[rewqfdsa]

You shouldn't be surprised to see blatant lies from Mircea Popescu, who also claims that he's a billionare, that English literature literally does not exist, that bitcoin literally makes states and laws obsolete, and that nuclear weapons are ineffective.

[dang]

Let's stay on topic, please.

Is this title misleading or linkbait? If so, we should change it as the HN guidelines ask. Would "Two pairs of RSA keys having a common factor found" do? Suggestions for an accurate, neutral title are always welcome.

Edit: We've detached this subthread as off-topic.

[rewqfdsa]

> Would "Two pairs of RSA keys having a common factor found" do?

Yes, that works. There's potentially a serious RSA keygen issue here, but nobody's broken RSA itself, and the headline does a very poor job of communicating this fact.

[asciilifeform]

Incidentally, anyone who suspects that I, Mircea, or Hitler fabricated these keys in order to troll the planet, is free to contact anyone who runs an SKS mirror and ask to examine their copies.

I do not know where the key came from, and especially whether it originates from the person who it claims to belong to (other people have found persuasive evidence that this is not the case) but I did find them 'in the wild.' Doubters are encouraged to check for themselves.

[schoen]

It is actually a pure factorization of two separate keys. But subsequent evidence in this conversation (from agwa above) makes me think that they aren't valid keys that are actively being used by the people in question, but rather spurious additional data being returned by keyservers for some reason, that probably wouldn't be accepted as valid by gpg.

[dang]

I don't understand this well enough to know what an accurate title should say. Can you or anyone suggest one?

[JoshTriplett]

The title should accurately represent the article, even if it turns out the article is wrong; anything else would be editorializing. So even if it turns out the factored subkeys are phony, this article doesn't say that, so neither should the title. The top two comments provide a useful correction.

So, the current title seems fine. If anything, the question mark is a bit of editorialism.

[dang]

The HN guidelines (and longstanding practice) are to prefer the article's title unless it is misleading or linkbait. A false title is misleading.

We sometimes add a question mark when a title is disputed but it isn't clear what a good (i.e. accurate and neutral) title would be. That's the best I've got until someone suggests an accurate and neutral title.

[throwaway2391]

In time for him to edit, I sent asciilifeform (the author of 'phuctor') mail on how I thought he could improve his comments here, just some suggestions to clean up the language so it's more civil for HN, rather than ad-hominem, antagonistic, etc. (As you can see below, I suggested only three deletions, and highlighted seven paragraphs as being very positive.)

He published it on his blog called it "hate mail" and named it tard.png (for retard).

My brief suggestions to him -http://www.loper-os.org/pub/tard.png

His publication of it - http://www.loper-os.org/