Slashdot Mirror
Digging For Truth Online Is Up To You
An anonymous reader writes "Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has released the second annual report on obstacles to the free flow of information online. Vint Cerf wrote the forward, where he argues it is the responsibility of every citizen to test the truth of information on the Web, and draw attention to incorrect information, rather than the government's responsibility to dictate the 'truth.' ZDNet Australia has an article on the report."
Does that mean I must aquire common sense?
Thankyou.
How can I "trust" this statement?
Mother, Should I Trust the Government?
Interestingly, the German geovernment tries to implement legislation that would require/force anybody who writes about a company or a person on the internet to publish a corrcection/opposing view from that company/person. If one would not agree to do that, one could be charged and fined or jailed. The government wants to implement the same rules that govern the professional print media to each and every internet post of a private citizen, including all the sanctions associated with a possible "breach". This could potentially result in web spiders looking for e.g. the name SCO, and force each and every slashdot poster to publish a correction. It would bring the internet and any discussoin to a crawl.
That's "that's" not "thats" and "damn it" not "dammit"!
WHA!? You mean everything I read on the net isn't true? *gasp* My world is crumbling before me. Now the trick is, how can you always tell if it is true or not? Heck, my mother, a 7-8th grade advanced science teacher did a test with the class showing them an online article about the evils of hydrogen hydroxide. At the end of the class, over half the class believed that there was a serious problem in the world with hydrogen hydroxide that needs to be dealt with. Only one student in the class knew the truth of what hydrogen hydroxide really is: water. Now, if we can so easily be tricked into believing water is evil, how the heck are we suppose to be aware of what is true or not? Make a professional looking page and sound smart, and the masses will follow! Just a thought
I came, I saw, She conquered.
I know several teachers who have a hard time getting their pupils to understand that information they find on the internet is not necessarily acurate. Teaching people to be critical is a majour task for schools, I think.
IAAAL - I am actually a lawyer
So if it is +5 informative it is true?
Slashdotter are stupid and biased.
If you're not sure whether you should trust something you read from the net, just post the site to slashdot and read the comments after a few hours.
Moreover, where disinformation or misinformation exists, thoughtful citizens have a responsibility to draw attention to the problem, possibly even to provide information to counteract the bad data.
Oh no! I just hope no one finds out about slashdot or they'll have a field day!
Oh... hang on a sec... No... my mistake, I was thinking of the NYT.
Given the extent to which various forces act on the big commercial media companies, Surely it makes more sense to doubt almost all media coverage in isolation? compare Fox/CNN with Indymedia with the BBC with various web blogs from people who are *there* and then come to your own conclusions.... each of those sources will be biassed (either by the opinions of their owners or their governments) but by comparing enough sources you might find a germ of truth somewhere....
-=DaveHowe=-
Does that mean I must _aquire_ common sense?
Nope...but bat least you need to search for and download it!
Apple iProduct. Non importa cosa sia, lo comprerete!
Hmmmn, I wonder which culture he was referring to?
The internet's strength - it gives everyone a voice - is also it's weakness because there is too much noise.
Filtering the signal from the noise is the challenge, and it's one the government is not up to.
-- the only thing we have to fear is really scary things
+1 True
In my opinion one of the best things about the internet is its ability to (help people) shine light in dark corners.
Especially with more people making the Internet read/write instead of read-only, with blogs and Wikis for example.
As DRM systems come into play, I wonder if they will also be applied to text, not just music and video. If so, that will lock up more content, and be a serious barrier to information flow. Imagine if 90% of slashdot outbound links became pay-per-view. Maybe the silver lining of such a scenario would be that blogs and other bottom-up content would have even more importance.
The article itself is rather empty and intended for the "citizen"(you got what I mean;o))), however if you bother to read the "by country" reports (pick from the menu on the right), and you choose the right countries(once again, you know what I mean), there's an awful bunch of interesting facts.....
It's definitely a better read, and there're things I didn't even suspect....
1. No sig. 2. ???? 3. Profit!!!
Replying to an earlier post, the science teacher should not be too surprised that her class missed the point about hydrogen hydroxide. Only yesterday we had a link to an article in which a former head of a House Committee on Science appeared not to know the difference between helium and hydrogen, twice. Poor understanding of science is a general disease of society, not something the Internet has brought about.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
It's foreword, not forward.
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SuaraMalaysia.com - Driving free speech initiatives in Malaysia
I dunno. I'm still waiting for one of The Onion's horoscopes to be accurate..... What do you mean they're not serious?
