Don't speculate, the evidence is bad enough.

There's no "don't change titles" rule, though it's interesting how the actual rule gets truncated to that in people's minds! Here's the actual rule:

"Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

In this case I was thinking of both the 'misleading' and 'linkbait' bits of that 'unless'. (By the way, this is common HN moderation practice—bog standard, as I often say.)

> to choose one unprovable point until another just as unprovable point is proven

You might have a, er, provable point if that were the case! but I'm taking for granted that the officials in question did actually use this client, so "used" is known while "use" (which I took to mean "are still using") isn't yet known for sure. Did I miss something?

Edit: btw, in case anyone's wondering why we left the submitted title up instead of reverting it to what the article says, one reason is that the submitted title struck me as arguably less linkbaity (and therefore ok under the rule) and the other reason is that we cut authors a bit of slack when they post their own work.

"Used" still allows "use" in the mitch-hedbergian sense.

I don't know why you're downvoted, she is a horrible liar.

> It's silly and ridiculous.

As is putting someone with a brain parasite and anti-vax beliefs as the head of HHS, but here we are.

“Silly and ridiculous” does not mean “implausible” with this administration. It’s the standard.

> This additional revelation, about the use of TeleMessage, shows that someone with a security background has actually thought about these things.

We only have evidence they used TeleMessage after the scandal. When the same guy let the press take a photo of his messages with Vance, Rubio, Gabbard and others.

> It was incontrovertibly approved as it is only installable via MDM.

Only if this his standard govt issued phone. It's also been shown they are also using their own personal phones. The could easily be using unapproved phones some random DOGE'er bought gave them with an MDM setup, without any real oversight.

This TM SGNL app is compatible with legit Signal clients and servers.

It’s also possible that they are using this app to archive chats that other parties _believe_ to be disappeared.

In other words, set your chats to disappear in 5 minutes and convince your target to dish some sensitive info. They think it’s off the record, but it’s instantly archived

Whether it was for that purpose or not, the messages did wind up disappearing. The CIA admitted it in a court filing.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/15/us/politics/cia-director-...

No it was reported by the journalist who was in the chat.

> Waltz set some of the messages in the Signal group to disappear after one week

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/03/trump-a...

There are already government e2e apps. The only reason to use something else is to have selective auto-deletion and/or to use personal devices for official classified data.

That's a fair point, and it's your call - however, if the new (major) development is covered in this way then 1) users on the front page won't see mention of it at headline level and 2) the discussion of that development on HN will be affected by/limited to the time-decay of a post that is 12 hours older. I understand that there are tradeoffs at play, it really comes down to if the development at hand is big-enough to justify another post, and, again, that's your call.

In August last year I got this from dang when reporting a dead 404 link: "The site 404media.co is banned on HN because it has been the source of too many low-quality posts and because many (most?) of their articles are behind a signup wall."

Not that I've really seen the low quality and the signup requirement doesn't stop other domains. There's quite a few things that originated from 404, so I hope HN gets over whatever it was that annoyed them originally.