A Lame Flirtation, a not-so-Clever Crime, All on the World Wide Web

Uh oh. A family-values sort of congressman got nailed trying to cheat on his wife and resigned. It's one of the most popular stories of the day. The Times is up front about the story. The original sex revelation came from Gawker -- a web site. The woman involved (who posted a Craigslist personal ad that the congressman, Christopher Lee from way upstate New York answered) chose to send their entire email exchange to Gawker, and not the august New York Times, or Washington Post, or Baltimore Sun. This to me is one of the most significant bits of information in the story. Reporters and editors don't often make clear just how much of their digging is composed of stuff that comes in over the transom. Let's say all the papers and television stations disappeared over night. Don't you think that information is going to seek a way to come out. And don't you think a lot of that information will come to people with enough time and money to sit around  tending their web pages.  (Of course, no one is going to send me money for plane fare to Cairo, and for the record, that's where the big story is today.)

The other interesting things in this story is just how much this kind of hypocrisy undercuts the ultraconservative line; and how mercurial the media is about whose sexual excapades must be pursued and whose are allowed to slide. But this article is very, very muted here.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/10/us/politics/10lee.html

Read us. We'll explain it all to you. That's the deal with news purveyors, isn't it? A quick look at a business story about Chinese hackers stealing information from oil company computers shows us that the purveyors fell down on the job. With rampant gee-whizzism, and a dash of xenophobia, we are told that hackers from Beijing were making a concerted effort, and succeeding, to steal info about oil. The story is clearly based on a report from the computer security company MacAfee, but you're on your own if you want to look it up. There are links in the story to stupid things, like a link to Google, but none to the MacAfee report. But it's easy enough to find, and the report, as well as the news competitors like the WSJ, make it clear that the Times left something important out: The attacks are all based on well-known weaknesses in Microsoft's software. The key to the attacks are sql injections -- sounds diabolical, but hardly ingenious. Almost every web server in the world gets these all the time.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/10/business/global/10hack.html