Vint Cerf wrote the forward, where he argues it is the responsibility of every citizen to test the truth of information on the Web
:-D
That's what I've always thought! Finally, I have an argument for downloading and checking if the audio data in that mp3 truly represent what its filename (i.e. the "information" we see when using P2P software) suggest, since it is the responsibility of every citizen. Take that, RIAA!
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
It is, for the given value of true.
Hell is not other people; it is yourself. - Ludwig Wittgenstein
+1 True / -1 False for a long time, as none of the other moderations really fit, when someone is doing their best to be insightful or informative but is just getting it all wrong. As if you have already modded the thread, you cant reply to point out their inaccuracies :/
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
- Kernel Changes
- Compiler
- Source avaliability
- Rewrite
If nothing else, some *big* names are releasing under custom linuxen - and I am sure Oracle would have a problem or two with giving away their source to any customer who asks!Provided you know about (and design for) the GPL in advance, kernel modules *can* be closed source. Changes to prewritten modules (patches, in effect) can't be, but then you aren't doing work youself, you are just bugfixing/improving what is already there. Certainly, certain makes of car are improved by adding multifocus mirrors to them, but that doesn't allow you to claim design ownership of any cars you modify, at best you can claim the mirror.
downsize your lawyer - immediately. he is obviously unable to read and understand licences - output of a gcc compiler and the standard linux libraries are only GPL if you want them to be. you can successfully write closed source programs in almost any compiler with no licencing hangups (or nobody would use them)
You are not required to give any source to anyone who doesn't have a binary; therefore, only your customers can possibly request a copy (although you can't stop them passing same to your competitors, you can limit distribution; if you have a small number of customers you can also "customise" the source in order to be able to track down which customers are being a little unfaithful....
you *really* need to change lawyers; either they should have warned you about the limitations of the GPL long before you started coding, or they should have known how to work around it for a commercial product. the written off development time (and/or rewrite time) has a commercial value you can almost certainly reclaim from them (although sueing lawyers is often a exercise in futility)
-=DaveHowe=-
He didn't write the FOREWORD then?
That was classic intercourse!
Then you're at the wrong website :P
Or at least you shouldn't be reading the comments.
mod the parent up as True(tm).
The problem here was that you took source code and altered it so that you could re-sell it to your clients, but you didn't read the included license until after you had spent all this time coding with it.
I guess that this is your first time using free software or open source or you would have known that the first thing you have to do when considering using thirdparty code or libraries is look at the license and check what you can and can't do or claim. OSS under GPL can co-exist happily with your own closed proprietary code but you have to keep a clear distinction between what you have written and what is GPL'd.
CeÃi n'est pas une pipe "|" (This is not a pipe "|")
----
Somewhat redundant, but yeah, /. moderation *IS* a great tool to separate crap from interesting. It's not perfect of course.
... and big organisations, such as the RSF, have these resources...
:-)
I even believe -most- webboards / mailing lists would benefit from using the Slashcode.org... but again, you need time, software knowledge & hardware to implement a slashcode-slashdot-like solution.
... dreaming of the day metamoderations will be used in more places...
Animoog.org
Sometimes I can't stand this group.
The article's about taking some personal responsibility to fact-check the crap you read - turn your brain on instead of take what you hear for granted - whether here, on Fox or CNN, from the govt. of your choice or even the online rantings of your Uncle Morty... perhaps especially your Uncle Morty.
I wish I could convince this group that sarcasm isn't truth. It's not even entirely healthy - it's as dangerous as naiveté and certainly more destructive.
The big problem here always is signal-to-noise, and the weenies who stopped doing "FP!" now contribute with their idea of wit. But often "witless" comes closer to the truth, in every sense of the word. Will it spark some kind of discussion? 'Prolly not - I'll just get flamed out the wazoo for saying it. Whoops, there goes my lousy 2 karma points.
It's easier to jabber on, brain in check, no matter what you believe. Blind faith in the worst makes you no smarter, no wiser and no productive than blindly believing in the positive.
Got a gripe? Listen, think, act - how hard is it? DO something about it. Heathly scepticism is a good thing, as long as it's combined with an inquisitive mind.
Talk is cheap - even more so nowadays.
Doubleplusungood! How is this any diferent than print media, TV, or anmost anything else? Look at some of the wild statements which have appeared elsewhere! The one which comes to mind immediately is Al Gore's invention of the internet.
Cheers,
Ian
take out cnn.com, foxnews.com,...
I always thought it would be a good idea to have a service that verifies sites, then issues some sort of certificate that lets people know that the site and its contents are legit.
