force the tech people to "dumb it down" to the point where it becomes essentially false. For example:

Cookies can store data about where you have been and what ads you have seen. Therefore, cookies can be used to track you.

Soon becomes:

Cookies track data about people.

Eventually becomes:

Cookies are a privacy threat.

Which gets read by the masses as:

Cookies are viruses.

Re:Not surprising

[morgan_greywolf]

But the problem in this case isn't with engineers that don't know tech, it's with journalists that don't know journalism. Consider what the article's author asked Newsweek:

In your article "Computer Programmer Takes On the World's Despots" you appear to have taken the author of the supposed Haystack program at his word. There are no quotes from people who've used the software, nor from people who've seen the software. How do we know that Austin Heap is telling the truth, and, more importantly, how do we know that the software works as advertised?

Surely, it's very basic journalism to have talked to more than one person about this subject.

There John Graham-Cumming hits the head right on the nail: they spoke only to Austin Heap and failed to get a second source. That isn't a failure to understand tech, that's a failure to understand Journalism 101.