Slashdot Mirror
Information Poisoning
There were several submissions of this piece: "Novelist Caleb Carr (probably most famous for The Alienist ) has written an article on Salon in which he talks about the dangers he believes information technology pose to society. His contention is that the unchecked spread of information technology will allow for increased corporate control over our lives. His proposed solution? Government regulation. (This is something that he has mentioned in interviews before, and it touches on ideas explored in his near-future SF novel Killing Time ). Overall a very interesting and thought-provoking read." I suggest you read the article without any preconceived ideas of whether you'll find it "good" or "bad", just read it and see what you get out of it.
The Libertarian would oppose government regulation of harmful corporations. That doesn't mean that they can't dislike certain corporations. Corporations become powerful because people expect to depend on them without getting involved or acquiring any knowledge about what they're paying for. They think, just throw money somewhere, and the problem is solved.
Don't want to get ripped off by an auto mechanic? Learn about how a car works. That way you can more easily sniff out if you're getting a raw deal. Pissed off about outrageous fees and/or bugs in Microsoft products? Easy. Learn to use Linux to do the same types of thing, then quitcherbitchin.
In the end (as indirect as it may be) it's consumer's attitudes and apathy that causes problems. (And the same things cause problems in Democratic governments as well). Depending on an abstract entity such as government to regulate corporations just pushes the problems these attitudes cause somewhere else and robs us of hands-on direct knowledge of the workings of the world around us.
-Tyler
"I wish that Microsoft would win the anti-trust case. That way, when they lose in the market, they'll have no one to blame but themselves."
Happy people make bad consumers.
The most restrictive readings of the First Amendment say that it only applies to political speech. Perhaps this is because even those who advocate government control of speech recognize the monstrous fundamental contradiction of the regulation of speech (especially of a political nature) by a government that is supposed to be elected by the very people whose access to information is being regulated.
You can try to make the case that children, mentally handicapped people, even convicted criminals as the author of the article suggests, can't handle just any information that's thrown at them. But such controls are always extended to the population at large. If We The People are too damn stupid to judge the information providers ourselves, then how in the fsck are We magically transformed into voters competent to elect people to judge for us all?
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
on the radio awhile ago. The thing about it if you listen to him or read his stuff for any length of time it becomes clear that he really has not clue about the power we the geeks have. He really does think that all the big companies have all the good tools and that we as people have no tools to fight them. What he does not understand is that many people (that would be most of us) have and have the knowledge to use tools that are as good or better than what the corps and the gov have. For example check out rubberhose. This kind of stuff is power and it is the power in the hands of the people who know and maintain the tech to do everything he wants the government to do. His idea is that the only thing that can stand up to a large corp is a large government. He just does not understand that we the people have the tools to do this for ourselves.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
watching an entire generation of young people grow up to become virtual machines capable of storing informational bits like biocomputers but not of assembling those bits into meaningful bodies of knowledge
And to solve this alleged problem, he wants government regulation??? Yeah, let's regulate people to be more useful and productive! Why didn't anyone think of that before?
It's hard to understand how someone like this is given any credence whatsoever.
Aside from the ludicrousness of the proposed solution, there's also the question of whether this particular problem actually exists. It sounds like pure old-fartism to me: "Young people these days are just plain irresponsible! We need tougher regulations to keep them under control!"
Thankfully, laws and regulations already exist - not least of which is the U.S. Constitution - which mostly prevent people like this from doing too much damage to our society.
I find that the more I read this article, I visualize us little Americans as dumb animals lead to the slaughter. Carr seems to view humans, especially Americans, as completely incapable of discerning between "good" internet content, and "bad" internet content. His call for a division of government similar to the FCC, and comparison of the information available on the Internet as similar to the food industry of the early 20th century is not logical. Print information is self-evident, where food content is not. His comparison also assumes that most early 20th century Americans bought all of their food from food manufacturers. This is untrue. Most American families in this time period grew gardens or lived on farms, and grew most of their food. The 21st century American does not need rely on one source for information, it relies on many sources, and, due to the boom in information technology, is able to "grow" his or her own information. I think that Carr is taking an ill-though out idea, and running with it, because it seems so sensational, even more sensational than the information revolution.
In a sense, isn't this how slashdot works? Basically, we read articles from other sites, then discuss their merits here. We are both the audience and the reviewers, and with moderation, we also "watch the watchmen." Now if only the moderation system worked better.
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"The people. Could you patent the sun?"
"Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it."
--Henry David Thoreau
Wow, thanks for the link, that article rules!
I italicized it to draw emphasis to it so that the poster to whom I was replying would not miss it for a second time.
If you can read this, then I forgot to check "Post Anonymously".
WE are corporations also. Do you think corps are owned and run by aliens?
I prefer not to put all my eggs in one basket. I'd rather have many corporations running the show instead of one goverment.
Joe
Joe Batt Solid Design
This guy need to be smacked up the side of the head a couple times or maybe he should move to an "enlightened" country like China, N. Korea, Cuba.
Speaking of kiddieporn boogeymen,
It's time for an update from Holland, Michigan -- What happened with your libraries pr0n filters debacle?!
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
The thing people do not seem to understand about the Internet is that it is reflective of what is in the world. There are many things about the world most people would not like to know about or would liked changed. People lie, cheat, steal, kill, in the world and you can see this reflected in the Internet. Regulating the Internet is like saying that I don't want a road from my village to the next town. Bad things are there like drugs, SEX, Prostitution. I want my children safe from that. Well safe they may be but they will lose all of the advantages that come with being able to see the world and to be a part of it. In the end you lose. If you feel that people are mostly good and the world is mostly good you will accept the road and all that can come with it. If you don't you end up losing out on everything the world can offer. It's life, Bad things happen but in the end it is better to have the choice to live free than to wonder about what you are missing out on because of someone else wants you to be or know.
If we expect Government to "protect us" against Corporations, we must be on crack. The only product Government can effectively sell is its Guns, and the only entities rich enough to pay for it are Corporations.
this proposal isn't a slippery slope. It's a frictionless Sarlacc pit.
Don't blame me - I voted for Howard Dean. http://dean2004.blogspot.com
Saying that the Government can't solve a problem is saying that WE can't solve the problem, because ultimately WE DO control the government.
I hope to god this is a troll. Most problems are better solved through private enterprise and individual action. Government sucks pretty badly at solving problems, but society as a whole is quite good at it. Just because we control the government doesn't mean that governmental regulation is the best answer to everything.
Try to name a problem government has solved:
Crime? No. Homelessness? Definitely not. Poverty? Drugs? Unemployment? Education? No, no, no, no...
Easy. You rely on trusted authorities: each side has its own trusted authority. Factual is not an absolute, it's a measure of trust.
The hard part is figuring out who to trust. And for that you need an educational system that teaches learning, independent thinking and critical understanding.
Hey, bat boy is real.
A journey of a thousand miles starts with a brutal anal raping at airport security
Since it looks like we all seem to disagree with his conclusions, let's beat on a few of the author's premises/assumptions:
"Either governments or corporations will regulate information, take your pick": did he ever consider the possibility that they be used to balance against each other? See the next item:
"The Progressive reforms at the turn of the 1900's were a prior example of this sort of regulation, where "parental" government can protect us against greedy corporate interests": wrong, these reforms did not work by protecting us from railroads, oil, electricity, or medicine, but rather by ensuring the rights of the people and using the power of the government as a balance against said greedy corporations by providing specific limits on their power (anti-trust), specific requirements for MORE disclosure (labelling), and only direct regulation on specific, provable, directly harmful actions (unsafe working conditions, unsafe food and drugs, child labor, etc.) He also conveniently leaves out that these reforms were hand-in-hand with reforms limiting the power of abusive municipal governments (civil service reforms, graft reforms, etc.) The Progressive reforms limited power of both government and corporations, not thoughts and expressions.
"The FCC has more power because broadcast is a more powerful medium": wrong, the FCC was created as a recognition that the necessarily small number of broadcasters would have government-sponsored power over the public airwaves. Because any idiot can publish a web page, that concern over a limited number of voices is not borne on the internet.
But hiding under it all are real concerns that the internet is just another medium for pumping ads at us, but with more potential for us to be ensnared. And the answer to that? Regulate the corporations, not the content! Make sure that common carriers carry every provider's content on an equal basis; make sure that content providers have to subject their "information" to becoming part of the public culture -- for use, for inspiration, for criticism, for accountability. The useful information will always thrive when given an equal status, access, and audience to the useless.
Yes, information can be powerful. That's exactly why we should never cede our rights to exchange it to any institution, corporate or government.
"You can't get something for nothing." - my grandfather, on the stock market and Reaganomics.
Says Carr:
The biggest flaws in Carr's arguments center around three things:
Carr's essay seems exclusively to be a lure for tech-types to buy and read his dystopian Killing Time, rather than a realistic attempt at outlining solutions to the issues he addresses.Ironically, essays such as this would likely never become pixels (although they'd certainly see print) under the program he proposes
MacOS, Windows, BeOS, GNOME, KDE: they're all just Xerox copies
Carr essentially makes the argument that given too much information, we become worse people. Given the bombardment of marketing, I won't be able to find time to quietly contemplate moral issues. But the government -- whose individual human agents won't be affected by this bombardment (huh?) -- can help by restricting information.
Thankfully, Milton figured most of this out several centuries ago:
I'd like to extend this to say that a fool will be a fool even if he writes a book... or two, or three.
Dumbass.
"...And if that means suspending full First Amendment protection from the Internet, so be it." This is a direct quote from the article. Hmmm...
Upon reading this slashdot post, I thought:
what? We need LESS govn't regulation.
The thing is, the govn't is the lesser of the two evils between it and corporations. It's just sad that sometimes the difference between govn't and corporations is so blurred.
Ralph Nader would support this idea, but will he ever get elected? probably not. The current government situation is way too corporatized to police corporations. It's a lot like a corrupt police force policing itself.
I don't think the point there was the need for regulation as much as stating that the net will be regulated (controlled) and making a distinction between regulation by content providers or an external agency. Much of what he says makes sense, regardless of what we might think of his writing style.
The difficulty with regulation is that government never knows where to draw the line. How many times has government made noises to appease the masses but lined corporate pockets when the legislation actually gets passed?
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As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
Thanks. You beat me to the punch.
You would think that the more likely outcome of a public having unregulated access to information would be the desensitization of that public, rather than it becoming dumb. I suppose if you considered the loss of such skills like, hunting, raping, and pillaging becoming dumber, by all means. Most "philosophical" and academic arguments point to a likely hood that a society becomes emotionless due to information overloads. This loss of emotion doesn't mean that an individual is "dumb", per-say. Let's take a look at our striving techno-wenie youth, technically smart, bored, and many rather self centered... (sound like any script kiddies y'all know?)
----Quid
----Quid
Less talk, more caffeine
Female Prison Rape in NY
A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both and deserve neither. -
Carr seems to overlook the fact that a government and a corporation are both institutions that, once established, have a policy of self-preservation. Do you ever see the U.S. government or a large corporation such as Microsoft purposefully attempting to undermine its position of power once obtained? At the very least, it seeks to maintain its power. But even more to its liking, is the desire to increase this power.
To place trust in either such institution with the hopes that one is the lesser of the two evils is foolish. Once having a hold upon information creation and delivery, a government or corporation will make certain that it is the type of information it wants created and delivered to the masses.
I am not purporting this as an inherently "evil" characteristic of the two institutions. After all, a true self-sacrificing altruism is about as common in institutions as in the people who make them up. But judge wisely the nature of the beast before conjecturing on what it would do given power.
"The truth which makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear." --Herbert Agar
Only in the ideal case where buyers and sellers meet in the marketplace with equal power, full knowledge, and no costs externalized.
Which is not to say that more government action is necessarily the answer to corporate misdeeds. We have to remember that corporations are creations of governments!
Rather than muzzling the monsters it creates, the state simply should stop creating monsters. Revoke corporate charters of misbehaving companies (that's not a new power for the state, it's an existing one that's never used). Require corporate shares to be owned by people, not other corporations. Stop treating corporations as natural persons (the Constitution defines U.S. citizens quite clearly, and corporations don't fit). These aren't increases in government regulation, they're actually decreases in the state power to create profit-obsessed artificial entities.
(Pardon me for the U.S. bias in the above; I believe the same ideas apply in other nations, but I'm most familiar with the laws here.)
But what this twit wants isn't to stop corporate abuses. If that were the goal, he'd want more freedom of discussion, making sure that net publishing remains available to the average American, not just to AOL/Time Warner and Microsoft. Like every other pro-censorship fuckhead, he's wants his opinions of what's good information or bad information to affect the rest of us, "for our own good".
"Information is not knowledge." Sure, Zappa told us that a long time ago. But I sure as hell don't need idiots like this "helping" me by forcibly filtering my data stream.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
"I sayeth that he calleth my tax plans nasty, brutish and short and that is surely a seditious act against the United States."
"No, I sayeth that his tax plan is seditious in the breadth and scope of its grasp."
Founding Fathers: "Whatever."
Just about the last thing I want to see is an Internet the likes of which Caleb Carr envisions, precisely because the government would control it and would exercise prior restraint. An Internet like that would take away one of the most powerful tools that protest movements have.
Let us consider the Drug War as an example. At the present, anti-Drug-War propoganda of varying qualities is available. Some of it is just plain junk. Some of it is good, factual stuff. In either case, this propoganda serves the purpose of countering the government's program of getting people to accept greater and greater intrusions on our privacy and our rights. The government has less of an excuse to seize and sell your property prior to trial if the marijuana you're selling maybe isn't that bad; or if you hear about some school teacher getting his property seized and sold, sans any charges or trial, because some kid he sold land to got busted for pot. And, slowly, the panic mongering becomes ineffective, and the government has to change policy to something less intrusive.
Let us suppose that the government automagically takes all websites with an anti-drug-war message and marks them "not factual." Then what?
Apply the same argument to, say, anti-war, pro-gun-rights, anti-abortion, pro-choice, pro-contraception, etc. websites, and you get an idea of what happens: the Government becomes one big CyberSitter[TM], same agenda and everything. At least with corporate-regulated Internet, we have a choice and the potential for competition if we want alternative information channels.
Let me suggest an alternative to corporate and government regulation: educating our children so that they can learn how to take information, screen it for bullshit, and turn it into knowedge, rather than having some faceless corporate or government entity judge what is suitable for Internet and what is not.
I'd also suggest to Mr. Carr that he stop believing his own press.
ObJectBridge (GPL'd Java ODMG) needs volunteers.
Finding God in a Dog
Read the article posted just a little bit ago by michael, and now read this one... Now I assume he has no bias (although, I assume he does in some way) to the articles that he choosed to post. Look at the total flip flop of the themes. Previous article, theme, 'damn you government.' This article, theme, 'government, come here, cuddle me now.'
I don't know what to think.
Of course, you need experts. Experts who are willing to judge any fact on its correctness, to do the research, and who have a gift for sniffing out a hoax. Obviously, the best system would be to run the whole internet on slashcode, and let the moderators decide what is interesting and/or true.
As you've probably observed, Slashdot users are generally good at filtering out nonsense. We don't try to make money quick, we don't believe there are AIDS infested needles everywhere or many unwilling kidney donors, and we've all seen hamsters dancing.
Occasionally, something will pass under the radar, when a false story passes the editor's bullshit detectors, and quite a few of the slashdot readers. This is usually because the story attacks us where we are most vunerable, promising free computing power, revealing a new Microsoft problem, or announcing that Linux and BSD have been ported to the central nervous system. There are enough sceptics amoung us, however, that the hoax is eventually found out. We quickly learn our lesson - In God We Trust, and all others require verification.
Of course, if all the Internet was on slashcode, the trolls would outnumber the virtuous by 10000 to 1. And that's why I keep getting forwards about Microsoft, AOL, and Disney teaming up to offer cash to folks who forward emails, etc. But I'm sure the next version of the slashcode will have an even more powerful moderation system.
As an added bonus, every web site will have its spelling, punctutation, and grammer reviewed / berated at no extra cost!!!
Today, congress has passed a regulation that would severely punish web site that publish information that is not factual with fines that can go up to 10 000$ per article.
In other news, VA Linux, owner of the news for nerds site "Slashdot.org" has senn it's stock value tumble to an all-time low...
While I'm sure that Mr. Carr had good intentions while writing this article, I strongly disagree with where he takes his readers:
The point of this article seems to be that the net should be regulated as other mediums are, in an effort to save it from `evil corporations'.
The fact of the matter is that other mediums are already under the control of evil corporations through bought-and-paid-for government pseudo-regulation.
The net is the only free medium, and it will be the last if the people allow it to be regulated.
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He actually thinks the government and corporate America are seperate entities.
-josh
Mr. Carr fails to notice that every form of media he mentions besides the internet is mostly limited to LARGE outlets, i.e. corporations, the rich, the downright lucky.
Part of the reason for this is regulation,only a well funded group can keep up with all the reporting and oversight requirements and/or defend themselves in court when they screw up.
How do you publish a book? Write a book, convince a publishing company that it is worth the money it takes to print and advertise it, in hopes that they can make money off of your work, your idea doesn't have to be good, plausible, or even original, just SELLABLE.
How do you get a web page? Go to yahoo, sign up for 20 megs free. Follow the directions or learn HTML, your idea doesn't have to be good, plausible, or even original OR SELLABLE.
Is this ideal? No. But will the human ability to integrate information disappear if it continues? I doubt it.
Insert pithy comment here.
Insert pithy comment here.
First of all, anyone who deludes themselves into thinking that the government operates seperately from the corporate world is in for a rude awakening. At one point they may have been seperate entities, but that day passed long, long ago. In the current capitalist system, the only controlling factor involved anywhere is money, and until radical changes are made you will not see anything different. The entire country is run by the power of the almighty dollar, and the only goal is to turn a profit. Politicians are just puppets of the corporations and lobbyists; any actions they make against the corporate world are either one of two things: whichever special interest group isn't paying them off at the moment, or a superficial act to garner public support that does no real harm to the company involved. Politicians do not really fear public retribution. They already control far too much of how the general public thinks, as do the corporations.
