The Tangled Web Syndrome



As someone interested in all sorts of hoaxes, frauds, and weird claims, there's a pattern of events I've seen over and over again.

- It starts when someone makes a sensational but unlikely claim. Said claim will be buttressed with some minimal concrete evidence.
 
(Note that when I say "unlikely", I'm using the term very broadly. Anything from "mentos dropped in Diet Coke will make a 10-foot tall geyser" to "My baby's father is a space alien.")
 
- Believers will rally around the claim, usually because it fits with some well established worldview.
 
- More skeptical minds will point out obvious problems with the evidence presented.
 
- The believers will respond by spinning conspiracy theories, or parsing criticisms of the original evidence for the slightest error, no matter how inconsequential.
 
- The original claimant, or a prominent believer in communication with the claimant, will admit that the original evidence may appear lacking, but that final irrefutable proof exists and that it will be revealed "soon."
 
And generally that's where the active part of the process ends. The believers and skeptics may argue on for a while, but the promised proof will remain tantalizingly the stuff of the near future. The original claim is either destroyed when the original claimants are proven frauds, or it just kind of fades away. In rare cases it becomes the basis of a new religion.
 
I bring this pattern up because I'm watching it being played out in every particular right now on the web. Back in August David Maynor & Jon Ellch, two researchers for the computer security company SecureWorks, claimed at a conference that they had found a Wi-Fi exploit that would let them hijack just about any computer with a Wi-Fi card. They showed a video demonstrating the process, and the machine they hacked was an Apple MacBook. The next day Washington Post tech writer Brian Krebs wrote about the demonstration under the headline "Hijacking a MacBook in 60 Seconds or Less." Obviously, the idea here was gain maximum publicity by suggesting that Mac OS X's rock-solid reputation for security was in jeopardy.
 
However, Maynor and Ellch's demo had problems. Most obviously, the hack was supposed to work on any Wi-Fi card, but for some reason Maynor and Ellch had a third-party, external Wif-Fi card attached to the MacBook. All MacBooks have a Wi-Fi card (what Apple calls an Airport card) built in, so what was the purpose of the extra card? Maynor and Ellch later claimed that they used the external card in the demo because Apple "leaned" on them to not do the demo on a completely stock MacBook, but they've offered no further explanation or proof of this claim. (It probably also didn't help that Maynor gets defensive about being accused of fraud at the end of the short video that people were seeing for the first people. Only the magician about to cut a woman in half actually says, "What you're about the see isn't a trick.")
 
The most fanatical believer in the Maynor and Ellch hack would probably be ZDnet's columnist George Ou. Ou has been picking apart Apple's statements on the subject, trying to prove that the company's non-ambiguous statements on the hack still have enough wiggle room to "prove" Maynor and Ellch were right. He's also been claiming to have "sensitive information" and that "soon things will get really interesting." It's the old claim that proof is just around the corner, but really, at this point it's too late. If Maynor and Ellch could do what they claimed to Krebs, they should have been able to prove it by now. Easily. They should be able to walk up to any Apple Store with their Dell laptop and restart the machines inside remotely. Ou and the others like him have an amazing ability to ignore this, and expect us to await the "better" evidence that will prove their claim, rather just having the claim demonstrated for all to see. Now Maynor and Ou are saying the final, definitive, ultimate, gooey, proof will be unveiled this weekend. We'll see.

Posted: Tue - September 26, 2006 at      

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