8mo ago

Saudi Arabia accused of modifying official Cop29 negotiating text | News of changes to usually non-editable document ‘risks placing climate summit in jeopardy'

Revealed: Saudi Arabia accused of modifying official Cop29 negotiating text

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Yikes. These people have no concept of operational security, if they think sending something as PDF prevents it from being edited.
- "I set the read only flag on the file. What more do you expect me to do?!"
- It's not "I sent it as a pdf" but "I gave edit access to the master copy to somebody who shouldn't have had it"
- But I used the password "P@55w0rd1"!!!
  
  I just use P155w0rd as my password. No one guesses it
Implying it wasn't already a fucking joke
imagine watching over Cop29 and thinking it wasn't empty and performative enough
I am reminded of that one guy who retyped an entire credit card agreement with clauses in his favour, formatted it to look like the original, then signed it and sent it back.
But at that point the stories diverge because he got away with quite a lot of "abuse" before they cancelled his card... and were required to pay his cancellation fee.
... or do they, because this Cop29 story seems to suggest that the Saudis have not only done this in the past, but they've been given secret permission to do so.
Not gonna suggest github because you know Microsoft, but you get the idea.
- No type of source control helps when the people who control access are giving it to people who shouldn't have it. Think of it as the github workspace admin giving out accounts to malicious individuals.
  
  In git terms, it sounds like the Saudi delegate added some commits to HEAD. But if they really used git, that wouldn't have affected the release branch.

13 comments