How many times have you heard people lament having only two political candidates to choose from, or claiming that there is no way for a third party to get into office? This is because the media controls the television and newspapers, which are still the main sources of information for most people. They are secure in their arrangement. Third party candidates and opposing political ideas upset their positions of power and wealth, so they make them non-existent by denying them a spot in national attention. They literally decide who wins and loses elections. More and more, the television will start to tell you who to vote for, and from there the media seeks to control every aspect of your life they can get their hands on. It is how they make money. It is their instinct to survive, and nothing will change that short of their demise.
The internet threatens all this. As it becomes more and more influential and integrated into people's daily lives, new ideas and the potential for them to reach others will increase. People like Ralph Nadar, Harry Browne, and even more extreme groups will be able to get an audience. They will start winning votes. Politicians the corporations can't control may come to power. They may even threaten to destroy the capitalist system and government itself.
The corpo-government's only response to this, if it wants to survive, is to attempt to regulate and control that which threatens it. The problem here is that people fail to realize that any regulation is bad regulation. If the government is allowed to gain control over the net, it will just eventually be turned into an interactive television. Information needs to be free. People need to be able to judge for themselves what is true or not. Never trust the government. It cannot and will never act in your best interests. It will act only in whatever way furthers its chance of survival. The second you begin using the government as your deciding factor in what is truth or not, it will only be a short road until they have everyone brainwashed into believing whatever they want you to think. It will be a short road to Big Brother.
You don't need the government to tell you what is truth or not. We are all intelligent people. We can use discretion and think for ourselves. We can decide what is fact.
There is no problem with 'information poisoning' here. There is only a problem with a group of people in power wanting to scare you into no longer thinking for yourself, so they can do it for you.
Think people, think.
-The Wicked One
I think the poster was complaining of the knee-jerk grab for political dogma reflected in many of the posts here. Personally, I haven't read much in these posts that can be described as an insightful, well-balanced perspective from a particular ideology.
You bet! I think this guy is just trying to sell books!
----Quid
----Quid
Less talk, more caffeine
Oh god, it's 10 times worse than I expected.
/should/ be regulated, but that obscenity elsewhere /should NOT/.
Carr on regulating away "obscenity" on the 'net:
"So far so good: We are talking about material that is obviously dangerous and has been criminalized in other areas."
Obvious to whom? FALLING ROCK is dangerous, pornography is not. Porn, or other "obscene" material, actively DOES nothing at all. One views it, one interprets, one chooses how to allow it to affect one's thought processes, ideas, and beliefs, just like any source of information. If I look at some porn, and then go commit some heinous crime (or some wonderful act of philanthropy, for that matter), the pornographer cannot be held accountable by any process of logic and reason.
There is a distinction of thought processes that I've discovered that will be very helpful if I share here. A person sees two things: one that is controlled by the government, and a similar-in-some-way thing that is not. The authoritarian mind looks at the unregulated thing and asks "why not?". The libertarian mind looks at the regulated thing and asks "why?". The point is not that obscenity on the 'net
"And if that means suspending full First Amendment protection from the Internet, so be it."
That pretty much speaks for itself. The internet is a mechanism through which I can express myself, usually in very classic means such as the written word. Any government action that prevents me from doing so is in obvious violation of both the letter and the spirit of the First Amendment. To put it simply, the day the Feds start nuking Slashdot posts, the spirit of America dies.
"People assume that what they read on the Net is true."
That is THEIR problem. I tell you a lie, and you believe it. I may have done a morally reprehensible thing, but that does not relieve you of responsibility for any actions you take as a result of believing my lie. Much as I despise misleading advertising and media spin, the solution is to get people to question all information, to adopt healthy skepticism. The solution is NOT information pre-approval. If the author is truly worried about information consumers becoming complacent in unable to properly transform information into knowledge, he should fear this kind of sanitizing more than anything. After all, if we have the assurance of our (ultimately benevolent, of course) government that anything we read on the 'net is true, then there's no reason to ever question anything again!
"if site owners can be held legally responsible for disinformation they may unwittingly disseminate (much in the way that if you unknowingly buy stolen goods you can still become an accessory after the fact)"
I turn your attention again to the liberty/authority thought dichotomy. The buyer of stolen goods not only did not intend wrongdoing, but did not even PERCEIVE wrongdoing. Similarly, webmasters cannot by process of logic and reason be held accountable for re-publishing information which they do not realize is false.
Mr. Carr dwells on the ostensible distinction between a motive of public welfare and that of private profit. He contends that the interests of average people and of corporations will not often coincide (a ridiculous notion in and of itself, anyone ever heard of the Invisible Hand?), and so government must make the choices instead. But he forgets that governments have interests too. If the government controls the media (which is essentially what Mr. Carr is proposing), how could anyone report on government corruption?
I get the sinking feeling that Caleb Carr's clocks and calendars are all wrong. You and I know it's 2001, but he seems to wish it were 1984.
MoNsTeR
The Butlerian Jihad
One drawback might be currency conversion costs. PayPal now seems to have gone more international, but the web really needs a single currency.
As a recent graduate myself, I saw this happening, and was even slightly mixed up in it, but I wanted to keep learning. I was terribly bored when I was not challenged. Many of those who didn't challenge themsleves are delivering pizza- a necessary part of our economy ;), but also an unfulfilling career.
People have to put in effort otherwise they stagnate and become materialsitic sheep, to be fed whatever by whatever source so long as they get fed. In a power outage, people are in anguish over their TV being unusable. They're missing their favorite show. I'd be worried about other things, like eating, bathing etc.
People don't change people, if anything people change themselves.
All right! Let's create a Department of Truth, so that only the best information will be fed to our citizens!
I mean, the FCC's regulation has done wonders for the quality of news handed to us by the networks! (tell me again .. which network was it that staged t-bone collisions with bomb-laden trucks
so they could do a "news" feature on it?)
regulating the Internet should be like regulating food and drugs as much as it should be like regulating books, TV and movies. A hundred years ago, people had no way of determining the quality of the food and drugs that went into their bodies. Now they cannot determine what sources or forces may be behind the information that goes into their minds.
Yes, and I'm sure that methods for judging the quality of information -- methods that will transcend subjectivity -- will be available Real Soon Now. In the absence of that method, I'll hang on to the billion babbling voices of the Internet, thank you very much, Mr. Carr.
zo.
Seriously, if there is going to be ANY regulation of the kind he envisions (and I am all for authentication, tracability, and holding the editors accountable for their content), it would have to be the result of a global/multinational concensus. I doubt the U.N. is up to it, and I don't know what organization could even begin approach the problem.
So it's pretty much DIW until we have an international IT standards committee. But I doubt the Americans are likely to go along with losing control of "their" Internet.
The only workable solution is a community-based one; like the moderation/"consumer reports"/vetting models already suggested. Many bottom-up solutions to this (pretty) well-defined problem would be more organic and less likely to fail, because of the decentralized nature of the process of consensus.
I realize that in any attempt to "regulate" content on the Net that there would be a normalizing effect which would marginalize some speech (even on Slashdot), but making information obscure isn't the same as banning or destroying it. And letting the people on the margins talk shit is small price to pay for an Open Society.
I am reminded of an exchange I had with a senior Journalism prof from the University of British Columbia last year at the launch of the "Journalism in the New Millennium" book. She said that the growth of Net journalism had caused a shocking drop in the standards of writing and editing, which made the entire profession look bad. I asked her what was wrong with people practicing their craft in the public eye, and making a fool of themselves? Did she want to restrict speech to those with professional certification? She looked shocked that I could even ask such a question, and her lack of a response said to me that she had never thought of the problem that way. (I do distinctly recall someone in the small Chapters crowd cheering my question with a "yeah!"... so at least one of other shit disturber was at the event.)
I think the real problem she and others in her profession have with this trend is that it points out how UNRELIABLE even the most "professional" sources can be. The public would soon learn that they can't believe everything they read, which would be disastrous for writers who have come to rely on the Voice of Authority alone, and have forgotten how to properly source and fact-check.
I would further argue that a "standards-less" Internet would force an evolution of humanity, since people would either learn to be critical, learn how to balance conflicting reports, or they would just give up and take themselves out of the loop. The wilderness of the Web would reveal to us the true diversity of human thought--from the arcane, to the mundane, to the absurd--and force us to see the same Big Picture.
It is the promise of the next stage in Human consciousness, moving away from idealism and utopianism, towards a more functional approach of scepticism, dialectic, and imagination: using the opposition of memes to resolve contradictions and point the way to new areas of inquiry.
To me, certainty is death. Control is an illusion. Give up and accept that THERE IS NO SIGNAL, just amplified noise that's been passed through a filter. My credo has always been "Truth is built one lie at a time." Who can say that we don't learn more from exloring fiction than from sticking to the facts?
Only in an ideal world. In our world, corporations can use monopoly powers to crush opponents, send high-priced lawyers to silence critics, bribe government officials to write advantageous laws, etc. None of this "pleases people" in the sense you indicate.
He said "Only by pleasing people can corporations earn money". I believe this is correct.
How are you going to sell a product that doesn't make consumers happy? Let us consider Rambus and their business model, ie force people into buying RDRAM. Do you think that we will be using RDRAM next year? I won't, because instead of trying to produce a product that people would naturally flock to, they tried to force RDRAM down our throats. They may yet win their legal battles, but if they lose they are screwed. In the end, if a company doesn't make people happy they will lose out. Monopolies are the exception to that, but our govt. already protects us from those.
Why do I keep typing pythong?
So far so good. Is the flip side true?
If I do not exercise responsibility, do I ultimately dinished my freedom? maybe.
What happens if I do not want to take responsibility for something? Ultimately, it is neglected, or someone else picks up the ball.
With really big social problems, who takes responsibility? Maybe some social group, like a club, a political party, a church, some haphazard group of people. If it is big enough, the government, maybe. Hopefully?
You follow this up and track it down, and it starts to look like the government grows to the extent that people push stuff onto it. It grows to the extent that people do not take an individual personal responsibility for something, anything.
So now we blow it all off, and say freedom equals the ability to not be responsible for something, to not have a care in the world, to dance around nekkid and do it in the streets. Does this work?
It works in the short run, just until the point that you have to deal with other folks. You don't do it in the street because you usually gotta watch for cars
Examples include things like you common sports teams. The Celtics coach Rick Pitino just quit in disgust because individual players are more interested in show boating and personal conserns instead of team play. Individual players getting lazy because they have made it and are being paid the big bucks, and now they can relax, even if the team drops pitifully down the standings.
We will be free to the extent we do take real responsibility, and rip it out of the clutches of government. If we blow it off, and let "the other guy" handle it, then the government will step in just as predicted in the article. A bigger more muscular government, because we gave it the power.
The game has got to be that we take control of the internet, instead of letting someone else hijack it for their profitable agenda. Regardless of how impossible that goal seems. (yeh, I know it 's a bitch, ain't it)
Otherwise we'll be no better of than a bunch of clueless basketball players, but we won't even have the paycheck.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
What we need are content regulations that are roughly similar to those regarding obscenity and the exploitation of children in other media; and there should be individual-use regulations, perhaps even licensing requirements, for visiting some sites, such as the plethora of supposed "special interest" sites that thinly veil pedophiliac content.
Children have been exposed in other forms of media just as bad around the world in print and on television just as much as the net so I sensed somewhat of a grudge in certain pointers in this article. There is no way governments across the world would bind together to propose a solution together when they can't even sign a simple treaty to stop from killing themselves (Israel, Korea, etc,.) As for pedophilia it has been rampant much more prior to the internet and much is being done to prevent this on Interpol's, USCustom's behalf, and what a lot of people fail to understand regarding this situation is that many pedophiles are sneaky and adopt to technology just as well as everyone else. Recently in a discussion with someone I had to talk them out of rm -Rf'ing a pedo site they found and rooted simply because they could've been jeapordizing someone's investigation. The minute you take a ped site down it'll pop up on four other servers and I have seen this rampantly in third world countries where laws are obsolete and there may be criminal elements within government, e.g. Russiam Mobs, Japanese Yakuza, etc., so to think all government or any one government can police is ludicrous.
Convicted sex criminals and other questionable characters simply should not be allowed access to sites that make it easier for them to stalk and approach their prey -- not until they have demonstrated, through a licensing procedure, some sort of rehabilitation, and maybe not even then.
Yes and maybe we should give those who shoot licensing tests as well. What difference would it make on a criminal level, a criminal is a criminal and one should be more worried about some form of rehabilitation and counseling than how to screen their actions on the net. Wait maybe someone should create a commercial proxy/firewall server and dub it anti-child-porn and FORCE ex cons to use ISP's provided with them. As if they wouldn't find methods of circumvention.
This can be a private process, unlike proclaiming to whole neighborhoods that a sex offender has moved in (a law that, while arguably effective, raises troubling constitutional issues).
I sense future salesman here. Megans law does justice and serves it purpose well unfortunately its sad to see people who complain never visit the local police stations to find information on people in their neighborhood. So when something happens people cry foul when they never took the time to learn about their community. Sure the law fails many times and the laws were made by people.. Bottom line people fail.
People assume that what they read on the Net is true.
I don't know where these stats came from and I would hope many would look into situations but this is a vague statement.
There must be strenuous efforts first and foremost to guarantee that what is represented as fact is fact, and that what is not fact is clearly labeled as such. Right now I could put up a Web site concerning just about anything and say just about anything so long as I attached a disclaimer. But disclaimers can be so well hidden (sometimes even in the code of the site) that they amount to nothing.
Yes lets all go out and create disclaimers many won't take the time to read, sure it will be a great solution to someone who may have just got off welfare and off their ass to try to make something of themselves by working in a low key job, well lets just give them a disclaimer with those neat little tweak paragraphs that sometimes make little sense at times. Lets make that disclaimer sign their lives away. It won't work.
How about some information based crimes on a whole new level yall?
360 degrees of Karma
This technique has been automated as "collaborative filtering". It's what Amazon and cdnow.com do when they give you recommendations based on your previous purchases and review scores.
A less-anonymous form is also the solution to your previous question about differing ideas of "truth". You simply ignore the ratings of those you disagree with, and weight other people's ratings based on their crediblity with you. This process can also be automated based on a simple criteria of likes and dislikes, agreement and disagreement.
--
Bush's assertion: there ought to be limits to freedom
So what? We are all doomed to forever be in shackles of the Police State. Nothing here will change that.
To the Moon!
http://www.beefjerky.com
How are you people getting to the site? The auth NS happen to be lame for salon.com at the moment. I guess everyone but me reads salon.com, and has the A record cached already.
Edith Keeler Must Die
After reading two of CC's books, I eagerly purchased his new one "Killing Time" and wished I had killed my time with a book that was readable, but I digress.
"Regulation is desperately needed to prevent widespread, even general, mental and intellectual poisoning of the public."
Translation: You are too stupid to make decisions for yourself (caveat: As long as you treat people like this, you will reap what you sow)
"I don't think this is a particularly complex concept -- but it will be difficult to implement. A federal agency is unquestionably required..."
Translation: From the people who brought you the CIA, the NSA and the FBI, trust us to tell you what is right. A man was just released in Boston after three decades in jail, he was framed by the FBI.
"Regulation by government or corporations, take your pick"
Comment: If I think Matt Drudge is an asshole, I can make a decision not to visit his site. If I think the Survivor is utter bollocks, I chose not to watch it (I do on both counts). I can't chose go to the "other" government if they decide that something isn't the truth and I disagree with them.
People are smart enough to make their own decisions about their own lifes without smarmy writers or god forbid the government telling them what the truth is. The truth is I wish I could get back my money for this sucky book...
Right now, that is.
Having worked for one of Australia's largest ISPs for two years, I can safely say they have no clue what they are talking about. All ISPs are treated as telco's and the industry ombudsman actually asks the ISPs what constitutes a breach in the law! I'm not kidding, every time someone makes a serious complaint, they come to us and say "What legally constitutes a "port scan?""
How on earth is a body supposed to regulate an industry when not only are they asking the industry what the law is, but they have zero kowledge of the industry they're regulating?
I agree with the author in that the kinds of content abuses he mentions and the kind of attacks perpetrated on Undernet can never be effectively legislated against unless there is a knowledgeable framework within government.
While I would prefer to keep this out of the hands of individual nations (eg, Muslim fundamentalist governments arresting women for showing their faces on the Internet) I do think such a body needs to exist. The only suitable body would seem to be the UN. Though, when you're not American you tend to see the UN a little differently. Their manipulation of the media in not strictly factual ways is as bad as any government, and seems to be largely dictated by the US's fascist approach to demanding autonomy in any theatre they have an interest in. For instance their main complaint about signing the recent anti war crimes paper was that they might have US troops convicted. Apparently war crimes are for other people, Americans have Patriotism.
Sorry for the fanatic tinge here, but no government will ever be perfect. So a strictly democratic Internationl body is the best we're going to get for policing and tracking of offenders. We've all grown with this medium and it's time to realise there's those out there who would make things much worse not only for us but for everyone. Control it before we're all staring at inhouse "broadband" corporation shit like the television. Legislate that the Internet remains a definite body and corporations can't use the name on whatever they like, and there are rules therein.
toeslikefingers.com - because
I don't think rankings of creationist/evolutionist sites will be a problem, as long as more information than just the average 1-10 rank or the majority vote is provided. If a web surfer runs across the two competing Talk.Origins archives, and discovers that on each one sizable groups of people have voted for both "completely factual" and "completely false", then said web surfer will have to (guess what) think for themselves. In this case, that's not a bad thing, because the better evolutionists and creationst are all smart enough to provide references, the references are increasingly linked to online, and so with a web rating system it would at least be possible to get most of the facts straight in that debate, even if many people consider the conclusions still debatable.
What I would worry about is stuff like this post, which got modded up for a little while because it sounded technically informed, before one or two of the replies showed how to verify that it was bullshit. Peer review works for academic research because it is actually review by one's peers who can be expected to fully understand the articles in question. If you extend that "peer group" to be the entire internet, then people who know what they're talking about are lost in the noise. At the least, this "web fact ratings" system would have to allow for moderators to add comments and links to justify their opinions.
