God, can we please change the fucking headline? What a fucking joke.
It's not like this is a fucking undersea cable cut to insert a hardware beam splitter and intercept petabytes of indiscriminate network traffic.
It's an <img/> tag.
The title would make more sense to the HN audience if it read:
"Navy Prosecutor Inserts Tracking Pixel Into Email Sent To Journalist, In Effort to Discover and Track Leak From Anonymous Source"
That would be a more technically accurate title that retains the spirit of the intended message.
The sender of the email was being deceptive, and attempted a poorly conceived effort to use a less than covert, but non-obvious loophole in technology that would fail to work on savvy users and technical folks.
It's not like this is a fucking undersea cable cut to insert a hardware beam splitter and intercept petabytes of indiscriminate network traffic.
It's an <img/> tag.
The title would make more sense to the HN audience if it read:
"Navy Prosecutor Inserts Tracking Pixel Into Email Sent To Journalist, In Effort to Discover and Track Leak From Anonymous Source"
That would be a more technically accurate title that retains the spirit of the intended message.
The sender of the email was being deceptive, and attempted a poorly conceived effort to use a less than covert, but non-obvious loophole in technology that would fail to work on savvy users and technical folks.
Is it scummy? Yeah.
Is it secret? Nope.
Is it newsworthy? Definitely.
Is it respectable behavior? Not in the slightest.