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New Project To End Stupidity Online
mrneutron2003 writes to tell us that StupidFilter, a new Open Source project started by Gabriel Ortiz and Paul Starr, plans to provide an intellectual prophylactic for memetically transmitted diseases. "Too long have we suffered in silence under the tyranny of idiocy. In the beginning, the internet was a place where one could communicate intelligently with similarly erudite people. Then, Eternal September hit and we were lost in the noise. The advent of user-driven web content has compounded the matter yet further, straining our tolerance to the breaking point. It's time to fight back."
Has anyone considered the following: I realize that the general consensus is that Americans are stupid. This seems to be the case. But both myself on FreeNode and several female friends and loved ones of mine will tell you that people from some Muslim countries are far worse than any AOL user ever was.
What I'm trying to get at, is that in his quest to stop idiocy, he will probably wind up blocking the entire Non-English speaking world and Non-White Cultures of the USA (Hispanics, Blacks) because those cultures tend to view the Anglo-Saxon English speaking culture with open hostility.
The point is it sounds an awful lot like Ethnic Cleansing since AOL as it existed in those days really doesn't exist anymore. Most of the non-technical denizens of the Internet are like AOL users were in those days.
A more closely relegated division in this time between the AOL Users and normal TCP/IP based users of today is Windows Users and Linux Users. Windows users tend to be poor, undereducated, in non-technical fields. Windows Piracy is rampant in third world countries. (Although OLPC is trying to change that.) Conversely Linux Users tend to be statistically white, male, of considerable wealth and highly educated (generally speaking) and from either the USA ore Europe.