{"id":1747837,"date":"2022-11-22T09:48:01","date_gmt":"2022-11-22T14:48:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1747837"},"modified":"2022-11-22T09:48:05","modified_gmt":"2022-11-22T14:48:05","slug":"news-outlets-expose-themselves-as-tech-illiterate-by-taking-years-to-authenticate-hunters-laptop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/news-outlets-expose-themselves-as-tech-illiterate-by-taking-years-to-authenticate-hunters-laptop\/","title":{"rendered":"News Outlets Expose Themselves As Tech-Illiterate By Taking Years To Authenticate Hunter\u2019s Laptop"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">26<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fnews-outlets-expose-themselves-as-tech-illiterate-by-taking-years-to-authenticate-hunters-laptop%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1747837&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>More than two years after the New York Post broke the news of crack addict-turned-first son Hunter Biden\u2019s laptop, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.msn.com\/en-us\/news\/politics\/forensic-analysis-of-copy-of-hunter-biden-laptop-data-shows-no-tampering\/ar-AA14nXIG\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">CBS News<\/a> reported that the laptop is authentic \u2014 just days after the second election day in which it might have made a difference.<\/p>\n<p>CBS said it commissioned experts at a Minneapolis-based firm called Computer Forensics Services to evaluate the hard drive. It used a variety of digital techniques, but in the end, it leaned heavily on a common-sense judgment that was available to even non-technical viewers of the laptop: \u201cJust the sheer volume of what we\u2019re dealing with it would be difficult, if not impossible, to fabricate,\u201d Sean Lanterman, the company\u2019s incident response director, told CBS.<\/p>\n<p>The report was by CBS\u2019s Catherine Herridge. Before the 2020 election, the network\u2019s Lesley Stahl sat down with then-President Donald Trump, who asked her why she wasn\u2019t covering the laptop. Stahl rebuked him: \u201cBecause it can\u2019t be verified.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>But for anyone with basic computer programming knowledge, it needed to take only minutes to conclusively say that emails on the laptop are authentic. An anti-spam measure called DKIM lets the possessor of an email ask the sender\u2019s server whether it really sent a message with the given text in order to prevent spammers from impersonating others. Your email provider likely runs this check instantaneously anytime you open an email.<\/p>\n<p>The Daily Wire\u2019s investigative unit verified the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailywire.com\/collections\/the-hunter-biden-files\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">laptop\u2019s emails<\/a> using this method, with no outside expert required. A DKIM check could not be performed for all emails for a variety of typical reasons, such as that the sender\u2019s email client didn\u2019t use the technology. But for the large portion in which the DKIM signature was present, it showed that they were real and unaltered.<\/p>\n<p>DKIM was not present on one of the most sensational emails, which proposed earmarking 10% of the proceeds of a Chinese business venture as \u201cheld by H for the big guy.\u201d But remarkably enough, one of the recipients of that email \u2014\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailywire.com\/news\/hunter-biden-laptop-whistleblower-tells-tucker-carlson-fbi-ghosted-him-before-2020-election\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Tony Bobulinski<\/a>, a former military officer with impeccable intelligence credentials and bipartisan bona fides \u2014 confirmed that email\u2019s authenticity in a press conference before the election.<\/p>\n<p>Reporters had reason to be familiar with technology tools for verifying emails, because the same technique was used to prove the authenticity of <a href=\"https:\/\/dailycaller.com\/2016\/10\/21\/heres-cryptographic-proof-that-donna-brazile-is-wrong-wikileaks-emails-are-real\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Democratic National Committee emails<\/a> after Democrats claimed during the 2016 election that emails published by Wikileaks might be fake. Wikileaks later incorporated DKIM results in its online tool.<\/p>\n<p>The slow-walking is part of a pattern in which legacy media outlets appear to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailywire.com\/news\/cbs-finally-admits-hunters-laptop-is-real-more-than-two-years-after-the-fact\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">adopt farcically slow timelines<\/a> in what is ordinarily a frenetic business when they are faced with an inconvenient truth that can\u2019t be rebutted.<\/p>\n<p>On October 14, 2020, the <a href=\"https:\/\/nypost.com\/2020\/10\/14\/email-reveals-how-hunter-biden-introduced-ukrainian-biz-man-to-dad\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">New York Post<\/a> reported on the existence of the laptop, and how it showed Hunter name-dropping his father in his lucrative international ventures. It was a classic \u201cOctober surprise\u201d that stood to roil the presidential election \u2014 if people saw it, that is. Twitter blocked the New York Post\u2019s account, and Facebook throttled the story. On October 19, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.politico.com\/news\/2020\/10\/19\/hunter-biden-story-russian-disinfo-430276\">Politico<\/a> ran a story headlined \u201cHunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>For the most part, however, major news outlets ignored the laptop. Publicly-funded NPR wrote on Twitter before the election that it was enforcing a blackout because \u201cWe don\u2019t want to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailywire.com\/news\/npr-were-not-covering-biden-laptop-scandal-because-its-not-really-a-story-pure-distractions\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">waste our time<\/a> on stories that are not really stories, and we don\u2019t want to waste the listeners\u2019 and readers\u2019 time on stories that are just pure distractions.\u201d NPR later <a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailywire.com\/news\/npr-admits-major-error-after-claiming-hunter-biden-laptop-reports-discredited\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">falsely reported<\/a> in April 2021 that the laptop\u2019s contents had been \u201cdiscredited by U.S. intelligence and independent investigations by news organizations.\u201d It later issued a correction, saying U.S. intelligence \u201chas not issued a statement to that effect.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>It wasn\u2019t until March 16, 2022, that The <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2022\/03\/16\/us\/politics\/hunter-biden-tax-bill-investigation.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">New York Times<\/a> casually admitted that it knew the laptop was real, writing in the 24th paragraph of a story about Hunter\u2019s tax woes that \u201cemails were obtained by The New York Times from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop. The email and others in the cache were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>As if embarrassed by its rival, weeks later on March 30, 2022, The <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/technology\/2022\/03\/30\/hunter-biden-laptop-data-examined\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Washington Post<\/a> reported that \u201cThousands of emails purportedly from the laptop computer of Hunter Biden, President Biden\u2019s son, are authentic communications,\u201d citing \u201ctwo security experts who examined the data at the request of The Washington Post.\u201d Those security experts primarily relied on DKIM.<\/p>\n<p>The Washington Post apparently felt more comfortable ignoring the reports of other outlets, which spelled out the technique on which its expert eventually relied. The <a href=\"https:\/\/dailycaller.com\/2020\/10\/29\/cybersecurity-expert-authenticates-hunter-biden-burisma-email\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Daily Caller<\/a> on October 29, 2020, got a cybersecurity expert to say that a key email was authentic, relying on DKIM. The <a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailymail.co.uk\/news\/article-9445105\/What-Hunter-Biden-left-tell-memoir-revealed.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Daily Mail<\/a> later had an outside forensics expert<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For anyone with basic computer programming knowledge, it needed to take only minutes to conclusively say that emails on the laptop are authentic. An anti-spam measure called DKIM lets the possessor of an email ask the sender\u2019s server whether it really sent a message with the given text in order to prevent spammers from impersonating others. Your email provider likely runs this check instantaneously anytime you open an email.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":1747840,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[541],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1747837","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-daily-wire"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1747837","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1747837"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1747837\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1747840"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1747837"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1747837"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1747837"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}