A "rate everything" website wouldn't be too hard to do; there were a couple companies trying (although not doing a great job IMHO) last time I checked. I'd start with something like the slash code, but with the story ids replaced by arbitrary URLs. Open a "story", and in one frame it gives you the website (put through a caching filter so that link tags take you to the ratings site for the linked page) and in the other frame it gives you veracity ratings, related links, commentary, etc. Add a front page with the ability to search through most popular pages, most active stories, etc. and you'd rake in the hits.
I would be more apt to agree with an article stating that those allowed on the net should first pass a basic intelligence test which would also test peoples ability to spot sarcasm and wit. If you fail, give us back your AOL CD!
Just a dude. Stuck in IT.
ComicBoy and SalonBoy aren't talking about the same thing at all, though. The corporate influences that the comic-strip writer (I don't know his name) talks about , which influence the production of the artist and his ability to get his art to the public, and the corporate influences Caleb Carr, which may not have anything to do with artists, are not the same thing. Not everyone who mentions corporations on the net is talking about music or comics or novels or things that can be produced by a singler person or small number of people.
TV has hypnotic qualities: people don't have to think, just sit back and watch. The Internet doesn't: people are free to ignore corporate sites and read personal homepages, Slashdot, whatever. That's why I think it is a good thing, compared to existing media.
There are two things the government ought to do, without actually censoring the Internet or other media:
The reason government regulation won't work in this case is the government regulators he thinks are going to save us are already beholden unto those causing the problem.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
We have a choice. No one is making us do anything. We buy it, or we don't. We use the service, or we don't. We throw away the junk mail, or keep it. End of fricken' story. Stop with the fear mongering.
Cheers,
Daniel.
--
Daniel Zeaiter
daniel@academytiles.com.au
http://www.academytiles.com.au
So what this really is, is an attempt to codify the producer/consumer relationship where the consumers are prevented from becoming producers because of the additional government regulations and requirements. (Remember FCC regulations on FM radio?) One of the largest benefits from the Internet is the ability of everyone to be both a consumer and a producer of information (unlike other mediums where the consumers were never producers). Traditional media (print, radio, tv) all have a clear difference between the producers and consumers. The high cost of entry made it very difficult for the average consumer to publish a book, distribute original music or video. It is in the corporations best interests to keep it this way. They profit from volume distribution of information. And now he want to give corporations a license to effectively become the only legal information providers. Clearly this only benefits corporations.
Most people aren't as stupid as he claims. We all know that information in the 'Wall Street Journal' is more reliable than information in tabloids. We all know that information on cnn.com is more reliable than some person posting to alt.barney.die.die.die or what I'm posting here. And if you don't, then eventually you'll need to learn that lesson. It's just we have a lot of people who don't have a whole lot of 'internet common sense' yet. That will come with time. That is a self-correcting problem as people make mistakes and then learn from those mistakes.
It all comes down to crediblity. His claim is that people don't have good enough 'bullsh*t' detectors, therefore the government must step in and take that role of saying who is credible and who isn't. But honestly, people will get better at it, and I don't believe that we should give up the peer-to-peer information distribution models that might not be as financially benefitial to corporations.
The funny thing is that I'm certainly not going to buy any of his books now, since he's lost a lot of crediblity with me after reading this piece :-)
Speaking of crediblity... Does he personally benefit from such government regulation. Why yes, I believe he does... as a current information producer, government protection reducing the number of other information providers (competition) benefits him.
Current laws (copyright, libel, slander, child pornography) are frequently sufficient when enforced, even in 'cyberspace'. We don't need a plethora of new laws, just proper enforcement and refinement of the ones we have.
- Mike
sub misinform {
&misinform();
}
&misinform();
print "truth\n";
Nonperiodic Central Trajectory
First of all, libertarians are not far-right. It's more of a "north of center" philosophy. In some issues, libertarians agree with conservatives, in others, with liberals. Politics isn't one-dimensional.
As for why there are so many libertarians, I don't see why you think it's so disproportionate. The Naderites and the libertarians roughly balance here. Yes, the mainstream parties are underrepresented, but that's because most people on Slashdot are more aware, and thus tend to take stronger stands on issues, whereas the mainstream parties go for the lowest common denominator...
Does it bother you that you're being exposed to other political ideologies? Would you rather just hear a whole bunch of people agreeing with you?
I am only a person: meaning that I am not legally compelled to maximize my income by any means necessary. I cannot reasonably expect to hire lawyers to exempt me from murder. I am not expected to try and destroy my neighbors. I'm expected to operate within a social system with pretty clear limits- not simply within the letter, but the spirit of the law, because I am a person.
Corporations are _so_ different from this it's not remotely funny. Laws banning corporations _are_ the answer: let them do business with some PERSON taking responsibility. Failing that, laws restricting corporations would be a step in the right direction.
Certainly, the most direct power comes out of the barrel of a gun. However, too many people conveniently forget the indisputable history of corporations hiring their own gunmen- most notably in the Roaring 20s, an era with many similarities to this one. Can you blame any of us for swearing, 'never again'?
The public school system has been doing this for the past 50 years at least. This is a sympton of society in general, not a net specific one.
As to the public's general apathy, how is now any different than any portion of the century in which television was available. Public interest has always taken a back seat to public diversion. Did the Romans need marketers to convince them to watch the gladiatorial matches for days on end, not even leaving to bathe or see to their homes?
"Corporate Regulation vs. Government Regulation" is just rubbish. Sure, corps are dishonest, greedy, and completely driven by profit, but unless Steve Jackson's vision of cyberpunk becomes reality, they don't have at their disposal a heavily armed force to exert their will upon you. Who does? Why our friendly government, just looking out for our best interests.
Honestly, the rest of the article doesn't even deserve comment. As soon as the 300 lb. gorilla of anti-internet propagana, the phantom pedophile, the whole thing just became sensationalistic. Most people lose all sense of rational thought when you talk about the "children". I don't blame them one bit either, but the fact remains, that when you hit upon a very sensitive and volatile subject, they will most likely believe anything they are told, regardless of how credible it is. Carr's philosophy of limited speech should be applied to him and his thinly veiled attempt to yell "fire!" in a crowded theater.
"We obviously need a new moderation category: (-1, Woo-fucking-hoo)" --Mr. AC
Thanks. It's been about 10 years since I read Dune.
the internet caused that?
i know guys who can name any player in any sport if you give them their number. i know people who couldn't balance a cheque book but can subract numbers like dustin hoffman in rain man to figure their dart scores.
that's one way the human brain is like a computer: it's just as happy to map the human genome as it is to play quake.
read /. or usenet or any other forumn where the merits of a given article, or newscast, or idea or whatever are discussed and you'll see that getting a bunch of people to even agree on what is "fact" is impossible.
what counts is the discussion.
carr suggests regulation because we're either gonna get what the corporations want to give us or what the government wants to give us, but at least the governemt is accountable to "the people."
what about personal web pages? what about usenet posts, or email? no doubt some carnivor-like system could be devised to filter out "unauthorized" content. who gets to set the rules for that software?
ThePrivateEssayist used the creation/evolution example. excactly.
governments do have a role to play, but that role is to fund education -- with a focus on critical thinking -- and to enforce existing laws of libal in individual cases that warrent it.
I don't care why you're posting AC
Oh, I'm sorry. Maybe it's the fact that the MPAA/RIAA are trying to have their cake and eat it too.
Me: "So, when I buy this CD/DVD, am I buying it or licensing it?"
Corps: "Oh, you're licensing the information on it. You're paying for the right to access that info."
Me: "So, if something happens to it, will you give me another one for free? After all, I've already paid for the right to access the info."
Corps: "No! You want another one, you pay full price."
Me: "Oh, well then, I'd better make a personal backup copy, as is allowed under copyright law."
Corps: "No! We don't want you to do that! You might distribute that copy to people who didn't pay for it! Thus, we'd better control the ability to copy any of our material."
Me: "Yeah, but isn't that punishing people who don't distribute copyrighted works? And isn't that also making it impossible for me to make my perfectly legal backup copy?"
Corps (realizing at this point I'm trouble): "You know what, screw you! We're not only going to keep you from exercising your rights under copyright law, we're going to do it insidiously, by slowly buying legislation that takes away rights you had."
Me: "What?!?! You can't do that! People will be outraged!"
Corps: "You honestly think most people will notice? We'll just use words like 'all-digital quality', and people will not only allow it, they'll welcome it! Mwahahahahahaha!"
So there. Now, I'm not saying that everyone who rips CDs to mp3 are just making personal backup copies. However, to punish everyone for those who do is just stupid.
49 20 68 61 76 65 20 74 6F 6F 20 6D 75 63 68 20 66 72 65 65 20 74 69 6D 65 2E
Your right/ability to sue is a dictate of law, and hence a product of government.
Let's use an obvious example, creation versus evolution. See the problem? If a creationist were to evaluate a scientific article talking about evolution, might he or she be tempted to mark it down as 'Not factual'? Certainly a biologist would mark creationist writings as 'Not factual.'
I think you just invalidated Carr's entire article with those few sentences. Regulating the internet would infact make people dumber in that they no longer are able to make their own decisions about things like creationism and evolution. The spoon feeding Carr seems to think is taking place on the internet would be amplified exponentially. Currently to verify anything consumed from the internet one must cross reference with other sources. The overall effect is to make people smarter than before as it makes them more critical of the ideas presented to them in general (which is a good thing).
-Caleb
Caleb Carr want a new government agency to frighten individuals out of reporting sensational news. Only large news organizations will be able to comply with the new Information Regulations. What horrors does he site for gutting freedom of speech on the Net? o Kiddie Porn o The Blair Witch Project Website (some people thought it was real) o The Drudge Report Kiddie Porn is already illegal. I think we can stand the threat of the Blair Witch, but the Drudge Report is clearly evil. We must destroy Drudge and anyone else that attempt to release news without proper approval. Because of the blue dress and the embarrassment to our President we must give up freedom of speech on the net. Mr Carr's idea of information regulation is the semen stain, and our Constitution is the blue dress. "Am I ultimately saying that the government should shut down the Drudge Report because it's irresponsible and specious? Absolutely not. I'm saying there should be an agency in place that would terrify Matt Drudge into vetting his reports and not publishing hearsay unless it is labeled as such. If such an agency existed, would Drudge, like the snake oil salesman he is, eventually be driven out of business by the reduced sensationalism of his product? Perhaps. And I can't say I'd shed a tear. But he wouldn't have been shut down by the government. "
A few miles from where I live, two persons were convicted of trafficing in and creating kiddie porn on the Internet. They went as far as to rape an eight year old girl live via webcam, commiting acts that were suggested to them by their online viewership. They had at least 1,000 regular visitors to the site, and were not tracked down until authorities in France busted a child pornographer there and found the links on his computer.
I am very disturbed that you are trying to minimize the issue of Child Pornography on the internet. A few years ago, Phrack Magazine carried an article by a hacker going under the psuedonym of "Se7en". He too believed that the Issue of online child pornography was not as pervasive as the media and the "right wing" have made it to be. So, he went out to look for the stuff. And he was shocked at the volume of Child Pornography available and just how easy it was to find.
If you don't think it's out there, go look for it. You will find it. And when you do, please report the offending servers/individuals to www.condemned.org
Okay, the Jacklegs-In-Blue-Suit-White-Shirt-Red-Tie shortage is doing a lot better now...
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
Name a single significant social problem that has been addressed by an individual, or a private institution.
Thanks for mentioning The Tempest; you accidentally made some sense of this guy's unbelievably thoughtless article for me. I was thinking it was merely a neurotic manifestation of Carr's desire to be one of the Arbiters of Fact he calls for, and/or his belief that if the world were divided legally into info-eaters and info-feeders, he'd be on the "pitching" team--and that's what it is, but it's also something else: We are Prospero. The internet is our library. Insert H.L. Mencken quote re: someone, somewhere having a good time (defined as an unapproved-of inner life). Fold in a little monomaniacal Puritanism and BINGO!--Caleb Carr. Prior to reading this, I'd thought he was just a bad writer; now I know he's a bad writer like Hitler was a "bad painter"--someone really should name a new complex after this bad-artist-turned-would-be-dictator thing.
(Yes, I know that's not what you meant by the Shakespeare ref--and I'm loaded, so my rant probably doesn't hang together too well--but thanks.)
Your mouth is like Columbus Day.
Which is a point in favor of the corporations as far as I'm concerned. At least they don't hide their motivations. Or do you really think the purpose of the War on Drugs is to save the children?
And anyway, with such information surpressed, companies need only please the shareholders, not necessarily make products people will buy naturally. They make products they think they can convince people they need, and more often than not, it's successful.
Even if this is true, they still have to make products that Joe Consumer will voluntarily pull out his credit card to buy. Even if they run glitzy multi-million dollar ad campaigns, you still have a choice. Contrast this with government programs, where if you decide that you can better plan for your retirement than can the government, tough luck, 15% of your salary still goes down the Social Security rathole.
A product does NOT necessarily have to be truly superior for a company to claim it is such.
Neither does a government program.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
Carr concisely refutes his own thesis that the single hand of governent should steer the helm.
Am I ultimately saying that the government should shut down the Drudge Report because it's irresponsible and specious? Absolutely not. I'm saying there should be an agency in place that would terrify Matt Drudge into vetting his reports and not publishing hearsay unless it is labeled as such. If such an agency existed, would Drudge, like the snake oil salesman he is, eventually be driven out of business by the reduced sensationalism of his product? Perhaps. And I can't say I'd shed a tear. But he wouldn't have been shut down by the government.
This is at best mental muddle and at worst simply dishonest. What Carr proposes is analogous to the old Jim Crow laws -- grandfather clauses, literacy tests, etc were the "agency in place" to "terrify" blacks into staying away from the polls, while theoretically not infringing on their right to vote. And, of course, fact-checking would be applied as selectively as the old literacy tests: if you believe that a Clinton Administration would scrutinize Salon as carefully as Drudge (or vice vera for a Bush Administration) I have some beachfront property in Flin Flon, Manitoba to sell you.
Carr claim boils down to an assertion that the government can absolve itself of responsibility by strangling anti-government publications in red tape rather than banning them outright. This is so ludicrous that not even politicians and judges are likely to fall for it.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
I apologize. I meant to say has been addressed adequately.
Seems to me there's a parallel here to the drug war. The U.S. government wants to control the supply, even though there's good reason to believe such an effort is unsuccessful, despotic and damaging to the institutions of a free and democratic society.
Carr wants to control the supply of information, even in the face of such problems. But why not address the demand, by teaching people how to critically evaluate information, and how to recognize viral memes?
It's cheaper, it empowers people rather than disenfranchises them, and it has all kinds of lovely auxiliary benefits.
As the author of the article attempted to point out, this isn't like most problems.
this includes the marketing of fear, addictive behaviours and deception
the corporate race with it's eyes on profit can become akin to a parasite that kills it's hostit has happened in the past(depression), it can happen again...
the corporations use of millions for marketing absurd knowledge should be countered with some form of public education/debunking and broadcast with the visibility/penetration similar to corporate marketing strategies
Some groups have tried to place adds on T.V. that may offend the profits of corporations, these adds have been refused by the networks,maybe some form of regulation to make legal content and the ability to pay the going rate the only condition for broadcast
While Huxley's world was grim, I didn't want want the readers drawn back to the fantasy of Shakespeare's "Tempest".
Its not that I have no hope, its just that I'm realistic enough to know that nobody will see their nose until its on the floor.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Corporations are a construct upheld by the government, and are given rights not even accorded humans. If the government hadn't created them in the first place, they wouldn't be a problem. If corporations couldn't commit murder and not have laws enforced against them, then it wouldn't be a problem. The root of the problem is still a government that expands to create dangerous new constructs like Corporations, or the New Deal, without regard for the Constitution, which does not allow and never has allowed any such thing. If the Supreme Court wants to restrict free speech, well, they can damn well pass an amendment, can't they? Judicial Activism, a bunch of Senators with the Elastic Clause written on their undies, and a President commanding a vast bureaucratic alphabet soup of thousands of unrestricted minor tyrants like the IRS, FBI, NSA, etc. are the problem.
A libertarian government would also enforce laws on corporations, because campaign soft money contributions would be nonexistent.
Of course Libertarians are up on corporations. That must be how Harry Browne raised all that money for his campaign last year. Right.
RevRigel
That information is poisoning.
It's a data wasteland that destroys the young.
They're overloaded on sex and drugs.
My apologies to Styx, but it seems appropriate.
The Underwriters Laboratory is an example of a 'Free Market' entity which self-regulates (for profit, no less! *shudder*) an industry and assures safety.
I'd say it serves as a good example of the free market self regulating an industry.
Another good example is Consumer's Report magazine.
Hay thar.
I work in networking and I've seen a trend where network engineers are not so much gaining knowledge but more remembering books and reciting them when required. Kind of like having a walking Docu CD really but given a simple problem they don't have the skill to use the information they have gained to fix it.
On the other hand the net also spawns some great ideas and free thinking, Linux might be a good example? Maybe I'm just working with idiots that learnt what they know by passing memory test exams.
A journey of a thousand miles starts with a brutal anal raping at airport security
We're not only going to keep you from exercising your rights under copyright law, we're going to do it insidiously, by slowly buying legislation that takes away rights you had."
Er, yes, but that wouldn't happen if Government hadn't inserted itself in the process to "protect the consumer", much as this guy is proposing.
I really wish people who criticize capitalism would actually read Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations instead of reading paragraph-length summaries of it. The whole thrust of the book is not "pro-business" but in fact warns that when government and business get together, the consumer, the individual, the little guy gets screwed.
Yes, the RIAA is bad, but it's bad because it uses the government to secure what it can't get through the marketplace.
As some once said
when someone says "It's for the Children", watch your rights and your wallet, because one or the other is under attack.
With the straw men he setup, I really surprised he didn't add "And subversive RIGHT WING gun groups use the net to exchange information"
Right now, gun ownership seems to be a short step behind pedophilia on America's most hated
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
. How do you get a system that marks information sites as factual or not factual when the population-at-large can't even decide on what they think is factual?
Only have skeptical, scientific minds rate the information, and ignore other people who aren't as careful or scientific. "www.skepdic.com" is what I'm talking about.
