Slashdot Mirror
Berners-Lee Wants Truth Ratings For Websites
holy_calamity writes "While introducing the new World Wide Web Foundation Tim Berners-Lee made also asked for a system of ratings to help people distinguish truth and untruth online. 'On the web the thinking of cults can spread very rapidly,' he said, saying that 'there needed to be new systems that would give websites a label for trustworthiness once they had been proved reliable sources.'"
... but for Facts, not Truth. If it's truth you're looking for, Dr. Tyree's philosophy class is right down the hall.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
What is to prevent any such proposed system from becoming yet another popularity contest plagued by those who want to quash unpopular ideas?
This sounds like an exercise in futility
Shameless plug alert: Game server control panel
What's really needed is a society where a majority of the individuals have a world class education. No rating system will ever work until you get that in place.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
As we know there are at least four:
Your version,
Their version,
the Truth and
what actually happened.
If that works out will I see a big red pulsating "This is all bullshit" label on the Scientology or any Creationist homepage? I doubt any admin in their self-righteous mind would put something like that on their site. In the specific idiology what is true in reality is a lie in their world. So who's to decide who gets one of those and ranked by what? And you had to rule out all of the parties and congress's website. What about Whitehouse.gov? There should have been one of these "untruthful" markers for eight years now. Where is it?
This will NEVER work. Since everyone makes their own truths nowadays there will be just as many ranking systems as there are opinions.
TFA is /.ed, and MirrorDot's not behaving, so this is a shot in the dark. But I'm reasonably sure we've heard something like this before, and the idea is just as bad now as it was. Berners-Lee is smart enough to know that all systemic rating scales are subject to being gamed. I fail to see how embedding such a scale in the protocol would help, and it's not unlikely that it would hurt the situation.
Moreover, the WWW as he created it - being a very dumb platform - allows us to implement such a scale at a high level, using user input and so forth.There are already a ton of services that do something very like this. Hell, I can trust the top 10 things on del.icio.us more than I can trust random Google results.
I donno. I just fail to see the point of this. Yeah, people's capacity to care about facts and details appears to be limited, but I don't think this is the solution.
So you can laugh all you want to...
It's bad enough that we have government at every level trying to legislate away personal responsibility, now we have a respected industry leader advocating for the same sort of Orwellian control.
Ironically, the Op's statement is more insightful than many people may realize. Let's face it, there is alot of crap floating around that masquerades as "Truth". The entire "9/11 Truth" movement, for example. (Which, I suspect, is what the OP got the "truthiness" quip from. A mock on the "truther" movement.)
The point is, WHO is to be the arbiter of "truth"? And how do we know they won't have a political agenda? I think that the major problem is not that some sites need a "true" or "not true" label, but that FAR too many people lack critical thinking skills and fall for emotional ploys and the latest "chicken little" scares.
It would be far more efficacious to push for a critical thinking and debate class requirements in grade and collegiate level schools. At least then people would be better equipped to winnow out the facts from the crap themselves, and we wouldn't have to rely on some nebulous "Truth Authority" to inform us.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
"What is Truth?" Asked Pontius Pilate as he washed his hands...
Virginia is for lovers. EVE is for griefers.
The onion is far more accurate than your average editorial page.
Perhaps, but it is a rather bad reference on actual onions.
Can someone out there DDoS the fuck out of it while they're at it?
Why? It's not like it's a danger. It's just information contrary to normal belief. I may not agree with it, but I don't think that it's worthy of FPMITA prison.
Critical thinking will never be in high schools as long as we have programs like No Child Left Behind.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
Tim Berners-Lee advocates a
(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting untruth. His idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to his particular idea.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(x) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to his are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
(x) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
(x) Blacklists suck
(x) Whitelists suck
(x) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
(x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(x) This is a stupid idea, and he is a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
Syllable : It's an Operating System
a popularity contest, not a truth gauge
The distinction is, I regret, becoming increasingly subtle.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
That may be even harder to make happen than to implement a fair and accurate "truthfulness" rating.
That said, I'm opposed to the idea of any kind of trust ranking. It promotes intellectual laziness, which we already have enough of, and would work against what you promote.
As far as I'm concerned, we need to push tools that stimulate critical thinking and logic. Any system that purports to provide a trustworthiness value of a source is dangerous to society in the long run, for reasons given in others' posts (e.g., groupthink).
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
What about sites that slam MySQL?
What about Vi vs Emacs?
Hell... lets be serious:
What about insiders who are leaking information about the next enron?
What about global warming?
What about academic sites that publish research linking cell phones to cancer? What if a paper is published that actually does connect them? How do you prevent it's "truthliness" from getting freeped by people with vested interests in the status quo?
What about a pharmaceutical website that claims their medication is safe despite mounting evidence it shuts down the liver?
What about a website that has recipes for making heavy grade explosives? How do you rate the truth in something that only a terrorist or a government can test?
What is the truthliness of Homestarrunner?
What about the story published in the National Enquirer about John Edwards affairs when nobody believed them?
This is another version of The Semantic Web and is just as impossible to pull of as the original. Both fail to take into account the tenancy to lie and exaggerate things to promote your world views. They operate under "as long as everybody plays by the rules this idea is perfect!"... which is a very stupid idea unless you've got a legal framework to enforce the rules.
It's not like there was anything in there before NCLB was implemented, either. It was a bad lefty (Ted Kennedy) writing a sort-of decent idea for academic standards by a semi-conservative (Bush), implemented all wrong.
Except of course that in the Dark Ages they did not burn Witches (most were hung) and they were not as many as people think (only a few thousand over 150 years) and many where not old and not women, and the Church were against the practice ...
So in the Not very Dark ages not very many witches (of all ages and genders) were not burnt, and not by the church ...
This is the problem with truth : Everything most people know to be true is wrong
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
Should "wassup" find itself in the dictionary, how will we sort the uneducated from the educated?
Considering that usage of a popular term has no relationship to the level of education that person has, you're facing that problem already. You're just going to have to find less shallow ways of judging people.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
The important thing berners-lee is missing is that cults rely on restriction of information to thrive, not the ready availability of it. Fair enough - cults find a wider audience through the web, but so does all the anti-cult information that exposes their various scams.
I mean, look at Scientology - thanks to the web, a lot more people know what Scientology is nowadays, and why it is a scam. So when they are walking past a "free stress test" stand they are less likely to get sucked in.
Problems created by misinformation are solved by education, not censorship.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons