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13-Mar-2024

Watching Tagesschau, Germany's main prime time news, and what do I see? A full Google Cloud private key (the -----BEGIN PRIVATE KEY----- really stands out), including project information, in a news report. I'm not sure whether this is a real key, or just a dummy, but it's a very bad idea to show this on national TV. Actually, the developers should have filtered / obfuscated that part from the script or log output to begin with.
At least it's not the usual ping output or mutliple-terminal-windows-with-htop-running that TV crews seem to like so much to illustrate hackingcoding stuff…

screenshot Tagesschau screenshot Tagesschau magnification

In the normal HD stream, the raw text can already be read (with some effort), considering that higher-quality versions may be available and the quality might be improved by sampling all frames, this is a real security risk.
Knowledge about digital security still isn't pervasive enough in a society that still mostly functions through analog faxes and email at best.