Of course, this will tell you whether astrology works, whether zombies are real, and whether the person selling "make money fast from home with no effort" is really truly sincere. Which you may know anyway.
But if you want to know if quantum computing will be practical or who should be president or whether a Macintosh computer is faster doing calculations than your ibm compatable running windows or linux, then you've got to go fish.
-Ben
P.S. Also if you are a creationist, my advice would be to build an ark, wait for the flood, and then go fishing from your new boat. Or, accept that there is a REAL OBJECTIVE world outside all religions which you should live within. That should be what the internet ultimately achieves.
Slashdot isn't the best place for complete intellectual honesty and skeptically judging all claims scientifically. ("Linux is best" best for what? "Best for me now, workers soon, and eventually your grandmother. Open source is the answer, and will bring about a new cyber utopia where we all know everything and are free to do anything.") But it is differently biased and probably more free-thought accepting than, say, a MSDN site. Still, remember there is a real objective world outside of computers, operating systems, and even the internet, which we should try to learn more about.
The question is not whether there is a problem. The question is whether you can solve it using government. The answer for most problems is "no".
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
But I can try and use the federal government to affect local governments across the country. I can't buy shares of Monsanto to affect Sony.
Lottery: a tax on those bad at math.
But then I read such gems as "The children should be protected".. I've heard this refrain before, it's quite common: It's used whenever some (government agency|news org|official) is trying to garner support for a further erosion of our rights.
Then he goes on to say that the Internet shouldn't be treated like print media, and yet he failed to give substanstial reasoning to support that position.
Numerous specious jumps of logic like this litter the text, it causes me to wonder: Perhaps this deliberately inflammatory writing was done SOLELY in an attempt to bolster his argument that an "agency of veracity" must be implemented? You know what that makes it?
A troll. What do we do with trolls?
Ignore them.
"Avast! Prepare for the rodgering!" THWACK! "Arrr.. me nards.."
...does his argument have a strong flavor of "we must protect the stupid from themselves"?
He says "People assume that what they read on the Net is true." Yet the Boston Globe has published articles that said that Tacoma was north of Seattle, and England west of Ireland. Were those mistakes any less mistakes for being published on dead trees (as well as the Globe's web site, of course)? No.
"We should openly recognize that many Net users do not possess the technical skills to detect such deceptions; therefore they need help, just as they need help with radio and television." In other words, there are people who are too stupid to tell that "Blair Witch Project" wasn't a documentary [he uses that example] so we must make it illegal to fool them.
"If we have a government agency continuously making sure that supposed research presented on the Internet is factual; if site owners can be held legally responsible for disinformation they may unwittingly disseminate (much in the way that if you unknowingly buy stolen goods you can still become an accessory after the fact); and if all images, data and text have to be accompanied by authorship or provenance information, or simply can't be posted; if these and many similar rules are laid down -- I think you can begin to get a picture of the very different kind of Net that would ensue." Yeah, it'd be different all right; no Slashdot, for example. ("That link isn't to a picture of the monolith in Seattle, but to something else! Take your site down or be arrested!")
>I see only one reason--if they're violating your property rights (pollution, etc.) In that case, your recourse is through the courts.
This is exactly where I might need to have sway over that company.
And what are the courts part of? The Government.
Lottery: a tax on those bad at math.
Actually, if you will check out the appendices in the Jargon File (maintained by esr) it is stated that, among hacker-types, there is a disproportionate number of libertarians.
I think I've got an answer to many of the problems: the micropayments get served by governments, which skim off a fraction as taxes.
I know what you're thinking -- Big Brother. But, if an open protocol could be devised that anonymized the payer, and only concerned itself with making sure it got hold of the payment on one end, and securely remitted on the other end, it could actually be an effective digital cash.
As to *which* government would serve payments, why the government in charge wherever the server was located, which would also set the tax rate.
As for exchange rates, I imagine you could invent a net-cash-only currency that the server on each end would convert to and from the local currency.
So, poof, there go all sorts of practical/political hurdles. Now if I could just think of how to do this technologically...
"You can't get something for nothing." - my grandfather, on the stock market and Reaganomics.
Did anyone else feel like the article was just badly written? I'm not passing judgement on his argument, just the way in which he went about stating it. The first few paragraphs glibly try to tie together several unrelated, or loosely related issues (i.e. the internet lets people amass more information, corporations are becoming more powerful, therefore the two are cause and effect), then immediately he's comparing corporate regulation to government regulation as though he'd already proven that the need for regulation was a given. I've never read his other work, and I'm not sure I want to, after seeing how sloppy this article was.
I spent months lobbying against the Smithsonian for its rejection of an Australopithecus Spiff-arino specimen. Now, sadder but wiser, I wish I'd known the provenance of that cruel hoax from the outset. Government is the only answer.
It will be interesting to see whether modern corporations can hire private armies to murder guild/association/union organisers, as they did in the 20s...
Well, yeah, that's exactly what's *wrong* with a strong federal government. I'm glad you're starting to see the problem.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
"And, were the net not protected by the first amendment..." When did that happen? There is no First Amendment on the Internet, anything you say or do is only with the permission of another person or organization (be it governmental or corporate). If they don't approve of your content/ideas/beliefs you WILL be censored and there is precious little you can do about it. The only 'amendment' that will allow your particular content to be accepted is the 'dollar amendment' (or in other words I'll amend my offer with more cash if you allow my content)
--
All men are great
before declaring war
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
I would say that maybe the free market is working just fine, and travellers are willing to accept a miniscule increase in risk (flying on the most dangerous airline is still far safer than driving) for a cheaper fare. With government regulation, they don't get to make those choices. In fact, if stricter safety regulation forced air fares up, more travellers might decide to drive instead, which would almost certainly produce more total accident deaths.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
Actually, financial well-being is the least important benefit of freedom. Carr seems blind to the ways in which the Internet has empowered ordinary people against both corporate and government organizations.
Next, Carr introduces the 'child molester' motif:
OK, Carr started by claiming the Internet will destroy education, health, etc. and now he's focusing on child molesters? Even if the Internet greatly facilitated child molesters, which it doesn't, this would have no bearing on the sweeping arguments with which Carr opened. And notice that with 'operators' Carr is invoking the image of a for-profit field much like broadcast TV - which is not what the Internet is becoming.
Then Carr wishes the FCC would censor the Internet as they do TV. Rationale:
Carr, it's more because TV lends itself to monopoly and near-monopoly. The internet doesn't - in fact the internet is more democratic than print media.
Just like government officials hoping to use 'child molesters' or 'cyber-terrorism' to get funding, Carr uses the scare of 'widespread information pollution' to justify draconian prior restraint. But he can't point to a single real world example! He whines about Drudge, but how many people have absolute faith in Drudge?
A crown jewel of idiocy: If you're concerned about corporate abuse of the Internet, you should advocate less government regulation, not more. The corporations are only winning through burdensome and unfair laws and regulations. In the case of Napster, it was the government's ridiculous interpretation of the ridiculous idea of copyright that forced Napster to kowtow to the 'music industry'. If the government would stay the hell off the internet Napster would not be forced into 'bilking' users.
I think Carr is just looking for excuses to push his pro-censorship agenda.
I think I'll stop now and resist the temptation to tear this thing apart word by word, illustrating the extreme illogic of which it is made.
Me: Here Og, take my brand new invention, The Toothpick. It is the best thing to use to kill Sabretoothed Tigers.
Og: But it is very small, and flimsy. How can it kill Tiger?
Me: Trust me. Don't try to think for yourself, that just hurts your big old dumb head. I've killed over 50 Tigers this morning with just this one Toothpick alone.
Og: Hmmm. Okay. Me try Toothpick. Here Tiger, Tiger, Tiger. Me have a surprise for you.
Tiger: Silly caveman. Can't you see your Toothpick is no match for my sharp claws and teeth? With your short piece of wood you have to get very close to use it. Close enough for me to use my claws and teeth. Now die!
Me: Thanks Mister Tiger. Now I go get to console Mrs. Og.
I'm tired of having to listen to people who have to defend the ignorant. You know what? Let the ignorant defend themselves. This would thin the gene pool out nicely.
Of course we would not have any more Darwin Awards, but I'm sure we could think up something else to entertain ourselves.
He says that although government sucks, at least it's on our side, whereas corporations have only their own interests. What he's missing is that in the race to earn profits, corporations have to please people. Only by pleasing people can corporations earn money. The ones that don't, lose money and go out of business. Government action doesn't have that feedback mechanism. It only has voting, and we only vote once a year. You vote for a corporation every time you buy or don't buy their products.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
He fears the free exchange of ideas, and seeks a way to squelch that which endangers his survival.
Salon.com is the online equivalent of the NY Times. Both are socialist rags.
nemo me impune lacessit
Govermnent is not the answer.
Government is the question.
The answer is NO.
It's a really nice suggestion to read the article without any "preconcieved notions", however, those preconceived notions are sometimes well thoughtout. Personally, as a Libertarian, I find the idea of government regulation as being repugnant. GIVE ME LIBERTY OR GIVE ME DEATH. YOU may want the government regulating YOUR life to protect YOUR sense of security, but I would gladly forefit my security and fight to my dying breath to preserve my liberty.
I understand that Carr is using the FDA as an analogy, to state his case for regulation of information. But here's why the analogy fails for me: information is not like poison.
1. Poison kills you, irreversibly. Bad information might confuse you, even for years, but with new information you can change your mind.
2. You (generally) cannot detect poison until it's too late. If all poisons smelled bad, we might not need to regulate them as severely. Bad information smells bad. When I get a chain letter, I sense right away whether I'm likely to find it debunked on snopes.com.
Frankly, I wouldn't know how to test my food for poisons. But information is different. Not only do I have well-known sources on the Web that I can use to verify facts, I have the logic of my own mind to analyze arguments.
The solution here is not to throw away free speech, but to EDUCATE people. Educate them about how to find info on the Web, and how to assess its validity. Educate them on corporate media, be it in print, broadcast, or Internet. Educate them on how to have face-to-face discussions with people of differing opinions; how to assess what's valid and what's unsupportable. Educate them with enough commonly-acceptable history and scientific method that they can easily spot the grossest of factual distortions. It's all the same problem that it was 100 years ago, but just on a larger scale now, with different media. The Web remains the greatest opportunity for free expression ever; let's help everyone rise to the opportunity instead of hiding from it.
... of being "irresponsible and specious".
Facts are objective, but from a practical standpoint, they are subjective.
You do it by including the identity of the reviewer with the rating. Each piece of info could be rated by many different reviewers, and the reader chooses the rating that is from the reviewer who, in the reader's opinion, has the best reputation for Truth/Reliability/Orthodoxy/PoliticalCorrectness/W hatever.
So, in your Consumer Reports example, who decides what is factual? Consumer Reports does. Who will use their ratings? People who trust Consumer Reports.
BTW, this is what is wrong with the Slashdot moderation system: moderators are anonymous, so you can never really trust the scores.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I'm not saying we don't have the right. The first poster just misquoted the 2nd amendment (as most people do). You are correct, from a literal reading of the amendment, we have the right to bear arms, but I was just questioning the reason for that right. It was in there for the militia, something that (for all practical purposes) ceases to exist. As another poster pointed out, most (if not all) of the constitution is there to protect us from the government, not other people or companies. Due to what the founding father just went though with the English, they wanted to make sure that the people could always rise up against an oppressive government, not an oppressive next door neighbor, or ISP.
check out Andrew Vachss' site.
----- go to www.questionexchange.com.
The primary legal justification, at least, for FCC regulation of the airwaves is not, as the author states, a recognition of the pervasiveness of the media. Regulatory authority - in the case of broadcast - is possible because of the finiteness of the media, says the U.S. Supreme Court, if I remember correctly. The Internet has a near infinity of "channels" and is thus subject to stronger First Amendment protection. (The finiteness of conventional broadcast is also eroding somewhat as technology advances.)
Absolutely brilliant idea! what do you mean by modding it (1)? this is a cheap, charismatic, rational solution to the inherent problem of gullibility. that is, until the other side gets PSAs with Charlton Heston telling them to believe *everything* that's published on the web...
It was this statement, however, that most struck me. In talking about how government, for instance, regulates the food industry so we know what ingredients we are dealing with, he says something similar is needed for the Net. He says: "There must be strenuous efforts first and foremost to guarantee that what is represented as fact is fact, and that what is not fact is clearly labeled as such."
This parallels an idea I had a couple years ago as a possible Web business -- providing a rating system to information sites as to how factual the information really is. A 'Consumer Reports', if you will, of information.
But the problem I came across, and one that I see in Carr's proposal, is this: Who decides what is factual?
Let's use an obvious example, creation versus evolution. See the problem? If a creationist were to evaluate a scientific article talking about evolution, might he or she be tempted to mark it down as 'Not factual'? Certainly a biologist would mark creationist writings as 'Not factual.'
So whoever provides the ratings as to whether or not information on the web is factual will either bring their own prejudices to the task, or will turn off a sizable segment of the population ('Oh, he marks that site as factual, but he believes in evolution so what does he know?')
I don't know the solution to this problem. How do you get a system that marks information sites as factual or not factual when the population-at-large can't even decide on what they think is factual?
________________
________________
Private Essayist
His argument that corporations will pursue only profit at all costs, fails to take into account that this is only a slightly different motivation than that of a government official; in either case, in order to be successful, the bureaucrat or the corporation must keep the customer happy. But for the corporation, this relationship is much more direct; the repercussions to bad decisions happen immediately instead of only at certain times (such as elections, appointments, or Congressional decisions) when the gov't official becomes vulnerable to outside forces capable of removing him from office. And corporations compete whereas the gov't is a monopoly. Either entity will try to manipulate people into doing things favorable to it, if given the chance; therefore the more feedback from the people, the better. Reputation-tracking software will probably evolve to help keep the corporations accountable, and those who always tell the truth will be more favored. If there is a need, in the free market it will tend to get fulfilled; but problems in gov't are harder to get fixed.
Thank you for pointing that out! The Internet does not belong to the American Gov't. Or any gov't. That's what makes it the only truly free and fair human creation on this silly planet. Bastions of free speech like China and Iraq regulate the Internet within their borders. 'nuff said.
Caleb Car suggests we need a government organization designed to protect the American public's information sources. We've done that already. It was called the "House Un-American Activities Committee", and it took way too long to die the death it deserved. Has he no sense of decency?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
However, the article does bring up the question of how to turn information into knowledge, and my position is that by "dumbing-down" the internet (or anything for that matter) you remove the need for people to think for themselves and even if regulation can make sure that information online is factual, it would defeat his purpose creating more knowledge.
How many times have you seen the exposure of hoaxes and vaporware on /.? Probably about as many times as you've heard "Read the damn article first" or "check your facts!" The thing is, most of us are net savvy. We've grown accustomed to the tricks attempted on us. But most times we have to learn the hard way. When's the last time you clicked a p0rn banner ad? Do you even wait for the html to load in an 'on-exit' triggered page?
No, I'm not trying to inflate your ego. My point is that the process of verifying text and validating sources is, in itself, what turns information into knowledge. It's like when Mom told me not to touch the iron: She said it was hot, but that was just information. It took me getting burned to know that both the iron was hot and that Mom could be trusted to deliver reliable information.
That's similar to what we do on the net. Sometimes we're the kid getting burned, and sometimes we have to heave a great *sigh* and point out the dangers even though we know that the newbie we're helping needs to get burned before he'll turn our information into knowledge.
This subject falls under the headings of Theory of Information or Theory of Knowledge and is usually taught in university Philosophy departments. Here's a quick bibliography:
Empirical Knowledge - Paul K. Moser, ISBN 0-8476-7493-2
Theory of Knowledge - Keith Lehrer, ISBN 0-8133-0571-3
A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge - George Berkeley, ISBN 0-915145-39-1
Cartesian Meditations - Edmund Husserl, ISBN 90-247-0068-X
why not sell regulated domains: for an additional subscriber fee that contributes to an agreed-upon fact-checking organization, you get a .reg (or whatever) domain name and an FDA/FCC/LOC(whatever inforeg organization) rated stamp saying your site is (relatively) true and responsible. the .reg domain would enable you to buy insurance to back up the inevitable court battles.
Man use... big words.... me confused... head hurts... need mindless entertainment to make the pain go away...
psmylie's dictionary: Godzillion (noun) Any number large enough to destroy Tokyo
There oughta be a law against spreading this kind of incoherent disinformation which is even now roiling in my mind's guts like a three-week-old pasta salad. Salon.com is lucky that The Food, Drug, and Information Administration hasn't padlocked their web servers already for their dangerous infohealth infractions.
I'm going to go stick my finger down my brain's throat now -- wish me luck.
--Timboy
In a sense, Google.com offers a "popular control" filter to the Web. Google's often my first stop for a search, and I am implicitly looking to find out what most people out there think are the best matches for my search. (For balance, it's important, though, to have additional search engines working on different search principles, including plain-old full-text indexing, without weighted links.)
I think that's a good suggestion for anything you read.
Personal responibility is a thing of the past. why would we even want to take care of ourselves when all these decisions could be made for us by government officials who care so deeply about the plight of the citizenry? we cant be troubled to educate ourselves or use common sense once in a while. think about it. if we really had any common sense, why would we need seatbelt laws, or helmet laws , or drug laws? the general public is so incompetent that it cant be trusted to evaluate information objectively, therefore safeguards must be put in place to prevent the spread of ignorance...and weve got to hurry before its too late! oh...wait... Seat belt laws, smoking bans, helmet laws, all supposedly to protect you from yourself, which is bad enough in and of itself, but really only protect the bottom line of insurance companies, employers, and anyone else who benefits from your existence. dont kid yourself and think that its just because you might get hurt. its because you might file an insurance claim or miss a day of work. The government is nothing but an extension of whatever corporation currently owns stock in its officials. and this guy proposes we do away with the first amendment in order to keep people from having to apply critical thinking skils? who benefits from this? I certainly dont see how it would make my life any better. i just have to wonder what effect all of this will have on the gene pool years from now if stupidity is allowed to flourish like it has over the past 40 years.
technology reaching the point to where it oVVn35 us may be just around the corner... I think that /. readers are amongst the true unrecognized voices of a technological society that is at war with itself.
