Confused Reporter Doubles Down On Bogus Trump/Russian Server Story With 'I'm Just Asking Questions' Non-Apology

Franklin Foer is a pretty famous reporter. But this week he totally blew a story that a ton of other media operations had passed on (for good reason), claiming that there was an internet server out there owned by Donald Trump, that was communicating almost exclusively with a server for a Russian bank. It took all of a few minutes to debunk this as technological confusion on the part of Foer, and a whole heck of a lot of confirmation bias between Foer and the security researchers who had concocted this conspiracy theory with data that they're only supposed to be using for malware research. Of course, in this stupid election season where both candidates simply love to fling ridiculous accusations at one another, Hillary Clinton herself tweeted out two separate tweets about the article, and called it "the most direct link yet between Donald Trump and Moscow." Except, of course, that was bullshit. It was nothing of the sort. It was some confused security researchers, teaming up with a reporter who famously doesn't like the internet or technology, getting a story so ridiculously wrong that it hurts. Some of us kept waiting for Slate to correct or just pull down the story, but they didn't. They put one small update and one small correction that didn't even touch on the core elements of the story that Foer completely flubbed. On Thursday, instead, Foer released a new story, which he claims is him "revisiting" the story to evaluate "new evidence and countertheories." But that's also bullshit. The original theory made no sense at all. The "countertheories" are perfectly logical explanations backed up by data -- but Foer basically puts them all on equal footing and claims he stands by his original reporting. Ridiculously, Foer tries to debunk the claims that everyone made that this was just an outsourced Trump hotel spam server, by arguing that it never appeared on any spam blackhole lists:

Was the server sending spam—unsolicited mail—as opposed to legitimate commercial marketing? There are databases that assiduously and comprehensively catalog spam. I entered the internet protocal address for mail1.trump-email.com to check if it ever showed up in Spamhaus and DNSBL.info. There were no traces of the IP address ever delivering spam. Perhaps the spam went uncataloged because it was being sent to a single bank in Russia, but L. Jean Camp, an Indiana University computer scientist and a source in my original story, thought that possibility unlikely. “It’s highly implausible that spam would continue for so many months, that it would never be reported to spam blocker, or that nobody else in the world would see the spam during that time frame,” she told me.

Wait, what? This seems to be Foer doubling down on his ignorance and confusion about the story. Almost everyone discussing how this was a spam server was using "spam" in the colloquial sense of "marketing emails." They weren't arguing that it was a literal unsolicited email server spewing things like fake Viagra or fake diplomas (though, with Trump, I guess that last one is a possibility too). It's just a marketing server. People who stay at Trump hotels get on a mailing list. I get that kind of spam all the time from hotels or hotel chains I've stayed at. I don't categorize it as outright spam in the purely scammy sense, but it's marketing spam. But Foer and Camp seem to act as if everyone meant the scammy kind of spam. And, as Rob Graham notes in yet another debunking of Foer, this shows a serious misunderstanding of how spam blacklists work anyway:

Cendyn is constantly getting added to blocklists when people complain. They spend considerable effort contacting the many organizations maintaining blocklists, proving they do "opt-outs", and getting "white-listed" instead of "black-listed". Indeed, the entire spam-blacklisting industry is a bit of scam -- getting white-listed often involves a bit of cash. Those maintaining blacklists only go back a few months. The article is in error saying there's no record ever of Cendyn sending spam. Instead, if an address comes up clean, it means there's no record for the past few months. And, if Cendyn is in the white-lists, there would be no record of "spam" at all, anyway.

Later, Foer does consider the marketing email idea, but also tries to discount it.

Still, the marketing email theory has a few holes. A typical marketing campaign would involve the wide distribut