common
It's rare for Barbara Ellen to get anything right so it's not surprising.
You might think being a Sunday newspaper columnist is a pretty easy gig. Think again. They have to conjure provocative opinions on everything, on demand, often with only the weakest grasp of the facts. To highlight their plight, here we present Barbara Ellen's attempt in yesterday's Observer to wrestle copy from ICANN's …
but this probably represents the upper-quartile's understanding of the internet, its naming and how it works. The other three-quarters think the internet is Google.
Since the whole censorship and copyright and freedoms debates will/are being informed by the same people (ooops, I nearly called them "journalists") who write this stuff, the best we can hope for are some over-zealous laws, quickly slapped together to solve the problems caused by tabloid headlines. These same laws will probably catch more unintended victims that actual harm-doers and will then be vilified by the same trashy newspaper articles that forced their creation in the first place.
In britain it's pretty much impossible to write a well-considered, emotionally uncharged and balanced piece of mass journalism about certain topics: drugs, children, terrorism and sex are the most frequently misrepresented (followed by europe, foreigners, green, non-green and small furry animals - esp. giant pandas, OK - and large furry animals). Until newspapers can get over their own taboos we stand no chance of making any sort of social progress and even less chance of some half-sensible legislation what does what it says on the tin.
I tried several times to explain to my father in law that BT Yahoo was not the internet. When I changed his default home page from BT Yahoo to Google he flipped out and phoned me. "My internet is not working" he said. You can imagine how the phonecall trying to get him to install and use Skype went.
The sooner anyone aged over 55 is dead the better.
I don't understand why you want to impose anything on your father then not tell tell him. It sounds as if you changed his browser defaults then went away without telling him only for him to find out what you did when you weren't there. I get frustrated with my father but I wouldn't alter anything he didn't want altering just to suit me. If he's happy with the way he's doing things why do you feel the need to gain some feeling of superiority over him. What did he do to you as a child?
Also, changing the home page to Google isn't exactly the height of internet sophistication. I would wager that most techies have about:blank as their home page.
but they give me a quick check of whether I've got a connection when I start the browser, so I normally use one of them. Ask.com for myself, Google for people I setup systems for. Most of them do think Google is the Internet. Which is at least a bit better than my mother who thinks it is AOL and can't find her way without it, no matter how hard I try to show her otherwise.
This >55 spent a chunk of his weekend rebuilding the MBR of a 16-year-old's netbook. Don't think the younger generation know much about technology. They know how to use the stuff, but ask them how to defrag a hard disk, or tell the difference between a VGA and a DVI connector, and their little jaws drop with incomprehension.
The over 55s will be dead in due course Sonny Jim, but don't take it out on us because you married into a family of techno-retards.
you have had many more years in IT than they?
say you are 55, been into tech for 30 years....
you get a new techie, who is 25, been into tech for 5 years.
are you really 6x more knowledgable than him?
and any techie that cant tell a dvi (i or d?) from a vga needs to go work for mcdonalds lol.
You do know that much all of the stuff that makes your shiny Google & Skype stuff work was done by people over 55...
Now go and play on Twitter (or Facebook or whatever you think is computing) with all of the other spoilt children - While we worry about Unix; and relational databases; and TCP/IP; and the World Wide Web; and C, C++ and Java - The trivial stuff that actual makes everything work.
Sorry, my mistake, Tim Berners-Lee and James Gosling are only just 55.
Sorry again - You may have touched a nerve - I probably spend too much time with people under the age of 35 who think that the internet is the big blue "e"; and wonder why they need a different account name and password to log onto their PC and Facebook; and think that Microsoft invented everything to do with computers.
Uphill, In the snow, both ways.
>The sooner anyone aged over 55 is dead the better
I have a year to live then. Unfortunately I have e-mails dating back to 1998, can write web pages using note pad, I know where the HOSTS file is on my PC and can edit it etc. etc.
I'm probably more IT literate than you but it doesn't matter because I will be dead in a year.
Meh...
And if one of my kids changed my PC settings without my express permission I'd feed one of their kid sweets and chocolate until said grandchild was about to be gloriously sick. _THEN_ I'd give the kid back.
Though as I'm the one who sets up _their_ machines I doubt that they'd dare mess one of mine about.
Beer, it makes raising children bearable.
I am laughing,
>but this probably represents the upper-quartile's understanding of the internet, its naming and how it works. The other three-quarters think the internet is Google.
Which group do you fit in? Or maybe your brain is so quick the internet expands for you and you can squeeze into a quarter in another dimension for really, really intelligent people who understand everything.
It pains me to see that a lot of so called techies think that the internet can be divided into the elite upper quartile who don't know one end of a domain name from the other (hardly elitist) and those who think Google is the be all and end all of the internet. The latter appears to be supported by the "Over 55's" commentard.
Wasn't there an episode from The IT Crowd where the guys convinces Jen that the entire internet is contained in a small black box and she in turn gives a presentation to high-powered nobs who ended up in awe of the box?
A lot of similarities here methinks...
PS. I have always maintained that the standard of education in the UK is on the downward slide but that's another topic.
The Gaurdian does sometimes do EXCELLENT articles such as this article about Dumb & Dumber who are now on the Health Select Committtee -http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/jun/26/conservatives-health-select-committee
Clearly, they shoudl fire Barbara because she's stupid.
Why would any porn company be unhappy about having a whole new address space to buy into with almost no competition from any other companies?