We as consumers are most concerned with how clear our picture is into the telescreen as we shout our mantra a la the "2 minute hate" (|\||\| broadcast...
It's all too scary for me and I try to forget those evil Aldous Huxley, George Orwell books...
Lies... please make them be lies.
I think I can make sense of the seeming contradiction. The corporations we characterize as 'evil' are frequently using laws which libertarians do not approve.
I think most younger, more net-savvy libertarians would like to see intellectual property abolished or substantially weakened. This would prevent most of the abuses complained of on Slashdot. Beyond that, we need to ask what right and responsibilities a corporation has as an artifical, government-created person. For example, it's noteworthy that while corporations enjoy most of the rights of natural people, they cannot be imprisoned for breaking the law. We don't even attempt to provide an analogous punishment. To explore this question is certainly within the scope of Libertarianism.
There's a good argument for using existing antitrust law to break up media centralization. We used to have that, and lost it in the Reagan years, which is how we ended up with AOL-Netscape-Time-Warner cable/internet/movies/TV/etc. Four years of Bush and we may be down to two or three media conglomerates. We really should have a forced separation between ownership of content and delivery systems.
But this guy is arguing for outright content regulation, which never works very well.
How, exactly, does the U.S. government enforce any regulation on servers outside it's borders? What's to keep someone from moving their host to Europe?
For this to work every government in the world would have to agree on how and when the regulation would happen. Anyone wanna place bets on the chances of that happening?
I dunno. I get the feeling I've just been trolled. Either way the trolls of /. can take lessons from this guy. :)
He spends the first half of the article building his case with kiddie pr0n as the raison d'etre, and the second half failing to understand the difference between information and ideas, or at least the fact that they are made available via the net in exactly the same way, and sweeping regulation of one will undoubtable stifle the other - untolerably so.
This is a shame, since his points about the historical inability of corps to self-regulate (without the fear of government regulation to motivate them) are very valid, and his concerns about the erosion of privacy are well founded.
Further, we already have laws in place which regulate to some extent what content can be viewed by which people in which circumstances, and we will undoubtably have more in the future. Requiring passwords and some form of identity checking beyond what we already have would erode privacy even further, which he seems to be opposed to overall.
In all, his arguments, while understandable, lack internal consistancy. He just hasn't thought hard enough about the parts where the edges don't quite line up.
He should spend a couple of months reading
Don Negro
Don Negro
Perl 6 will give you the big knob. -- Larry Wall
Separate standards for the same medium is not without precedence. Take for example the latitude given to broadcast television in "late night" versus "prime time" scheduling. NYPD Blue has been showing tits and ass for a while now, something completely inappropriate for Saturday morning or even ABC's TGIF. This is a good use of limited resources, and shows good compromise between protecting children and decency and preserving First amendment rights.
Too big to fail? Does that make me to small to succeed?
I just gave this a read. He states there are only two forms of regulation: governmental and corporate. What about self-regulation? Why assume any regulation is needed in the first place? His argument about information dumbing down America is ridiculous.
Even worse is the form of regulation he espouses. Under his plan the govermnent would verify that information placed on the web is accuarate. HELLO! Who in their right mind want's the government to be the arbiter of truth? Any teenager with a dog-eared copy of 1984 should be able to see through this guy.
This is nothing but a troll disguised as a novel.
Sadly, I don't have any better solution than Carr's to offer, besides suggesting that people educate themselves, distrust authority generally, and leave the raising of other people's children to their parents.
OK,
- B
--
http://www.bradheintz.com/
- updated
OK, I was with him through the first couple of paragraphs - I'm a big one for the principle of charity, and giving someone the benefit of the doubt to see where they're going with their argument. And at the beginning, Carr makes a lot of sense; he throws in our faces the most glaring possible indictment of how the so-called "information revolution" may be a harmful thing:
"It is my belief, for which I offer no apology, that most of that technology is making people dumber: It is teaching them how to assemble massive amounts of information, of arcane minutia, without simultaneously teaching them how to assemble those bits of information into integrated bodies of knowledge -- such integration being the only function that distinguishes the human brain from a mechanical computer."
I agree with this wholeheartedly - I haven't been too long out of America's public education system, and I've seen the kind of folks we're cranking out these days...it's scary to think that they're going to be running the country in fifty years. What we have right now is a population which, though confronted with more information than any other group in the history of the human race, consists mostly of people who have neither the skills nor the inclination to make use of that information. People expect anything relevant and important to either have a neon sign flashing over it and nicely numbered how-to steps, or to be "self-installing", like "Saving Private Ryan's" message of why we should be grateful to veterans.
This is something which media sources have traditionally been very good at - the six o'clock news gives you relevant issues in the form of human interest stories rather than statistics and op-ed pieces. Hollywood delivers mediated experiences that can lead you to believe or think a certain way without any visible effort on your part, other than watching the movie. Neal Stephenson pointed out once that Disneyland is a great example of this - you go to say, the nature-themed part of the park, and you walk away with an impressed idea of the importance of ecological issues, conservation, etc. - but without having read or processed anything.
"Traditional" media have been doing this for so long now that it's second nature to them, and while they may skim over a lot of details, they don't openly lie and most of the time they're not trying to deceive us (when they do, it's usually in very subtle ways having to do with promoting an image of America that makes the end receiver feel good about himself/herself), and you don't find too many genuinely harmful or volatile things in the papers, on TV, etc. (I'm not going to get into the sex and violence argument here). So as long as we have traditional media, it's OK that most of our population can't think for themselves, because they don't have to. They're going to be all right because they're getting fairly accurate information in precompiled form. And while we all know that "pre-compiled" means "you lost some options along the way", it's better than handing over root access to someone who thinks smaller fonts take up less disk space, and it works out better for everyone in the end. But now we have the Internet, and it is not like the traditional media. Carr is insightful in noticing this, and also in pointing out that with the Internet we have a problem. The Internet is not precompiled. It is not user-friendly. It does not give you what you want without needing to be told or asked. The Internet is, quite simply, whatever you can manage to do with it, and nothing more. This is terrible news for all those people who are just fine with Dan Rather or Peter Jennings telling them how things are every night, and Julia Roberts films giving them a warm fuzzy moral sense.
So what does Carr suggest we do? Regulate for the protection of the people. If you don't know how to use the information in your hands, you're a danger to yourself and others, because as we all know, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. This would be a good idea, if not for two objections:
/. is a splendid example of this: in order to protect people from obscene material, we have to take it out of the hands of people who have legitimate uses for it. So we end up with regulations that protect us from things but at the same time keep us from being able to function, and that's also a Very Bad Thing (TM).
1) That's an enormous responsibility to put on an agency, and an enormous amount of power to just hand over. We (ostensibly) have that kind of regulation already in the FCC, but the FCC isn't perfect, and I think we owe most of the good in media today to the fact that the people running the media companies aren't stupid and know what's in their best interest. They need trusting, docile populations who receive information as piped into them. Start lying to people, or ripping them off, and those docile people get very ugly very quickly. So they've learned over time to be the mostly trustworthy, friendly outlets we know today. New, internet-based media companies don't necessarily know this; they haven't been around long enough. That means they're going to do a lot of stupid things, and a lot of them are going to pay the price for being companies that did stupid things. If we involve government regulatory power, then we're asking for more trouble, because the government regulators almost certainly won't know this, and they'll regulate like crazy in the name of the public good. Then we end up with heavily censored and absolutely useless (at best) or devious puppet (at worst) media, and that's a Very Bad Thing (TM).
2) Not everybody is a blithering incompetent. Start introducing government regulation designed to protect people from themselves, and you're going to restrict the people who actually know what they're doing. The Supreme Court ruling mentioned in another article today on
Yet Carr is right - there is a significant problem in the fact that staggering numbers of people now living aren't capable of processing information or performing certain critical thinking tasks. What do we do?
Ideally, we'd start teaching people how to think again, rather than using schools as a convenient eighteen-year daycare center between the day you're born and the day you get a job. Ideally we'd give up on "career tracks" in public schools (known as "school-to-work" where I grew up) and instead teach people to figure out what they want to do with their lives and how to plan to accomplish it, because then when life tries to throw a wrench in the works, they can deal with it and move on. When they're confronted with choices, rather than have an automatic "I'm an [insert career here], so I do X" response, they could consider options, reason about them, and reach an informed decision.
But that would be one hell of a project, and I have no idea how to accomplish it, so there needs to be a better solution. As it turns out, there is a workable (if trollish) way to do it: KEEP THE INTERNET FOR THE GEEKS UNTIL NORMAL PEOPLE CAN HANDLE IT!
Let's face it, the Internet was never intended for some of the things it does today; originally it was a novel and powerful tool for performing certain highly nerdy tasks. I say we should let it stay that way...it doesn't need to be too user-friendly just yet, because that'll scare off people who don't need to be forced to think at this stage in their lives. Then, when they're ready, the Internet will still be there, pure and in all its glory, and they won't need to be protected from it.
Not too long ago, the Internet was in just such a state. Then the "new economy" and the "Internet boom" came along and it all got corrupted in the name of the Almighty Dollar. That's a shame, because the Internet was coming along just fine at the time, progressing quite naturally toward being accessible to everyone - academics knew how to use it, geeks and tech folks knew how to use it, it was there if you needed to do research, and recreationally AOL or Compuserve would let you have a novel way to talk to your friends and play games. You didn't have trillions of bits of unfiltered data thrown at your head, like a sandblaster turned on a soup cracker (credit to Scott Adams for that metaphor), and the average person could get what he/she wanted and the knowledgeable person could get what he/she wanted. It all worked very nicely.
So how about if instead of throwing regulation at the Internet and making it useless or even more dangerous in the name of protecting people, we just quietly let it scale it back down to what it used to be a few years ago? Dot-com businesses are already dropping like flies, and that's one of the big issues out of the way. Plenty of people still find computers and "that Internet thing" confusing as hell, so they're taken care of, too. In the meantime, our culture and our educational system can adapt to helping people deal with huge quantities of information in preparation for the day when they'll strike out onto the Net on their own. In fact, if we let it go on its own for a while, this solution may just implement itself. If not, well, maybe the Internet media providers will learn a thing or two and scale back on their own - it's in their best interest, anyway. The Internet isn't quite ready to be what they want from it just yet, and anybody with sound business planning skills (I say that sarcastically, having watched the "dot-com" revolution fly past) ought to be able to understand that and act on it.
Besides, do you really want the Bush administration controlling the Internet? "Error 404: I was unableable to locatify the page you requesterated"...
Information is dangerous. If you go back to the roots of information you will find ou that it directly leads to power.
Man discovers fire. That man now has new information. He can cook meat, ridding it of some of the unpleasant bacteria and stuff (unbeknownst to him). He can frighten large predators. He has power over life and death in a relativistic sense. Now he can share that information with others. Or he can demand payment, becoming a business entity, or he can become a government entity, heed my words! Those without the information, in this case fire, would find that it is beneficial to them to submit themselves to the owner of the informations rules. At least until they can figure it out or steal it or defeat the owner and gain rights to that information.
Now, I understand that all information isn't that crucial like fire. But information is power in one form or another. The discussions that have gone on here relate to "Should we give the power to governments or corporations?" That is a good question.
Giving the power to the people is very dangerous. People are greedy. But we can't trust corporations to act any better. Government loves to keep the power, and the information, away from the prying eyes of the public. What real solutions can we find? What other alternatives can we find?
I'm not necessarily pro-gun control (enforcement issues would probably guarantee that only honest people don't have guns) but the whole "guns keep us safe from government" argument is just unmitigated bunk.
You guys always leave out the fact that one of the main impetuses for holding the Constitutional Convention in the first place was the inability under the Articles of Confederation to provide a strong central government capable of putting down citizens' rebellions.
The Constitution specifically states in Article IV Section 4 that the federal government (not "the people" or "the citizenry") is responsible for protecting the States from both invasion and domestic violence.
Article I Section 8 grants Congress the power to "suppress" insurrection. Depending on which definition of "suppress" you choose to invoke, this could quite reasonably include preventing individuals from stock-piling military weaponry.
The current situation we have right now, in which individuals have access to firepower adequate for the defense of their home but inadequate to mount a serious military action, is a pretty good middle-ground IMHO.
So it would take five years and a bunch of $1 million studies on the impact of new ideas on rat brains to get them approved?
I'm sorry. This has to be the stupidest thing I've ever read. As Slashdot proves every day, the best answer to bad speech is debunking speech.
D
----
Have you turned on TV lately? What about ;-)
information poisoning there? Plenty people lie
and distort information anywhere. Talk to your
friends when they tell you a story or truly
known fact, they are would sure to put their own
spin onto it. Govenment blatantly stating truth
to guide ourselves into obedience is stupid.
So what's next, government controlled rumors.com?
See what the percent of people with secondary
degree in US and this action by a government,
among few others might just start making sense,
sense for them! =)
Re: Internet turns lives and hearts of children
dark - reworded Bush quote... is Bush a president?
I think I missed it.
Tax on recordable media in Canada/Germany - Gov't Backed, Corp Bought
It should be pointed out that there is no tax on recordable media in Canada. It is a levy and actually gives the consumer something in return. It is perfectly legal and ethical for a Canadian to copy an audio CD for personal use, regardless of whether or not they have purchased it. 5.2c for a CD ain't bad!
In the DUNE books by Frank Herbert, isn't there quite a bit of discussion about the negatives of technology? There is even a great Jihad because of the downward spiral human kind suffered from the excessive use of technology. What was that Jihad called, anybody know?
I tried to be fair and hear the guy out, but I read the article and it's still as annoying and foolish as I thought it would be. He's either ignorant of, or oblivious to, the facts of corporate influence over our very own government. Soft money, PAC's, lobbyists, corporations sign big checks on a daily basis to buy legislation that favors their cause: profit. Someone please explain to me how corporate regulation is such an inevitability that we need to call in the government to regulate it. Especially when the government has a corporate hand up it's ass. Where we are now in terms of freedom online, is where we need to be, and where we should pledge to be no matter how fiercely we have to defend it. The internet went mainstream so quickly that no corporate or government regulators could put a leash around it in time. Online businesses are dropping like flies because, contrary to this writer's statements, we ignore their presence. People don't click banners, and the image he gives of the internet becoming one big commercial is a theory that would only come to pass if we wanted it to. Salon's corporate profile section will show that their funds come from Microsoft, among others, and they were criticized during the elections for hitting Nader hard as a result of his attack on corporate crime and corruption of our government. So I find parts of his article in that aspect, ironic. At this point in time, anyone who's done their research knows that corporations are doing their best to chip away at your rights online. Every person that's done that, is one more reason why they will fail. The article claims that the corporations who operate and own the infrastructure of the internet itself, can't be trusted to maintain our rights to absolute freedom of the information it holds. For that, I turn to the AOL/TW merger where the FTC once again maintained your 1st amendment rights. Both 'governing' bodies, whether profit driven or voter driven, are problematic. Putting either in control of this medium is a mistake. From the beginning both have been used to give the people of the world more freedom and knowledge through the internet, and that's the way it should continue -- with business profiting from your access fee, and government making sure your access is absolute and free of censorship as per your 1st amendment rights.
to the point of saying the First Amendment shouldn't apply to the internet. I can't imagine any /. reader taking him seriously.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
BTW - there is a way to moderate the moderators on SlashDot. There is a meta-moderation tool, where you are presented with 10 comments and a moderation to the comment, and you decide whether the moderation was fair, not fair, or you decline to decide.
There's a FAQ, but there is also a bug. Although it is availible to anyone in the top 90% oldest accounts (10% youngest accounts are excluded), it doesn't appear as an option until you do it once. So go Meta-Moderate (M2), and then do it every day. You'll help keep out the evil moderators.
My friend, I was having an argument with someone the other day, and you virtually quoted me to the letter. Wish I had mod points.
--
All men are great
before declaring war
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
Between the resumes stored on their site and the job descriptions listed, there's no way DICE could pass a truth-o-meter.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
I wholehearedtly agree (I think) with everything this guy said about the present, but the conclusions he draws shows that he doesn't even understand the present.
The Internet is fundamentally an open global information forum and NOTHING the US wants to do about it can change that! Think about the propeganda wars we have seen in recent years online such as the Serbs-V-NATO and you can see how no international agreement (think China) will ever be reached to control the entire internets information.
Attempts to ascribe viewing rights as the method of control is backward to every other item on the planet. It is the responsibility of the distributor to stay within the law not the consumer (when at age 15 I bought condoms though the legally required age was 18 (16 to marry, 17 for sex and 18 for condoms...sheesh intelligent people!) I felt no fear or prosecution though the seller should have). Pornographic magazines do not attempt to create child-proof covers, they trust the retailers to keep them in the right hands.
To enact the sort of steps outlined in the article, the U.S. government would have to disconnect the U.S. from the Internet directly and create "proxies" to allow acceptable internet information not hosted in the US in, as well as forcing all people allowed to host within the US to obey whatever verification rules they enact. Now what you have is an inflexible web (- /. of course) where no new ideas appear (they are old by the time soneone says you can say it) with a mountain of beauracracy, your internet would no longer be a library/research centre/entertainment facility.
Finally I have one question....why the net and not National Enquirer? If people believe the net is true they sure as hell believe paper is (let alone film, tv, music ...). I detest the coporate influence in the world AND agree that the key is governmental regulation BUT I don't think this guy has a single good idea in his head about how to do it. I think it is nothing to do with the internet or media (though they best show the "coruption") but is entirely based in the monetary based legal systems of the world. Imagine if in the MS V Stacker case both sides were unable to spend more than a judge appointed amount on their cases (or even better they could spend nothing but would be represented by court appointed lawyers if the court deems a case neccessary) instead of one side simply using money to delay and badger the legal system to get the best profits they can. The legal system should be above money, imagine Gore and Bush could not engage a lawyer or even legal advice, they just had to decide for themselves whether or not they should go to the court and if they did that the courts then decided what should happen instead of one side pushing for judgements while another pushes for delays until time is the only issue left and politics (money) the only deciding factor.
