The utter stupidity of the Nation's attempt to absolve Russia of the DNC hacks. [View all]

[DanTex]

I'm surprised they would sink this low. Here's the article. It's long. I actually read it, and followed the links. But don't bother.

https://www.thenation.com/article/a-new-report-raises-big-questions-about-last-years-dnc-hack/

Here's the TL;DR. The "questions" are all based on the timestamps on DNC files that were released. There are two salient points. First, the times suggest that the computer involved was running on Eastern Time in the US. Second, the differences between the timestamps indicate a transfer rate of about 23 MB/sec, which is faster than would be possible from most ISPs (fair enough, it's MB not Mb). From that they conclude that the files must have been copied physically onto a thumb drive rather than hacked over the internet.

OK. So leave aside the fact that it is utterly trivial to modify file timestamps, or the fact that there are indeed plenty of servers connected to the internet that can do 23 MB/sec no problem. This article is even stupider.

Because, even if we accept that the timestamps indicate copying locally, not through the internet, all this analysis would imply is that at some point the files were copied locally. It says absolutely nothing about what happened before those files got copied. Files get copied all the time. To assume that these timestamps represent the actual time of the hacking, rather than some other time that someone copied them from one drive to another, or one folder to another, is unbelievably stupid.

I don't know Nation, you've written some good things in the past. But to sink to this level, citing anonymous "studies" on the internet by people who don't have the first clue how computers work, in order to absolve Russia. Not good.