Cannon does not have the technical savvy to comprehend Goodings arguments...
Yes, Cannon lacks technical savvy in computer stuff. That's why he enlisted the aid of folks who do have that kind of technical savvy to help him.
A number of tech-savvy people tested out Cannon's idea and found that it was indeed possible for someone other than a yFrog account owner to upload images and generate tweets from the account. And the interesting thing was that there are anomalies in the screen captures Daniel Wolfe was sending people which had raised some questions about whether the screen captures were genuine -- and it turns out the tweets sent out when someone uses the yFrog exploit Cannon discovered have the exact same anomalies.
We have a number of tech-savvy people confirming Cannon's idea works. (Or did work until yFrog, soon after Cannon discovered and began publicizing the existence of the exploit, disabled that feature.) We have a number of tech-savvy people demonstrating it works -- and demonstrating that the results look just like the tweets that Wolfe has been peddling to folks.
In contrast, we have Gooding -- who claims to have refuted Cannon. We have Gooding's word that he's some super-savvy computer whiz. But his word doesn't seem especially good. His track record, as documented by Cannon, looks rather poor.
So let's try to straighten this out. Here,
by way of Rachel Maddow, is the gist of what Cannon is saying.
Rachel Maddow said:
The theory is that Congressman Weiner's account was spoofed through yfrog's mobile e-mail upload system. You've probably seen this feature on other services as well, it's not uncommon, but in case you're not familiar, the idea is that you can send an e-mail to your online account and it'll automatically turn that e-mail's subject line into a tweet. And if you have an image attached to the mail, it'll upload the image for you and add the link to the tweet as well.
Anyone who knows your secret e-mail address can send messages through your account this way. So the theory goes that someone figured out the congressman's secret address and essentially impersonated him, sending the now-infamous photo of dubious work safety to that poor gal near Seattle.
That's simple and clear, I think.
Now: can you give me a similarly simple, clear summary of what Gooding says is wrong with Cannon's theory? I'm not interested in angry rhetoric. I'm not interested in petty nit-picking or tangential criticisms (the equivalent of criticizing someone's spelling or grammar here). I'm interested in whether there's anything substantively wrong with what Cannon said could be done.
Because a number of people who genuinely are qualified to speak on the matter are indicating there isn't -- that it could have been done exactly as Cannon indicates, and that if it had been done that way the results would exactly match the screen-captures we saw.
Gooding may make a rhetorical case that what Cannon maintains could have been done actually can't. But Cannon set up a yFrog account and a number of tech-savvy folks, testing the idea out emperically, did it. In my book, empirical evidence trumps rhetoric. Especially rhetoric from someone such as Gooding, whose main record in the past seems to be one of being consistently partisan and consistently wrong.
shocked I tell you!!
I promise not to use any more sources from a site maintained by a college or university, because they are clearly biased in favour of reality
(by the way, I have my fingers crossed behind my back).
and a blog from some nutcase who proudly displays an Obama = Communist banner.