By the way I know I can't spell :-)
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
I wrote a lengthy letter to the editor in response to this article, I would suggest that Slashdot readers do the same.
What really infuriated me about the whole thing was the notion of "We'll protect you from knowledge that might be dangerous." And he thinks the government is the best institution to do this? How many people here were spoon fed lies, outright contradictions, and gross factual errors during a stint in the public education system? I remember getting into an argument with an eighth grade science teacher who said there were only three parts to the atom. I argued for the myriad other subatomic particles, but he denied their existence in class and moved on to the next topic. While a small, isolated incident, this demonstrates that the government is by no means perfect and does not have a great track record of information integrity.
"From the good folks who brought you 'Duck and Cover', welcome to the US Internet Authority Stamp of Accuracy!"
Yes, there is a whole hell of a lot of misinformation on the net. Some of it is probably harmful or dangerous, but anyone that is unable to perform even the most meager feats of skepticism or critical thinking is going to be duped by something else--tabloid newspapers, weird rumors, religious cults, shiny objects, etc. I'm not suggesting that we kill off all the stupid people (hopefully natural selection will prune the tree along the way) ;), but assuming that the entirety of the human population is unable to think for themselves is preposterous and frankly insulting.
Just for the chance of added moderation, should we rely on the government to tell us which operating system is the safe and "right" choice?
While I enjoyed Caleb Carr's "The Alienist" (an excellent bit of turn of the previous century historical fiction), I don't think I'll be picking up a copy of "Killing Time".
Random Musings at Rum Smuggler
He makes the point that there are only two types of regulation; Government and Corporate... however there is a third, and that is Social.
I've come to realize that community is so very important to our well being and that we have systematically removed it from our (American) culture. It's easy to see why he missed this point, we haven't do a very good job of utilizing social regulation.
Here's a simple example. There was an ad campaign which attempted to curb litter. The ads focused on individuals and made it clear that you were responsible for your own litter and that you should dispose of it. The reality is that we are all responsible for the trash on the ground. The ad made litter appear to be an individual responsibility and if you littered it was a sign that you were a "litter bug", but if you walk past litter and don't pick it up, then you are just as responsible.
We ignore our responsibilities as members of society by blaming problems on other individuals (or corporations, governments.) Want to know who will regulate... look in the mirror. It's you.
.
Yes, I agree that the government should control the net. That way, General Electric, Rockwell, and Time Warner can create an even greater media lockdown, because they're the ones that fund the infolection campaigns of our "representatives." When we have a regulatory agency to police the net and protect us all from sexual predators and tongue-in-cheek articles (That evil Onion) then we'll truly be able to lie back and enjoy an Internet that's suitable for the whole family. What is this guy trying to do? Sounds to me like he should pull his head out of his ass...
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
This opinionated post has, what is believed to be, unprovable facts, and is, therefore, being removed by the United States Government.
Big Brother is watching you...
--
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
The central premise of the book is that since information is so easy to manipulate and modify, that everything you read, hear, or see via some form of media is suspect. Or, at least, it will be in 20 years or so.
His article makes a couple of assumptions. First, that governmental regulation is better than corporate regulation. Probably, but governmental regulation has, in so many ways, been a tool of corporate interest. Nobody is going to convince me that the government overall acts in the interest of the people, unless they are rich. Also, in the novel, the government is one of the prime manipulators of information to control the population.
The second assumption is that traditional media is more reliable and accurate than what you find on the web. This is true to a point, but the largest media providers, including print, are owned by large corporations. I trust what I read in The Nation more than what I might read in USA Today. I agree that the editorial process is a Good Thing, and trust that most of the 'facts' presented in print have been checked. But, the choice of what to present is more and more being curtailed by the interests of the corporations that control the providers.
During the Crusades, a band of Germans slaughtered an entire town, which was mostly Jewish. The Cambridge Medieval History from 1968 refers to this incident as "the misbehaviour of some Germans."
Or, take the story of the Alamo. There is a Kurt Vonnegut novel that breifly explains why there was a fight there in the first place. This story, which is presented in text books as a swashbuckling tale of good Americans fighting injustice against insurmountible odds, has more to it that you may have read in the 8th grade. The Mexican army attacked because the Good Folk of San Antonio owned slaves. Slavery was illegal in Mexico, and San Antonio was a part of Mexico at the time. So, the heros of the Alamo were fighting for the right to own slaves. How utterly American.
You may believe that or you may not. I read it, and it seemed entirely reasonible to me. What's interesting is that I believe it, even though I've never been able to confirm the information. Vonnegut very well could have been making it up. I have been trying to confirm that story, on and off, in various sources for the last five years. I have had no luck.
The last time I attempted to find any confirmation on this information, which I was exposed to about 10 years ago (or more), was about three years ago. I tried looking for info on the Web, which was much smaller then. I have just searched Google for the same thing. There appear to be several essays on the subject out there. Some of them appear to be genuine pieces of scholarship.
I agree that our information exposure might well become a more serious problem. I agree with Clifford Stoll that we don't need more computers in public schools. I also believe that an ideal situation for the Net would be one not regulated by governments or corporations. I also believe this is possible.
One-ton tomato
This is good advice, Michael:
'I suggest you read the article without any preconceived ideas of whether you'll find it "good" or "bad", just read it and see what you get out of it.'
though shouldn't this apply to everything one reads?
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
actually, the 2nd amendment says (and I quote): "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." Not quite as black and white as anti gun control people would like us to think it is. They had a definite reason for give people the right to bear arms, and I'm not so sure it had anything to do with personal protection. It was to help defend the country. Given that our biggest enemies are most like to rain ICBM's down upon us, I doubt Bubba having a snub nose special is going to help any.
The last thing I'd want to see is any government involvement. I doubt that the government would step in since they won't get any bribes from lobyists to do so on behalf of the workers, but if they did it would only be a token measure and likely to cause more problems for both parties than any good the government might do. (just look at any government involvement to see my point).
At issue is how we use technology and how technology uses us. Technology will not stop, it is human nature to invent and improve upon invention. Yet in that process we change ourselves with the technology we create. We must learn to recognize and acknowledge those changes in order to benefit from them and keep them from harming us. All technology has the potential to be usefull or harmfull, it is up to us to determine which it will be.
So, we as people need to change things for ourselves and change ourselves by doing so. In this aspect, we must redetermine how much power our jobs have over our lives and figure out how much we give our employers in return for that portion of our lives to see if it is a fair exchange. Nobody can make us do something we do not wish to do willingly, employees in general must learn this and learn that the companies they work for need them as much asa they think they need the employers.
There is alot that we can do about this problem of work creeping into our lives. The last option should be government, the first should be ourselves. Form a guild, an association, an union. Refuse to work for slave driving corporations, turn the pagers off, turn those cellphone ringers off. Live your life when you go home and go home at a normal hour, the money is not worth your life, is it?
"When people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called 'the People's Stick'." -Bakunin
The writer of that piece (Scott McCloud) is also the author of two great books on comic art (or Sequental Art, as he puts it):
.01, plenty small enough for most micropayments. The reader gets to use a credit card to pay if they wish. As Scott said, whenever he wrote a really good comic and made it availiable online I'd be happy to cough up .25 or .50 it it was quick and easy to do.
Understanding Comics
which talks about the atructure of comics, and the mechanism that lets you understand the temporal/spatial/emotial concepts comics attemtpt to portray, and
Reinventing Comics (which the author mentions is the piece you posted), a book I have just received and not read yet - but is about how comics are transitioning into the digital world, and I image if you liked the short piece linked to in the original comment you'd love this book!
My second thought is this - why do more people not use PayPal for online micropayments? I ask this becase witrh PayPal it's easy enough to set up a simple link that you can have a reader use to pay you as little as
It is true that to offer this service PayPal takes some percentage, perhaps that is enough to stop it from being used. I'd be interested in hearing from other people about possible problems with using PayPal as a micropayment system.
A final note - the comment used in my sig was found in Reiventing Comics.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
oh boy, what a trigger for slashdot arguing. anyway, while i am probably hold the same opinion as most slashdot readers, i will say anyway that i cannot agree with caleb carr that information is inherently dangerous and must be regulated. the only solution to problems of disinformation and destrunctive control is to provide people with the tools to contribute to national and global media, and the only solution to what some seem to view as dangerous information (pornography, how to grow pot, how to make a molotov cocktail) is *education* and prosecution of destructive acts only if and when they actually occur.
VOS/Interreality project: www.interreality.org
We need to put the power of moderation in everyone's hands, so that my search directs me to Matrox's beta linux driver (kewl!) and yours brings you to what you want. This is the idea behind truly personalized media. But the problem with personalized media is that, up til now, you've had to surrender your valuable profile information to get it. The looming danger of Big Brother is why I called my 1981 thesis on a personalized newspaper NewsPeek (a peek at the news, and a play on the George Orwell-1984 term newspeak).
We need better filters, but Google as it stands won't cut it. A "my-Google" that blends my particular viewpoint with others of like mind is more like it, but privacy becomes a major concern here. (What happens when "my-Google" gets bought by Microsoft or Oracle, or what if its records are subpoenaed by the FBI?) Separation of your true name from your persona (what you do) becomes essential. As Bruce Sterling wrote way back in 1992, we need tools to direct our attention to what we want to see amongst all there is to see. And as we build these tools, we will need to be mindful of our privacy.
--
The antidote for misuse of freedom of speech is more freedom of speech.
-- Molly Ivins
As a Canadian, I have to pay a fee on every transaction to cover the cost of converting the payment into US dollars. The fee is 2.6% plus 30 cents, which kills any micropayment possibility.
As it happens, the fee is charged twice if you're sending money to other Canadians -- once to convert it to US dollars and once to convert it back. The magic of the digital economy!
I eagerly became a PayPal member, but after learning all the terms, I don't think I'll ever be a PayPal user.
Yogurt
Carr seems not to notice that not a single one of his concerns about the Internet could not also apply to the print media. Print was much more pervasive in its heyday, when every major city had 4 or 5 major newspapers, than the Internet is likely to be even 10 years from now, but nobody ever dreamed of regulating it. All newspapers, even nowadays, print unmitigated drivel from time to time, but they're only liable for it if it causes harm to someone. Carr offers no compelling reason to hold online content to a stricter legal standard than that.
And the brethren went away edified.
The usual counterbalance of government intervention into the casual and murderous corporate greed (bought a Bridgestone/Firestone tire on a Ford truck lately? It happens folks, and losing voters "in extremis," is what it takes before somebody in government takes notice,) can't be relied upon in the case of IT because both want to control you, your assets and whatever's left of your power.
One will do it because all they see is the bottom line while the other will be doing it to "protect" you (from who or what is always nebulous ain't it? Kiddie Porn. Give me a break! Its an State-run industry in Asia. Porn tours of Malasia. "Bangkock and bang pre-tit poon-tang for foreigners")
Basically, get down on your knees, spread 'em and kiss your ass goodbye. Orwell just had the timing wrong by fifty years.
Hopefully I'll be dead before then. I'm childless, intent on remaining that way and won't subject any progeny to the shit that's coming.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
"Only two forms of regulation are available in the United States: governmental and corporate. "
That's the central flaw. There is another form of regulation: Self control. TV rotting your mind and turning you into a corpulent blob? Get up, turn it off, and go for a walk. Kids downloading porn? Take 'em aside and explain the evils of the sex industry to them.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
A few months back a friend of mine, and myself, had the pleasure of developing a website for Mr. Caleb Carr. The URL is http://www.web-of-deceit.com Please feel free to check it out, it is a VERY interesting read. Definately worth your time.
~~Dilate
We need to prevent corporations from gaining too much power over the population. We need to make sure our children learn critical thinking skills. I agree with Carr on these points.
What I don't agree with is that notion that somehow registering users for porn sites and giving the government the abilitiy to punish gossip-mongers is somehow going to accomplish this goal.
Carr starts out with a sensible goal in mind, but I really don't see how the things he talks about are going to help. If sites have to carefully label all claims they make so that someone isn't unwittingly duped by a false rumor, wouldn't that just further degrade people's critical thinking skills? (No need to question that news item -- it's a proven fact that's been certified by the government.)
Also, as near as I can tell, fraud isn't legal just because it happens on the internet...
-- dR.fuZZo
That's not what the US Supreme court says in their decision to strike down the CDA: http://www.eff.org/pub/Legal/Cases/EFF_ACLU_v_DoJ/ 19970626_cda.decision
The first amendment doesn't deal with forcing people to publish something or to provide connectivity to your website. What it does do is restrict government so that it doesn't prevent people from doing those things.
What I, and the author of this article were referring to were specifically government interference with people and organiziations who do want to share information.
All information is good, information technology can be abused, as can any technology ... both industry and government are to be feared in abuse of technology ... the press (including slashdot) are what protects us from abuse by exposing it.
The graft he talks about has already made it a government of the corporations. The federal reserve bows to Wall Street. Food and drugs are regulated, yes, to protect the public saftey, but primarily to keep the oligopolies in power. Even environmental law exercises favoritism about when it will look the other way and where it will probe.
Someone mentioned Monsanto above. Ever wonder who Monsanto's competitors are?
Ludicrously enforced copyright and patent laws will be the death of freedom on the net, before anything else. And lets not forget, internet porn was *highly* subsidized by the government and justified by the media. Remember all the 'when VCRs first came out' analogies?
It does take a percentage if you have a business account, which you need to have to use it for online web payments. They've also made a number of changes recently to encourage switching to a business account, like only being able to accept about ~700 a year in payments made by credit cards from other people... and they have a sneaky default now of paying someone from your bank account rather than by credit card if you are just trying to send money to someone (I recently drained $500 from my checking account by accident that I meant to put on a credit card that way!).
That said, your basic point is a really good one and I'd hate to scare away anyone from a useful service like PayPal, which is still great for casual transactions and auctions.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
How ironic that this was posted right before the ancient article on Undernet being DDoS. Some people get a hold of bad weed, and the rest of us get a hold of some bad info. Slashdot is getting very lax in checking the articles lately and that just exemplified what this article speaks of.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
I'm going to make a completely prejudicial post here and now, and then reply to it after I've read the article with more specific thoughts.
/choose/ to allow it to "control". A /government/, on the other hand, will control (with force, naturally) any part of my life it damn well pleases, and if I don't like it, I get to go to jail.
Government regulation cannot POSSIBLY be the answer. The simple reason is that government doesn't work. In fact, it often works in reverse. Most areas in which the government tries its (inherently violent) hand at "fixing" something, it ends up broken even worse. You can't throw a rock into the history of government without hitting a policy that worsened what was ostensibly the problem.
A corporation cannot "control" an aspect of my life that I do not
more in a minute...
MoNsTeR
Yeah, and technology is creating "a laboring class" who somehow are suddenly poorer than they used to be, starving, etc. because - what? We read slashdot? Kids surf for porn? Give me a fscking break.
This guy needs to get out more. What he doesn't like on the web ... he doesn't have to read! And I for one don't want the likes of him interfering with my RIGHT to communicate.
Sorry.
sulli
RTFJ.
He does mention Napster (which is one-to-many communication IMHO, in the form of telling you the IP address for the file you're after), but let's face it: the Internet often blurs the lines between public and private communcation.
Where does the Constitution allow for regulation of conversations between friends?
That's about where I stopped reading. If there were still a House Committee on Un-American Activities, I would expect this guy to be brought before it and blacklisted. The only difference now would be that it would be justified.
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
I might acutally believe one word this guy said if i upped my crack intake 10,000% or so....
C:\>ls
bad command or file name
C:\>uptime
this should be filed under censorship
sulli
RTFJ.
It's a pleasure to peruse your post, sir!
:). This is something that no level of government can guarantee. Rather it is something that we must strive to inculcate in ourselves and in each other.
I can see several problems with Caleb Carr's proposal.
1) His government board is likely to turn into a monstrous tax-sponsored feeding trough for bureaucrats and lawyers.
2) The United States federal government can only directly influence a piece of the World Wide Web. Only organizations with global scope, like the United Nations, or with net-wide influence, like ICANN, would have the reach necessary to enforce the kind of regulation Carr proposes.
3) Regulation of the net does not address the root problem, "that technology is making people dumber". Indeed, instituting a supervisory agency would tend to aggravate the problem by leading people to believe that it is safe to absorb web content uncritically.
A solution demands that our culture should produce a population of discerning citizens capable of good judgement and critical thinking (such as Malor
Actually that's a good point. Information IS power and therefore it is dangerous. However, for the most part, information is only dangerous to existing social systems -- ie, new data or theories cause old social structures to be outmoded. So the perception of data as danger is going to be strongest by those who have power in the existing system.
:) )
Information about things like bombs is not, in and of itself, dangerous, any more than a gun is dangerous without someone to use it. Information just is, it doesn't do anything by itself. (in fact you could argue that information doesn't actually exist until it's in someone's brain, which is much like the old question about trees falling in uninhabited forests making sounds.... ie, kind of fun to think about. Not relevant, however, so I'll get back to the main topic.
In very general terms, restricting access to information means restricting access to power. Restricting access to power means concentrating that power. I suspect that power, like money, tends to accumulate; if you have money it's easier to make more money. If you have power, it's easier to get more of it. If this is true (and it seems powerfully true from what I can see), that means that the slide toward totalitarianism is the easiest and simplest path to follow -- water likes to flow downhill, power and money flow uphill. If that natural flow continues unchecked for too long, we have totalitarianism/1984.
Strikes me that just like we can get water to mountaintops, we can keep power and money in the hands of the masses. That does not mean that it can't be fought and delayed as long as possible. I would suggest that trying to keep information out of the hands of the masses does not encourage the fundamental principles of democracy and equality, and instead would work to concentrate power in the hands of existing institutions.
Considering how abusive they are becoming of the power they have already, giving them more just doesn't seem like a very good idea.
Remember, half of the population is below average intelligence. Do you really want to give government bureaucrats (not the brightest bulbs in the firmament) that much ability to tell you what you can read, think, and do?
I do agree with you that widespread, free access to information is dangerous, but I would suggest that the consequences of the alternatives are far worse.