Indymedia has great coverage of most events and also has news about issues you would never here of through the main stream media.
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
Ok, so how do you draw attention to it, but posting or linking to the site and saying, "This is wrong." Meanwhile the search engines pick up that the site has been linked to and increases the site's "score" for future searches.
This isn't idle speculation, I have seen a search engine come up with a high score site which has actually been incorrect. (I wish I could remember the specific search I was doing at the time, but I can't. Sorry.)
I don't see things in black and white; I see the gray. Heck, I actually see in color, which makes things more difficult
" if you scream anything loud enough and long enough, esecially the more absurd it is, eventually people will start to believe you" -- Aldolf Hitler "Mine conft"( no idea how to spell that last bit).
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
You make fyordor (or whatever the hell his name is) look like Cassanova.
But there are many, many snake oil merchants and most of them are not on the WWW
A good example would be Vint Cerf's company. Ever hear of "Worldcomm"?
There's an interesting project at Sourceforce called Newsfighter that's working to build an open source reporting and colaboration system for fighting repressive control or censorship of information.
From their web site:
...The Incas were boolean....
Cross-check new "facts." If something is bogus, someone out there has probably already pointed it out. On the other hand, if it is true and significant, you can probably find the same information from many diverse sources. (Google is your friend.)
Develop some online resources you (tentatively) trust. Over time, you can sniff out and discard those web resources that publish untruths.
Give everything the smell test. If web resource claims it can make your penis grow, make you rich overnight, or get you (a slashdot geek) dates with a supermodel, then be very suspicious. ;-)
It all boils down to not being lazy. The search for truth is not some arcane process that only the super-intelligent can understand, but it does take some work.
"Rub her feet." -- L.L.
Stop being unpatriotic!
So were there WMDs in Iraq or were there none?
I rediscovered this guide today after many years and had a good laugh when I ran into a few of the propaganda techniques after lunch.
After 15-30 minutes reading this guide, you'll be amused if you practice it on:
1. Fox News Channel (easy place to start for beginners--you can sometimes detect 5 different techniques within a few minutes)
2. Slashdot Posts (if you're into picking apart someone's flawed argument, you'll become a pro)
3. CNN Crossfire (watch 2 pros battle each other using these techniques)
IMHO, they should teach this (bullshit detection) in high school and assign homework to find specific examples of common propaganda techniques in advertising, news media, etc. Can you detect which one(s), if any, I'm using in this post?
Index of 10 common techniques
Word games
....Name-calling
....Glittering generalities
....Euphemisms
False connections
....Transfer
....Testimonial
Special Appeals
....Plain Folks
....Bandwagon
....Fear
Logical fallacies
....Bad Logic or propaganda?
....Unwarranted extrapolation
Source: http://www.propagandacritic.com/
- in your scenario are the ones who every paycheck during the late 90s put cash they had in hand into the magic beans market, wherein 90+% of them or more all lost money to the tune of several trillions. that's Trillion with a T. "Educated" people who looked at PE ratios that were so far out they were off the planet, yet insisted that "they knew what they were doing".
Those educated people? The same ones who still mostly vote democratic or republican party, despite all the evidence that both parties are just bribed off or paid off lying bozos at the top, election cycle after election cycle? The same ones who right now are undergoing the highest foreclosure rates in 45 years, have the highest personal debt load compared to savings of any time in the nations history, and who actually don't own their homes but kept rolling over 30 year mortgages, and have all their credit cards maxed out? The ones who have to have the latest fad toys? The ones who kept insisting only those low brow blue collars would ever lose their jobs to foreigners overseas, because they are so irreplacable? The ones who are incompetent to do much of anything ouitside their little niche field, and are hoplessly lost on what to do if their jobs poof? the ones who think they have a retirement plan, despite both government and the fiortune 1000 companies having no way in hell to pay even a fraction of what they claim they will pay in the future? The same ones who can look at derivatives exposure of the banks they trust and think "nothing bad" will happen to them?
Yes, we are all so-o-o-o-o-o impressed with our white collar "educated" betters and innovators.....they mostly learned how to innovate more advanced cons and schemes,all the way to the point that they believed their own drivel, and that's about it. Thank you so much massah..we's go shuffle off do ours chores now massah....
> Heck, my mother, a 7-8th grade advanced science teacher did a test with the class showing them an online article about the evils of hydrogen hydroxide. At the end of the class, over half the class believed that there was a serious problem in the world with hydrogen hydroxide that needs to be dealt with.
