That guy should've been more scared about getting it wrong. Every single piece of evidence pointed to his supposed secret communications channel with a Russian bank (and a random American health clinic for some reason) being the simple result of run-of-the-mill mass marketing emails for Trump hotels sent by a company that had been subcontracted to do so for years. The Intercept even managed to obtain copies of some of the emails they'd sent. A DNS covert channel of the sort being suggested would require the secret co-operation of the technical staff at a company the Trump Organization didn't even have a direct contractual relationship with - why take that risk to set up a really terrible communications channel? Multiple outlets had apparently already passed on the story because it didn't hold up - but that didn't matter, because the moment he published it went viral on social media, with the Clinton camp's tweets alone getting tens of thousands of retweets.
It would be no exaggeration to say that his decision to ignore the pesky technical objections he didn't understand and run the story anyway did permanent damage to the US political and news climate, that it made everyone's beliefs about the world a little more wrong forevermore. When Clinton's campaign tweeted to demand the FBI investigate, only one outlet - the New York Times - dared stand up and report that the FBI had already investigated and concluded all the evidence was consistent with it being exactly the boring junk email server it looked like, and people are still pointing to that article to drag the Times' reputation through the mud to this day. (Their own public editor even criticized them for questioning and not believing!)
He created a world where not believing junk emails were secret Russian communications was, to quote the recent New Yorker article, the equivalent of believing "that space aliens did this".
Though not pertinent to my original comment, that newyorker article does have a portion where experts argue that the misconfigured bulk emailer explanation which you bring-up does not hold water:
I'm saying 9to5mac as an apple enthusiast site has a reason to run the post it did and that since technical people like to talk about technical things of course there's someone connected to the story making those arguments then largely non-technical reporters have trouble making sense of it all.
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That guy should've been more scared about getting it wrong. Every single piece of evidence pointed to his supposed secret communications channel with a Russian bank (and a random American health clinic for some reason) being the simple result of run-of-the-mill mass marketing emails for Trump hotels sent by a company that had been subcontracted to do so for years. The Intercept even managed to obtain copies of some of the emails they'd sent. A DNS covert channel of the sort being suggested would require the secret co-operation of the technical staff at a company the Trump Organization didn't even have a direct contractual relationship with - why take that risk to set up a really terrible communications channel? Multiple outlets had apparently already passed on the story because it didn't hold up - but that didn't matter, because the moment he published it went viral on social media, with the Clinton camp's tweets alone getting tens of thousands of retweets.
It would be no exaggeration to say that his decision to ignore the pesky technical objections he didn't understand and run the story anyway did permanent damage to the US political and news climate, that it made everyone's beliefs about the world a little more wrong forevermore. When Clinton's campaign tweeted to demand the FBI investigate, only one outlet - the New York Times - dared stand up and report that the FBI had already investigated and concluded all the evidence was consistent with it being exactly the boring junk email server it looked like, and people are still pointing to that article to drag the Times' reputation through the mud to this day. (Their own public editor even criticized them for questioning and not believing!)
He created a world where not believing junk emails were secret Russian communications was, to quote the recent New Yorker article, the equivalent of believing "that space aliens did this".
Though not pertinent to my original comment, that newyorker article does have a portion where experts argue that the misconfigured bulk emailer explanation which you bring-up does not hold water:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/15/was-there-a-co...
I'm saying 9to5mac as an apple enthusiast site has a reason to run the post it did and that since technical people like to talk about technical things of course there's someone connected to the story making those arguments then largely non-technical reporters have trouble making sense of it all.