Irreal, as you probably know, how a dim view of the effectiveness, among other things, of the media. This is particularly true of the technical press, of course, but also holds for the more main stream traditional press.
Case in point: you would think that if one were going to write about security they would actually know something about it. Yet here’s the The New York Post decrying the sale of NYC “1620” keys by some rogue locksmiths and the implications this has for security and terrorism and God knows what else. The problem is that along with the article they published a large picture of the key. Now everyone can have one even without paying the $15.50 the locksmiths were asking.
None of this is news. Remember when the TSA allowed The Washington Post to publish pictures of their luggage master keys and the widespread ridicule of many in the press? You’d think that someone at the Post—a large and sophisticated paper—would have heard about that. Apparently not. And why didn’t the reporter who was, after all, writing about security know this? No one expects reporters to be able to explain, say, the intricacies of RSA encryption but they should know by now that if you publish a picture of a key it’s trivial to make a copy.