Personally, I find that the Net makes me A LOT smarter. I function at a level that I could never have attained on my own, because I have access to so many expert opinions on so many fields. The hard part, admittedly, is determining who is actually expert and who's full of BS. I'm not sure how hard that skill is to learn, but it doesn't seem all THAT difficult.
The REAL problem here is the Caleb Carr has seen a lot of stupid young people recently. That's all. That's the real problem; he assigns a causation to his observation and off he goes. There are many other possibly explanations; one I like is that the culture is failing to teach a good working ethic to young people. I don't think it's related to the Net at all, personally. If there is a problem, first we have to figure out what the problem actually is: he didn't even come close to doing that.
And I totally missed this in the first read. Shame on me!
argh. didn't proofread well. 'possible' not 'possibly'. *doh*
He's quite correct in one thing, though. You are only as free as the information given to us. Certainly, conspiracy theorists will accuse the government of manipulating information in order to control the public, but corporations don't even hide that fact. Marketing is ALL about spin, whether you like it or not. A product does NOT necessarily have to be truly superior for a company to claim it is such.
And anyway, with such information surpressed, companies need only please the shareholders, not necessarily make products people will buy naturally. They make products they think they can convince people they need, and more often than not, it's successful. How often have you decided you *really* needed a gadget that was advertised on TV? I generally don't have that problem, but there are those I know that get swayed by those sleazy snake-oil infomercials.
So, to sum up; an economic argument only works when everyone has the ability to put together all different sides of the issue and figure out what is best. However, it is in the corporation's best interest to prevent that from happening.
yours,
yours,
kbs
Alas, there's not much help for stupid young people except...
/.
- reading
- time and experience
- luck
- a good teacher.
Corporations and/or governments can help with such things (maybe not the luck). But will they?
Scott Rosenberg, managing editor of Salon, has written a followup article" to 'Information Poisoning': if you were thinking about flaming Salon in email try reading this first, as they have been pretty swamped with outraged letters :)
It is not correct. All that a corporation has to do is to make a would-be consumer in their target market (i.e., someone with the income to spend) believe that they have more to gain from purchasing the product than from not purchasing it, or that they have more to lose from not purchasing it than from purchasing it. This may not have anything to do with pleasing the consumer at all. I have bought many things that do not please me, because I am afraid of the consequences of not buying them, rather than things that would please me. This includes insurance, some Microsoft products, and laundry detergent.
... isn't the Internet. It's an Encyclopedia.
Worse, he wants HIGHER standards for the internet than exist for dead trees. Government factual checking? C'mon, what government agency is cracking down on the Weekly World News for running the "Bat-Boy" story?
I did notice how he was able to mention his new book so many times. Must just be a wacky coincidence...
G.H.
---
So what? What are YOU going to do about it?
Just wait till some crappy band steals your nic.
A article full of of podium bashing and fallacies that borderlines on fanaticism. I have a whole lot of comments on it but I didn't think you'd like the entire list because it is almost as long if not longer that his four page document. My first sentence pretty much sums up my thoughts on it. I will say that I did like some of his thoughts on the internet...just not his solutions. Gaudeon
There are many on-line communities that are beginning to understand the need for reputations: Slashdot has karma; Mojo Nation uses mojo, a private currency; even SourceForge has implemented user ratings. And much more is being done in the private, closed source sector, unfortunately often driven by a requirement to more accurately target specific market segments.
The holy grail here would be an open source, fully distributed, open yet secure reputation system can satisfy this need. If in addition, this system put the user in full control over their personal information and how - and with whom - it was to be shared, then privacy could be assured while reputations at one site could safely cross boundaries into other sites.
As information begins to drown us, reputation-driven services that can accurately direct our limited attention to what we want to see when we want to see it will drive the new economy. We have the technology - let's build it!
--
The antidote for misuse of freedom of speech is more freedom of speech.
-- Molly Ivins
First, contrary to US citizens' beliefs, the US does not own the internet.
This guy is an idiot! Information can't be regulated by anyone. Especially the US government. Personally I would -rather- have corporations have more power over this sort of thing, because 1) they can't make laws, and 2) there are so many competing companies that these 'regulations' wouldnt really exist.
Anyway, why the hell should the internet be treated differently from a book? Information itself is not dangerous. Ignorence is.
For all you Greens out there, corporations aren't any different from you. They are only people. If you don't want AOL to 'take over the world', the Constitution must be upheld. Laws banning corporations aren't the answer. Vote Libertarian.
There is nothing quite as disgusting as an author willing to sacrifice others' freedom of speech.
I can't remember the last time I saw someone so condescending to both his readers and towards the American public.
-*- Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced -*-
i.e., the 2nd ammendment guarantees your right to wear T-Shirts and TankTops and not to be required to cover up your bare arms in public places.
HTH.
--
People should not be afraid of their governments - Governments should be afraid of their people.
Given the choice between unregulated, suspect information and regulated, supposedly 'proven' information, I'll take the former any day of the week.
-- If we were in any other industry they would've shot us a long time ago.
Having read The Alienist, and liked it, it surprises me that its author could come out with such an ill thought out article, unless (long shot) he meant to.
As he rightly points out we are constantly inundated with information, which does not constitute knowledge, and as a result many people fail to extract any real meaning from the stuff that gets piped into their brains every day. However, he implicitly seems to assume that the difference between the two is simply that knowledge is true and does not involve porn.
When an individual makes a judgement as to the truth of a piece of information, he does not simply check whether it is consistent with various other pieces of information which he knows to be true. The decision is based on any number of unquantifiable tendencies and attitudes, which are a result of that person's past experiences and the conclusions he has drawn from them. The building of knowledge seems, at least in part, to involve being exposed to the widest possible range of information, and learning to assess it.
Certainly, it is the duty of a parent to protect children from disagreeable influences, and certainly particular types of material can be considered obscene and should be restricted, but Caleb Carr is saying that the general population of the world needs to be somehow protected by their governments from people who may not be telling the truth. Here we have an arrogant man saying that all the "ordinary" people need to be protected from their own stupidity by a government-appointed elite. Rather sickening really.
Rather than the immature, utterly impractical suggestions here, maybe we should work on encouraging people to form their own opinions of what they see. Also, and more importantly, perhaps we should take more effort to emphasise that information is not experience. Even a slashdotter can see that the full depth of life can't be projected down a CRT.
You know, those of us who don't happen to live in the U.S.A., and who don't "benefit" from the U.S. guvment's capricious actions? Will the U.S. go to war to impose its censorship regime on us?
"The internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it."
You can not use patent law as an example of the failure of the "free market." Patent law itself is a infringement on a free market and an example of government regulation. A true free market would not have patent, copyright, of trademark law.
i was just reading this when i thought is hould submit it...
in any case, he has many valid points, but the execution of such a regulatory policy is far more difficult than getting people to say it is a good idea.
"The Internet should therefore cease to be governed by such undeniably loose rules and instead be overseen by an agency that would more closely resemble the FCC but have even broader power, specifically the power of prior restraint"
hmmm. difficult to do as the internet is an international entity. the FCC is able to be effective because any rules it makes effect only american viewers. any internet ruling body would need to be global to have any real effect and considering the HUGE moral variance between countries (US vs Afganistan for example) it would move at a galacial pace, if that fast.
-- Hail Eris
after he wrote that, i really didn't care much about anything he could say - in my opinion there is no such thing as enlightened government regulation, so his entire point is moot.
it's even more ludicrous when you try to imagine Dubya saying anything remotely RESEMBLING an enlightened comment about the internet.
Carr is a new Puritan: if it seems beneficial and people like it, then it must be bad. TV's are everywhere- so, get rid of yours and tell everyone about it, endlessly. The Internet has revolutionized our culture, so for that reason alone it must be very, very bad.
I'm going to burn my computer to prove how cool I am! Just watch me!
You HAVE no liberty, and it's not only the government's fault. Read "Manufacturing Consent" and "Profit over People" by Noam Chomsky to see how corporations are also a culprit.
... it just simply depends on which you think is the lesser.
Unfortunately this article is merely a verbalization of a principle of the "lesser of two evils"
yours,
yours,
kbs
[shameless
Government regulation should always be a last resort, as we lose personal freedom with every law they enact. Others have already quoted Franklin here, but it's worth repeating:
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
I was hoping to find a finely considered argument for regulation here, of the kind Lawrence Lessig generally produces. I did not. In fact, I found a short essay practicing what it claims to condemn. It pushes a couple of predictable buttons for the general public - paedophiles and large corporations - in order to scare people into buying the "dangerous information" argument in general, and they goes on to argue that the government should regulate the internet for accuracy because it is different (no attempt to made to explain how) to media for which that would be considered a gross violation of human rights. No attempt is made to explain how to avoid the inevitable corruption and contention involved in such regulation.
I kind of agree, actually, that the public is in danger of poisoning its conciousness with inaccurate and oversimplified information, but thats been going on for years and the mass media have a lot more to answer for than the internet here. I believe our attitude to information is wrong: that we are too happy to sit back and absorb what is fed to us by people we never see and who'd motives we rarely know ? Is it surprising that some of what is fed to us is poison ? That attitude has been encourage by mass media, and in the age of the internet, we need to get over it. Someone suggested a kind of global moderation system: that seems like a good start. Ultimately, people need to accept that it is their responsibility to verify what they are told, and, if certain images disturb them, to control what they see. In my opinion, that means a change in our whole cultural attitude, starting with hwo we are taught in school.
In the end, this is just another attempt to fudge an issue of private responsibility by declaring that the government must take care of us all.
Only in an ideal world. In our world, corporations can use monopoly powers to crush opponents, send high-priced lawyers to silence critics, bribe government officials to write advantageous laws, etc. None of this "pleases people" in the sense you indicate.
The Constitution does not give any rights -- it simply guarantees that preexisting rights shall not be infringed.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
The beauty of running links or lynx as a web browser is that you never have to loose your lunch looking at goats.cx
Don't the commercial industries OWN the government? Sure, they don't come out and say that but come on, we know who's running the show.
If this were regulated, it still wouldn't matter.
Look at the public schools. They are set up to turn children into obedient little consumers. And now we complain that kids cannot assimilate information into knowledge. Does anyone want to know why? Here it is.
/. is more likely to have made it through with this ability intact. And as a result we often had to endure being made fun of and otherwise abused. Yes, it's a tired refrain, but it is the typical situation.
;)
/.ers do. Government isn't the answer. It is the problem. As usual, EDUCATION is the answer. Problem is, it's much harder to educate than to legislate. And people are lazy and pick what appears to be the easy way. Problem is, it actually turns out to be worse in the long run. But of course, by then the people that wrote the law are gone and the new guys have to deal with the fallout from it. Interesting, that.
To accomplish this requires an ability that 12+ years of public school drives out of most people. Critical thinking. The ability to think for yourself. Yes, the audience here on
The thing is, critical thinking is not good for educators. It makes it harder to control thier charges. Kids are born thinking for themselves. At least all the kids I have worked with. And teaching someone that constantly questions you is difficult at best. Not to mention a whole classroom full of them. But it can be done. And it's eaiser without all the government restrictions educators must put up with now.
This situation was not the case in the past. It is a relitively new attitude. Talking with people from previous generations will tell you that. Yes, old people have usefull stuff to teach us. Much as it pains me to admit it.
Now this guy says we should limit the big bad corporations with strict government control of the net and IT in general. If we taught our kids properly, they would see right through all this corporate BS and call them on it. Just like typical
One more thing. The net, like real life, can be a dangerous place. There is a lot of content that is not for children. It's life. Deal with it. Watch your kids' use of the net just like you do when they are outside, in real life. If they can steal a credit card and fill in the forms correctly to make it work, then they can steal a "license" and password. Just like how they can get drugs, alcohol, and tobacco without too much hassle. You educate them on those issues, why is this different? Again, the soultion is education and responsibility. Two things serriously lacking in American society.
With apologies to Blair et al, there is a third option regarding "Internet vetting." I will preface this by saying that I agree with the author that there should be some kind of system to rate and interpret information. Although the raters would have some kind of control, this kind of system would allow for people who are not independent experts to get first time information from the Internet, rather than just confirming things read in far more exclusive venues of knowledge.
Ok, here is the third alternative between government and corporate control:
Popular control.
The reason we have government and corporations fighting over the domination of the Internet is most easily illustrated by imagining two lion prides fighting over a water hole while antelopes and zebras die of thirst. Although everyone, including the lions, would benefit from free access to the water for the zebras, only the lions are strong enough to wage the war.
In the case of information on the Internet, the entire system is organized towards marketing; the most valuable information, such as that on Lexis, is for pay. But, as many slashdotters are aware, freedom of information would encourage innovation.
How do we do it?
Michael Albert and others have outlined models of participatory economics (parecon) which rightly puts a high premium on knowledge, and the organization of knowledge, as something which is of very high value and is very political.
It also requires that experts abandon intellectual property and the exclusive rights accorded thereby, instead making propsperity dependent on free and easily accessible information for all people.
The model of educated, democratic input works on a small or a large scale, in capitalist or socialist economic systems, or as an economic system.
Sorry for the overly theoretical response, but I do not know enough about indexing, databases, or networks to be technical on this issue.
Goat sex free since 2001
Below is a letter I sent to Salon
Well, I'd say that a mass market novel has more reach than any one web site, so we should start with novels, right?
How many people believe what they read in novels? (Think Tom Clancy) How about TV (Star Trek). They reach many more people than even the most popular web sites, and a lot of people believe in them.
Perhaps the answer is for use to teach people to THINK. Maybe going back to teaching the Trivium? Heck, most people wouldn't know logic or retoric if it hit them on the head.
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
The interaction between the gov't and the net has mostly this way. While we did have problems with CDA and kin, the end picture was that the gov't wanted those sites with inappropriate material for children to take necessary steps to make it harder for children to access them while still allowing easy access by adults. There are certainly a few stragglers of adult content sites that don't care if they push to kids, but most are intelligent enough to plaster warnings up all over their sites.
Privacy is a similar beast; the gov't has been dropping hints that consumer privacy on the net is very important to them, and corps that need privacy policies should start implementing them appropriately. But unlike the child-blocking of sites above, there a numerous examples of late where privacy was not treated highly or ignored; credit card lists thefts, aburpt changes in privacy policies without opt-outs, etc. The gov't is dropping more and more hints, but these big sites do not seem to be picking up on this. And when the gov't cannot succeed with hints, the next step is to pass legislation. Which is going to happen within the next 2 years, IMO. The technology is there to set up a privacy framework, where consumers can easily opt-out any information that they don't want a site to have, and the legislation is going to require that sites do this. And the businesses are going to complain and the like, but I think the gov't with the current political nature is going to put their foot down and tell them to do it or be punished with civil punishments.
Privacy policy WILL happen, the question is, how restrictive is it going to be -- will the net companies try to make amends now or later?
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
"People assume that what they read on the Net is true." - pg3 paragraph 3
if someone is dumb enough to believe everything they read (in ANY medium) then the det what they diserve.
-- Hail Eris
It is precisely this pervasiveness that _requires_ us to afford the Internet First Ammendment protection. If we only apply freedoms to some mediums, they lose all of their value.
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
Consider: the very first example he uses is 'pedophiles'. At the moment, there is no more hated and reviled group on the planet. (Personally, I don't really buy most of the noise -- I strongly, strongly suspect that it is nowhere near as bad as the politicians want you to believe.) There is no button that is hotter. Feelings on this matter run so strong that (so far) I have yet to see any rational discourse on the topic at all -- and that's his leadoff example. Not a good sign.
And then he goes on to say that information is dangerous, and that the state should be in the business of prior restraint of speech. Many people, he says, are incapable of separating fact from fiction, so that's why the content of the Internet should be regulated.
Well, gee. This is news? Most people I know just take the pap they're spoon fed by the media. So far, this hasn't been enough of a reason to license news agencies (to my knowledge) or to create a review board that would approve/deny any particular story or stories. We all know how quickly that would start being abused.
Consider: what if pedophilia actually isn't as bad as it's painted? (I"m not making that assertion, I'm just positing a hypothetical case.) In a system of prior restraint, that kind of topic would be very, very likely to be suppressed, or to be forced to take a label of 'fiction' rather than 'fact'. But ideas that are close to the mainstream, like 'The Internet is full of dangerous ideas and children shouldn't be exposed to them without content restrictions' would most likely be allowed to use a 'fact' tag. (heh, [FACT] [/FACT] :-) )
I can't imagine any better way to create even more of a feedback loop than we already have. Popular ideas get repeated, and dissenting ideas tend to be ignored. This has absolutely nothing to do with their actual truth or merit, just their popularity.
Any kind of governmental board would serve only to amplify this feedback loop. I can't imagine a faster way to destroy all possibility of rational discourse on truly disputed topics. It's a great way to make sure that the fundamental values remain unchallenged and that nothing ever REALLY changes.
As an aside, this guy also pisses me off. I'm perfectly capable of separating fact from fiction, and I'm quite capable of assembling a body of knowledge from disparate bits. The fact that there are people out there who cannot is simply no excuse to cripple my ability to gather information and decide for myself. It's just censorship in a slightly different form.
We can't run the Internet for stupid people. To do so will make everyone stupid.
Before the printing press, books were luxuries
costing years of an average person's income.
It was thought dangerous for the average person
to read the Bible in their own language- they
might get the wrong ideas. For better or worse,
the press changed things. New ideas and their
applications acceleration- first religion, then
science, and new concepts of government. It
created a means and market for new authors,
plus increased reader literacy and customer base.
The Net continues and further accelerates this process.
Everyone can be an author,
not only in print but multiple medias.
I don't even want to think of the Orwellian nightmare his ideas would produce if put into action. Hell, I'm not even comfortable with what I hear about libel laws in the UK.
As always, the solution to bad speech is more speech. Let the ideas fight it out in the open marketplace - a marketplace made more open by the structure of the web and digital information.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
"Too much pornography" is "obviously dangerous"?! This guy scares me. I plan on raising my daughter to be comfortable with nudity and pornography.
Screw the prudes!
Mr. Carr spends a lot of this article complaining about the lack of accountablity on the interent. He claims that the we need regulations guaranteeing that the authorship or origin of materials found and line can be traced. The abscence of this makes the internet dangerous and useless, according to him.
