zlacker

To summarise, your position is that what Cloudflare says is more trustworthy because they know the truth.

You do not really address the fact that they are not required to say the truth, or that when the truth is harmful for their public image they are directly incentivised to not speak the truth. The only way you do address this is by saying that this is something that needs investigating. I would posit that the grandparent has done this already, and come to the sensible conclusion: There is less reason to trust someone incentivised to lie than there is to trust someone who knows nothing.

Aside from that trust, we have to evaluate the validity of statements. Given prior knowledge, for Cloudflare in the bad case the likelihood of a valid statement approaches zero. For the random yelling things as they pop into their mind, it is completely unknown.

>>krageo+(OP)
My position is only that there's a difference. In some sense we could treat it as though it's just garbage, but it's worth investigating. For example if it was written by an outside PR person who has no access to the people who made the decision, that also changes things.

It's not so pure. For example an outsider here on HN who says "A close relative of mine works at cloudflare on the team that made this decision, and he confided in me..." -- then again you have to somehow judge if this is true or not, but it is worth treating it differently from someone writing "I don't have any insider information and this is pure speculation, but maybe..."

I mean it just doesn't make sense to treat these cases as exactly the same. I wanted to give another example. say you don't trust the gps coordinates you're being given when you make an API call on a device.

would it make sense to treat it exactly the same as making the API call on a device that doesn't even have a gps module, such as a microcontroller without gps or wifi/cellular access or anything that can be a proxy for gps?

if there's a physical module and you don't trust the output, at least you can investigate. it doesn't make sense to treat it exactly the same as if the information isn't even on the same device.

it depends on the details of the process that's giving you the output you don't trust. What's the process by which getX returns its output? What's the process by which Cloudflare employees make statements about their motivations (which they do have access to)?

These are questions we can investigate. if we find that the statements are written by a PR agency who hasn't even stepped in their building and has no contact with the teams they're lying on behalf of, that's a possible result too. but it's worth looking into.

>>thrwwa+c3
Your GPS/Microcontroller example is not very relevant, as those are chips that malfunction in measurable ways. We were discussing people. Fundamentally I think we just disagree about how much the word of a corporation can (and should) be trusted. That's okay, and to my view unlikely to change with extended discussion.