The problem was that she neglected to mention that Dihydrogen Monoxide (DHMO), Dihydrogen Oxide, Hydroxyl acid, and Hydric acid are just as prevalent and just as dangerous.
When I recently reread Farhenheit 451, I caught a detail that I never paid attention to before. The firemen did not start burning books because the government wanted to eliminate them. The people demanded that thought-provoking, controversial and therefore disruptive works be destroyed. For any book, you could find some group who was bothered by it, so all books came under the kerosene.
I see aspects of a sort of reverse-Orwellian society today. Varied viewpoints and honest criticism may be available, but most people don't want to hear them, any more than Bradbury's society wanted their books. Given the choice between the happy myth and reality, people will choose the myth. How many Americans care about the truth of Iraqi WMD's, the Lynch "rescue", or whether Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks? Or that fuel cells are not an energy source? Far too few for my comfort.
This is worse than 1984, which envisions domination under an authoritarian government (as I remember; it has been a while). You don't have to beat down the people. Just tell the people the lies they want to hear, and they will do the rest. Whatever contradicts what people already want to believe will be ignored.
This is something fascinating about information access and the internet. The net does not serve to widely disseminate information, except in the most literal geographic sense. Instead, it allows people to form communities with others who already share the same opinions. Memes bounce around in a mostly closed community, building up power and credibility.
I can think of one concrete example. I received a forwarded email in 2000 of stupid statements allegedly made by Al Gore. I replied with an email from 1992 with the same set of quotes, but attributed to Dan Quayle. Did the original sender feel humiliated and send an apologetic retraction to everyone he had forwarded the message to? Of course not. The truth was easily available, but they liked the lie better.
Sheesh!
Unlimited growth == Cancer.
Regarding #3: If you don't distribute source with the binary, or provide equivalent access, you must provide a written offer. If you do, that offer must be valid for *anyone*, not just your customer.
Equivalent access is teh way to go: if someone pays, logs into your site to get their binaries, and the sources are available in the same place, that satisfies your requirement, just as if you distributed them in the same package.
Your lawyer and you are both stupid, or this is a troll, or both.
The output of GCC is not governed by the GPL (nor the output of any other GPL tool). Read the GPL, see the fsf.org site GPL faq, or just use your head.
If you modified the kernel itself, your modifications would have to be GPL, unless you wrote a module with an existing module interface, that could be kept closed. Big deal, the tools and OS itself were free in the first place.
As you just said yourslef, this option was not even available to you with Microsoft's products.
If you think Linux isn't "being competitive" with microsoft, you are going to fail as a consultant. Linux is everywhere, and maknig huge inroads all the time. Many, many businesses use it to a huge degree.
Or do you mean the economic planners want it? Politicians are driven by something, and it's not just what they want.
At a top level, everyone acting predictably makes economic planning possible.
Seems like a good time to quote Starship Troopers:
Rico: "A citizen is someone who makes the safety of the human race their personal responsibility."
Sounds like either you're got outstandingly fucked schools or we still haven't heard the worst news about the state of US public education.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Once they've read a few, hopefully they'll wonder just what else they're reading that ain't so.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Glad I could help.
Tech Public Policy stuff
I had missed that bit, I admit - as an aside, would it be allowable to require the written offer (or a copy of it, intact) to accompany any such requests?
-=DaveHowe=-
And redundant.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
And I came to the conclusion that the whole point of a "written offer" probably boils down, in legal terms, to just meaning "You have to let them know the source is available to them for the cost of media and shipping".
WITHOUT this clause, they woudln't have to tell you.
It's sort of like how you have to give notice that you are vacating your apartment in writing.. it's just so it's clear the message has been given. I do not believe it's intended as a one time offer.
There is also a clause that allows you to avoid the source provision requirement if you are redistributing in the same form you received teh binaries, and in a non commercial way: you can just pass along the written offer you were given.
In this case, as you both can keep copies of the binaries, you would both be entitled to source from the original distributor who had the written offer.
Also, it does say they have to provide a written offer valid for any party to get the source for no more than the cost of shipping. Turning in the written offer could constitute an additional unrelated cost.
At any rate, the best bet , and easiest way to stay out of a source provision mess is to either always provide the source along with the binaries (if it's on cd) or provide equivalent access (if downloading on the net). This way you are not obligated to leave the source available for any length of time, only while you are still distributing binaries.
ie: You can put up a binary for download, and the source in a separate tarball, and take both down a week later, and you are not obliged to provide the source to those who didnt' bother to download it while it was available... because it was available to them at the time you were distributing the binaries.