I fail to see why this is such a huge deal? How about if, instead of introducing such regulations, we educate people about why not to believe everything you read. Rather than introducing costly and difficult to enforce regulations about attributing sources, we have PSA's where James Earl Jones recites, in his best this-is-god-speaking tone, that strangers on the internet sometimes lie or are incorrect. That seems more sensible to me than having the Ministry of Truth licensing websites.
Eduardo Ramirez
Wir mussen wissen. Wir warden wissen. I am a wuss
It's pretty funny to find this article posted on Slashdot, an entity that I think provides a somewhat flawed, but still pertinent counter-example to Carr's imagining.
Carr believes, in essence, that centralized authority -- of any sort -- can effectively help people determine how they want to view a global sea of information. By setting up big bad corporations vs. big bad government as the only two alternatives, he complete misses the very interesting alternative of emergent collaborative filtering projects such as Slashdot, Advogato, Everything2, etc.
Carr suffers from a common, lingering misperception that it is either possible or desirable to prevent the voluntary collaboration between arbitrary pairs of information providers and consumers. That's not to say that anyone wants to have an unfiltered, unmediated view of the global infosphere, but the idea that an organization modeled after the FDA is going to be able to regulate the "internet" without destroying its usefulness (and, in turn, spawning alternatives) is ridiculous.
I actually agree that there is dangerous, unpleasant, and irksome stuff out there. The answer is to not read it, and to help others who don't want to read it to not read it.
"International borders aren't even speed bumps on the Information Superhighway." - Tim May
some people just don't get it...
Burris
I thought that one of our big problems in the freedom department right now is that government regulation is actually increasing the power that the coroprate interests have over our lives. I realize that some people still put an awful lot of faith in the government, but I don't care how you spell it out. If you think that by asking the government to take more power you are going to make things better for the common citizen (and actually get meaningful regulation of big business)....
...well, let's just say that I think big government is not the answer to big business taking control. Big business+big government is not going to equal big freedom. But, I'm sure in time we'll see the proof of that. After all, we are rushing headlong into the era of big business corporate control. And most people are actually pushing as hard as they can to make it happen. Ah well.
------------
Typical of most "authors" who view the rest of the world as mindless dolts who can't think for themselves. Amazingly enough, most people (even fairly stupid ones) actually have brains and know how to use them on occasion. I believe the church used to use these same arguments to suppress dangerous ideas about the earth being round and such...
"most of that technology is making people dumber: It is teaching them how to assemble massive amounts of information...without simultaneously teaching them how to assemble those bits of information into integrated bodies of knowledge"
Is he saying that information technology, of all mediums, is creating a passive society? one in which we sit dumbly and accept whatever programming someone in control thinks we want? Has he completely missed the point of the control that IT gives to the consumer? the otherwise powerless couch potato? The whole concept that everyone with a desire, is a publisher of content? yep, no-one holds your hand online and makes sure you 'get' it. no-one makes excuses for those who truly have nothing to contribute in any one forum. there is no one madated to teaching the old dogs new tricks. The end is nigh.
"information technology bombards us so constantly with entertainment and marketing that quiet, objective consideration of our fate often becomes impossible."
you mean he can't find the close button on his browser? the off button on his tv? c'mon. anyone with such a passive attitude towards liberty and free will deserves to be a marketing department's marionette.
"This leads to a society in which each member is increasingly concerned with the satisfaction of his or her own material appetites, and less and less concerned with the philosophical problems and principles that underlie the successful creation and maintenance of a civil society"
Yep, information technology, the wonder by which marketing noise has -failed- to produce returns - by which philosophical and technical debates have exactly equal presence and footing with the superbowl - is to blame for our obvious lost sight of the prize.
We are all worse off for having invented the wheel. Why when we had to carry rocks on our backs - it made us strong. This wheel is going to make us all weaker, and then we won't be able to defend ourselves from the big nasty teeth and fangs of the wild animals. We will be left to the whims of things bigger than ourselves. Wheels are a bad idea. This single tool will be our downfall.
I have no idea where he makes his disjointed congnitive leap from digital liberty to infernal dystopia... his logic and fear astound me. But i guess someone has to try to argue with George Orwell's fear of big brother right?
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
It's fine to say that companies might (did he say will) abuse fact and disseminate misinformation about anything they like using the internet as a medium. Well, dishonest companies have been doing that for centuries, as have dishonest individuals. Most countries already have mature legislation to deal with such activities. It's illegal in England for a company to make false representations about (for example) their products, or to present falsity as truth.
Admittedly, the internet as a medium for dissemination of misinformation is allows for vastly more rapid proliferation of data, and recent experience has shown that most people will equally aid propogation of any information, regardless of source. Before the internet came along, such information had names that included "gossip", "rumour-mongering", and "politics". Carr would have us believe that the internet is going to exacerbate these practices to the point of destroying the fabric of our society. (Sorry, my paraphrase.)
Let's not forget though, that pre- (and even post-) internetworked society has shown itself to be as adept at uncovering fiction presented as truth as it has been incautious in perpetuating it.
This is because the basis of trust for the majority of people means that when the integrity of the source is doubted, we seek independent correlation of fact. Despite the best efforts of a television-centric society to encourage us to act otherwise, there will always be people that want to verify information, especially if the source is a corporate entity. Such verification can come from individuals, government agencies, or competitive companies. (Was it my imagination, or did Carr forget about the power of individuals to expose and regulate the behaviour of both companies and governments?)
Anyway, that's far too much ranting. I'll be happy to post to responses below. =)
The long chains of simple and easy reasonings by means of which geometers are accustomed to reach the conclusions of their most difficult demonstrations, had led me to imagine that all things, to the knowledge of which man is competent, are mutually connected in the same way, and that there is nothing so far removed from us as to be beyond our reach, or so hidden that we cannot discover it, provided only we abstain from accepting the false for the true, and always preserve in our thoughts the order necessary for the deduction of one truth from another. - Rene Descartes
..can be found here. The best part is, the essay is a comic strip.
I was going to submit this, along with the Salon article, pointing out how much more insightful the comic writer was (hmm... is this always the case?).
What SalonBoy misses (and ComicBoy gets) is that if you directly paid the artist, "corporate" interests are silently subverted.
And if there was a micropayment system, you would be more likely to pay the artist rather than demand free content.
The question becomes: is the lack of a micropayment system a technological problem, or a political one?
It would solve all his problems: only web pages that have grade-A USWA (U.S. Web Authority) factual content are available from this proxy. It won't link to any non-true web pages. The USWA would bless each page they host. Advertise the heck out of it: "Think about it: COMMUNISTS don't use the USWA.GOV proxy!" or "If it isn't USWA approved, IT'S ALL LIES. " They wouldn't have to link to pictures of the human body, and they wouldn't have to link to MP3s. Netscape and I.E.6 could come preconfigured to use the USWA.GOV proxy.
And those of us who scoff at their idiot mind-set can continue to ignore them.
The article is not worth reading, and therefore his books surely aren't. Even Jon Katz reviews more interesting and/or useful books than this one. It's barely worth the time to read the /. comments... :-)
John
John
Up until now I have been personally responsibly for determining the veracity of information I receive, and I like it that way. It means that I can choose to disbelieve whatever I like, and cling to beliefs that everyone be me thinks are so stupidly ill-concieved it causes them physical pain... exactly the sort of mentality that one tends to adopt when making great intellectual advances. Being able to promote, publish, and discuss my fringe ideas is at the heart of intellectual advancement, and shouldn't ever be regulated - you lose too much when you do.
There are a great many other issues I could raise about the article: use of inflamatory language in exactly the manner he claims needs regulating, shameless use of a controversial op-ed piece to promote his book (and he was so down on corporations for being money-grubbing!), etc. But I think that the basic issues are nothing new, so I've decided to focus on them. Mr. Carr has made the classic mistake of assuming that the internet is more than it is... it's just an information medium, nothing more. Sure people can be stupid, believe things that they shouldn't and make poor choices, but tha't certainly not a new problem and we've managed to get by somehow.
--
Behold the Power of Cheese!
It is my belief, for which I offer no apology, that most of that technology is making people dumber: It is teaching them how to assemble massive amounts of information, of arcane minutia, without simultaneously teaching them how to assemble those bits of information into integrated bodies of knowledge -- such integration being the only function that distinguishes the human brain from a mechanical computer.
This seems so true, on some self-reflection. Does anybody know of any psychological studies about effects of extensive Internet surfing and SlashDot on human mind?
The largest problem I see with the United States today is people just like this guy. People who are anti-freedom. Allow me to explain:
Too many people I see posting here are constantly claiming that the constitution was designed to make government efficent or to make laws which kept the courts from being constantly clogged with questions regarding a few of the same facts. It's simply not true. The First Amendment is there to protect people like Drudge, whether you like him or not. It's there to protect the writings of Jefferson just as much as it's there to protect Penthouse, whether you like it or not. It doesn't say "Congress shall make no law except in cases where somebody somewhere might be offended or believe something which isn't in the intrests of some group or other." It says "Congress shall make no law".
The idea here was not content restrictions, it was regulation restriction. It's there to keep Republicans from silencing Democrats and Democrats from silencing Republicans and to keep both of them from silencing me.
I noticed in one post someone said the constitution was outdated, that Jefferson had never seen a machine gun. I wholeheartedly disagree. If Jefferson were alive today, he'd want every single last citizen to own an M16 and a bullet proof vest. Not for hunting, not for shooting sports. No, the reason he laid out was simple: To shoot police and soldiers. To fight a revolution. To defend ourselves from the State.
And now we have lots and lots of guys like this. People who proclaim the "public good" (whatever the hell that is) must be upheld, no matter what. If that means I can't write this piece because I refrence revolution, so be it. If it means our own state can remove all our freedoms, so be it. If it means our ultimate demise... so be it. For the love of God, think of the Children!
Then there's this bizarre concept of corporate control over our lives. You wanna know where any such control begins? Government control. Look at any industry you believe to be overly controlling and I guarantee it's a heavily regulated industry. The only way such control can possibly exist is if there is government force keeping other companies from coming in and outcompeting (perhaps by offering less 'controlling' policies) those companies. The only solution to this is simple: Remove the power of government to regulate these companies (with the exception of keeping them from phyiscal force and outright fraud, just as it would with any citizen) and these companies will have no reason to pay off senators. They won't be able to do things that their customers don't like, because there will be others there to do things their customers do like. Deregulate and all these problems vanish. Move to a truly constitutional government, and everything will work itself out within a few weeks.
Anything other than such a strict constitutional government is a proposition for antifreedom, anticapitalism, antiwealth, and antilife.
--Me
[wales001@dontspam.aristotle.bomis.com]
(Moderate me up for once!)
now how long before we get NAS (ie johnny pneumonic and neuromancer) and start living william gibsonesque lives?
I don't care, Capice!
I disagree. All a government has to do is try to look like it's working toward the public good.... In the same vein as my post to earlier story on "Truth in Science" government is run by people, people who are just as likely to be bought and sold as those in the corp. life. A government's job (IMHO) is to do the minimum to preserve fundamental rights (now just what that "minimum" is is the $50K question...). Corps will, to an extent, screw with you mainly because they're run by people (I don't buy the people are better than corps line. People run corps. There are corps out there that have, in my opinion, very good ethics and there are those out there who are frigging lousy... just like people). Its the nature of the beast. At least with a corportation I can choose not to do business with them. I'm much more afraid of a government with too much power.
Just look at all of the /. favorite topics of late
DCMA - Gov't Backed, Corp Bought
UCTIA - Gov't Backed, Corp Bought
Tax on recordable media in Canada/Germany - Gov't Backed, Corp Bought
etc....
It costs a hell of a lot less money to throw some cash around to the Pols and get legislation passed to protect your market than it is to improve your product. The great paradox is the more control you give the gov't the more control you hand over to those with very large pocketbooks.
If you don't have anything nice to say, say it often.
- Ed the Sock
The power of prior restraint he speaks of essentially means that the government can choose to review each document that goes on-line, and prevent posting "because it said so" (I'm the mommy, that's why).
It should be fairly obvious after the parade of censorware blocks on legitimate sites, that any organization who gets that type of power will immediately procede to misuse it. And, were the net not protected by the first amendment, there would be no real way of defending against such things.
The odd thing is that the author appears to view the net as a read-only medium controlled by a few corporate interests. This is especially absurd considering TV and radio, being limited by the small number of channels available are necessarily controlled by corporate interests, while the Net is the great equalizer.
If I recall correctly, the reason for "balanced reporting" requirements and "operating in the public interest" broadcasters are helded were put in place for the very reason of limited bandwidth and corporate monopoly over what is transmitted on said bandwidth.
Yet another person who thinks problems on the Internet can be solved by American legislation. Nuff said...
Special Relativity: The person in the other queue thinks yours is moving faster.
But are there only 2 choices ? What if instead of some agency you would have several volunteer-driven groups (sites) targeted at specific audience which would link to information and provide commentary ? And where readers could then discuss it further ? And then you decide which groups you trust to classify information for you ? You pick several sources to filter "censor" information, and submit information you consider valuable.
I believe I heard about site called ... umm Slashdot was it ? Or kuro5hin ?
There you could get "pre-filtered" information that could be then further corrected/discussed in comments. Anyone else around here heard of Slashdot , no ?
Opinions are mine only and could change without notice.
Obama 2012: our incompetent asshole is slightly less of an incompetent asshole than the other incompetent asshole !
I could not escape one central dilemma: Only two forms of regulation are available in the United States: governmental and corporate.
This strikes me as similar to a religious person trying to convince an atheist that everyone should live under the rule of the Church, because after all, you're either going to live under God, or under Satan, and at least God is on your side... ignoring, of course, that the third possibility that neither God nor the Devil are on your side (much less exist at all) and that people can damn well take care of themselves.
He wants the Internet to be like his favorite bookstore as far as I can tell. Yes, I agree it'd be great if I never accidentally clicked on a goatse.cs link while online but his point about "an entire generation of young people grow(ing) up to become virtual machines capable of storing informational bits like biocomputers but not of assembling those bits into meaningful bodies of knowledge" is completely subjective. Where's his proof of this?
For instance, I use the Internet to find books, which I then purchase and read. I could spend my time reading up on Aryan hate groups and thinking "well gosh durn it these boys sure got all the facts, yeehaw!" but I don't because I can think for myself and I tend to corraborate information I find with different sources.
I think Mr Carr just bought a iMac and is shocked that many online people and websites are immature and offensive. He thought he was going to be able to buy a latte and browse through the early 19th century sections and in fact he found himself staring at a "Barely 18!!" banner ad.
-Tem
I am continually stunned by the number of pundits (and yes, this author has firmly stepped into the realm of punditry with this fluff piece) who think that the Internet is somehow fundamentally different than any other 'legacy' information sources we utilize.
Somehow we get along just fine in the print world without his draconian governmentally enforced and verified 'truth'. People seem to sort it all out just fine for themselves. When I want good, reliable news I read the New York times, or CNN.com. These are names I have grown to trust over the course of my years of interaction with these organizations as a consumer of their content.
When I want sensationalism or schlock journalism I go to the Weekly World News or Matt Drudge, other outlets which have acquired a quite different reputation in my mind.
What is so different about the Internet as a source of information that somehow we now need to be protected from ourselves?
Regardless of the question of the need for such regulation, he utterly fails to address the consitutional issues that his regulations would create. I dare him to stop me from publishing lies on my own web site, via any law consistent with the US consitution. As long as I stay away from libel, slander, and inciting riots I think I will be well protected by the consitution.
-josh
We demand that /. stop the dissemination of all the bleading-heart liberal opinion.
Just because the Manongehela river caught fire, we blew up parts of Texas, your cars were death-traps before the damn guvmint got involved and made us have collapsible steering columns, doesn't mean we don't care.
Okay we don't, but we'll sue your ass off for defamation and even if you're right, we have more money than you so we'll win. Bwahahahahaa.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Would you like to see all news articles sponsored by government censored or would you like to see all news articles critical of corporations censored on coprorately patrolled web sites?
Neither is a good option, thus I would think that a net that is for the people and run by the people is best, pretty much the way it is now and always was.
Speech may be free, but the brains to process and filter the information you hear or see is your responsibility. Do not rely on government or the boss to tell you what truth is and is not. If you find something hard to believe, check into it yourself and make an educated choice.
"When people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called 'the People's Stick'." -Bakunin
So we can continue hear such drivel for what it is!
Mr. Carr states:
I could not escape one central dilemma: Only two forms of regulation are available in the United States: governmental and corporate.
He neglects a third, though one I can easily see why he neglects, because it is oh-so-extremely-rare in our American society:
Self-regulation.
Namely, that of being responsible for one's own actions, and respecting the rights of other individuals.
Responsibility and respect: I have said it before, and others have said it as well. Until these two ideals are exercised on a day-to-day basis by our citizens, we will continue to see decline within our society.
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Facts show us that government is a corporation with no limits, period. Now picture two people with baseball bats coming towards you but you aren't sure if he is coming at you, or at your neighbor to protect you. One you can choose to avoid, but loose out on the benifits he gives you (consumer choice and boycotting) the other (government) is absolute. You must accept what he is going to do regardless.
As history shows, it is the people who were beaten who mistrust the second one worse. The guy next to them trusts government more. However, it is the intelligent third person who recognizes patterns and that he too may be next. He might even actually care about others and try to disarm both the men with bats.
Furthermore, it is also he who seems to be the only one who noticed that the corporate guy supplied the bat to the government guy, and the government guy supplied the liscense to the corporate guy (or as is usually the case, just looked the other way and played favorites)
Remember, government is the person that will Break both your legs, then hand you a pair of crutches and expect you to pay him and give him thanks for helping you walk
I seek not only to follow in the footsteps of the men of old, I seek the things they sought.
Slashdot has always been heavily libertarian. Or maybe they're just louder. I suspect a bit of both. What I still haven't grokked is how the prevailing philosophy can be simultaneously libertarian and anti-corporate. "These corporations are evil and constantly abuse us, but the most important thing in the world is that we allow them to continue unmolested!"