Most importantly they are colouring in the people and their flaws, without specifically labelling them (e.g. psycho/sociopathic is never said, but the behaviours are).

The interactions with politicians and federal entities are critical to understanding the story.

What you see as irrelevant information is all extremely relevent if you care about protecting yourself against fraud, manipulation, bad actors, etcetera.

Think about the legal and social context of this article, and you will see other facets of the reporting that are clever.

I am a middle aged intelligent man who used to be an engineer, and now I have moved up the ranks. I work in IT for a droll company, so I can afford some toys and vacations, and a bit because I just like hardware.

I treat El Reg like a British pub, where wit is appreciated, and sometimes we talk about "the war" (our collective past), and certainly taking the piss out of ourselves and everyone else is a good laff.

I also need to know some of what El Reg writes about for work; at least they make it fun, unlike most of the rest of my job where much of the pleasure is black.

indeed...

My impression of the -sparse- darknet mentions is that they were independently (= not through their P2P monitoring software) looking for useful data there and manually inserting it into their datastore.

> In the nineties, Microsoft pursued a canonical FUD strategy, creating phony error messages to make consumers wary of using Windows on a competitor’s operating system—a tactic that resulted in a legal settlement exceeding two hundred million dollars.