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6:38pm on Monday, 26th October, 2009:
Outburst
The Guardian's jobs web site got hacked on Friday and the particulars of half a million people were copied by the hackers. If it had been the government, rather than The Guardian, I dare say they would have been rather feisty in their reporting of the event. However, as it was they themselves who were hacked, they reported it as if it were a news story (even to the extent of saying that the third party which holds the data on the newspaper's behalf is "reportedly" Madgex).
However, they had a problem in that for this to look like just a regular news story, they had to put in a stylistic element — a break-out box with figures in it. The figures are not good here: the CVs of some half a million people could be in the hands of crooks. So how do you spin half a million so it doesn't look all that bad?
This is what The Guardian did:
Hmm.
Well, hopefully some other newspaper will take up the challenge and report:
1,000,000,000
| The number, in two thousandths, of users of the Guardian Jobs site who may have had their personal data compromised. |
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Copyright © 2009 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).