I can't see them ever forcing certain types of companies to have xxx on the end in the same way all the other top-level domains are not used by the correct companies most of the time.
that's *exactly* what the pornmeisters are worried about. And once they are coralled into .xxx domains, it's the work of a second for a country to block that entire domain.
He's a similar suggestion .... you know how currently we use .gov for government associated websites ? Why not have .anarchy as a domain for all viewpoints that oppose the government ?
"once they are coralled into .xxx domains, it's the work of a second for a country to block that entire domain."
...and the work of another second for users to type in the actual IP address and thereby bypass the censorship. The .xxx proposal is protection against *accidentally* landing on porn. To make it even vaguely secure against *deliberate* attempts to reach these sites you'd have to perform a reverse DNS lookup on every TCP connection attempt. To make that even remotely efficient, you'd need to cache the lookups, which is no different from having a long list of barred IP addresses, which is what these countries presumably have right now.
Only a young child or a politician will be thwarted by censorship at this level. However, that's the benefit. In the case of young children, I don't actually hear anyone campaigning for their rights to access smut. In the case of the latter, perhaps that's the best solution: give them a fig-leaf so that they can go back to their constituents and say "Porn has been banished from the interweb! Praise $(diety)!".
because they could very easily be blocked from networks (or countries) that don't allow pr0n. Right now, you can't block ".com" (which is where they reside), you have to instead depends on a published list of known pr0n sites and block each one*. If you force the pr0n industry to use the top domain ".xxx" then they will lose a good partition of their customers.
* or force your network through opendns, which is what I did in my office. All non-encrypted DNS requests are forwarded to opendns.
Your all gonna shoot her down for a slight of hand?
That's really weak, remember that, 'cause others will judge you on it.
Users don't care about how the tinternet works, they just want it to work when they are shopping or shit. For gods sake most people in this country cant tie their own shoe laces, never mind expecting them to know this.
>"For gods sake most people in this country cant tie their own shoe laces, never mind expecting them to know this."
And if they read the paper this appeared in, they never will.
I suppose that it's perfectly acceptable for newspapers to make things up if they don't understand them.
Problem is, you let something like this pass, what else do you let pass? Invading $country was to find WMDs? Stop Al Quaeda? Bring democracy to the Freedom loving peoples of the Middle East? Pinch a shedload of oil?
Seen it happen before.
Posts by Obviously!
All because the average user has no idea what they are doing..... → #
Posted Tuesday 29th June 2010 10:44 GMT
>In Notorious Kraken botnet rises from the ashes
>Sorry its not good enough to cry that tech should be available to all.
>If you dont have the faintest idea, you shouldnt be allowed to surf.
>We don't let drivers without a licence on our roads!
But it's Ok to write articles about it?
"This article referred to www. and the notional xxx. as suffixes. It should have been prefix. This has been corrected."
Great journalism - get readers to spot the mistake then correct it with another mistake! It would never happen on El Reg.
Long live Grauniad, we need a laugh from time to time.
Some commentards with don't read beyond the first paragraph of the story or possibly just skip straight to the comments page without reading the story at all.
What's amusing about this story is not so much the original column's confusion of suffix and prefix or TLD and host name, but the fact that some idiot sub ed made things worse by publishing a supposed correction. It's bad enough that the original wasn't proof read, but you would think the person posting up the correction would have thought to proof read it more carefully - or if they didn't understand the difference between suffix and prefix, TLD and host you'd hope they would be smart enough to get somebody who did understand to proof read it for them.
You know that rule that runs "any internet post correcting the grammar or spelling of a previous post will always contain at least one error of spelling or grammar that is worse than the original error". Clearly it applies even more to online journalism.
or, "Son of Straight Banana".
What about the "EU mandates that eggs must be sold by weight" excitement?
Compare http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandconsumer/7857087/EU-to-ban-selling-eggs-by-dozen.html
with http://www.thespoof.com/news/spoof.cfm?headline=s3i77613
(for example)
No, I didn't dream of including a link to anything with Daily Mail in it...
This kind of factual clusterfuck isn't just the fault of the writer, even though she is clearly a pompous, uninformed dimwit. Editors are supposed to fact check and edit the material before publication, and the fact that nobody caught something as obvious as this is scarier than the error itself.
Either a) The Grauniad/Observer have fired their last remaining editors and they're now posting/printing raw copy, or b) the few editors they have left are too young to be conversant with correct English or the basic rules of journalism (you know, getting your facts right and other such tedious details).
But maybe things will pan out in the end for the media sector. Let's all hope that once every magazine and newspaper on the planet is exclusively served up as an iPad-only edition, the Jobs reality-distortion field will make the need for facts a thing of the past, and we'll all be happy.
Barbara Ellen says "When did porn (watching strangers shagging) become a basic human right?" perhaps it is really that that she thinks that because *she* doesn't like it, nobody should be allowed to see it, in other words "Freedom of Expression" really means "Freedom to look at things that Barbara Ellen likes, but not otherwise"
One of the prime reasons I never read anything other than the free Metro these days! Almost all papers are full of shite. Supposed to be "news"-paper, that neing the case, tell me what's been happening, not what you and you middle-England, middle-class twatty mates talked about over dinner last night!
..Publish a retraction:
"Sorry, this story was complete rubbish. The journalist in question has had it mentioned to her that she should do something called 'research'. The sub-editor responsible for proof-reading her work has been fired. Normal service will be resumed shortly. In the mean time, here is a picture of some kittens doing something funny."