Slashdot Mirror
European Union Asks US To Free ICANN
An anonymous reader writes "Viviane Reding, Information Society Commissioner of the European Union, is calling for the United States to hand over control of ICANN (Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers). She said that the organization running ICANN needs be free of control by a single nation, and rather controlled by a private entity and governed by multiple nations. ICANN, headquartered in Marina Del Rey, California, was created in 1998 to oversee a number of Internet related tasks. Reding said, 'In the long run, it is not defendable that the government department of only one country has oversight of an internet function which is used by hundreds of millions of people in countries all over the world.'"
"Reding believes "The US, so far, has done this in a reasonable manner", referring to the oversight that the US government has given ICANN."
Oh. My. God. In the era of Web 2.0, it appears that Slashdot has Jumped The Shark. The question now, is when did this happen? I remember in the early 2000s, Slashdot was THE geek website, but something has changed and it appears they have lost the magic. I mean, seriously, ICANN? I can...what, exactly? I can haz cheezebrgr?
I therefore decided, today, to cancel my account (Smidge207) take them off of my RSS Reader, and cancel my Time Warner broadband "service". I am off the grid; I am off the 'net as of today. I am a free man, now; I own my own mind. I have piece of mind, now. I am free. Lordy, lordy I am free. See, the thing is, Taco, I find your stories trite, boring and dare I say, irrelevant to IT.
So the questions of the day are:
When was the exact day, and, what was the exact story, that caused Slashdot to jump the shark? What is your best bet to the cause of their demise?
This is just my opinion, and I am sure each and ever person that uses RSS at some point has made the same decision about another website. If you get angry easily you might not want to read the rest of this post:
1. I am 32, openly homosexual, and I have outgrown any interest in the usual stories that appear on Slashdot. A specific example is this story, about a "Coup" attempt in an Apple Underground User Group. I have absolutely zero interesting in ever reading something like this for the rest of my life.
I felt violated by Rob Malda's minions by reading something that stupid today, and I will admit it may be because of my age, and due to the fact that I now have a wonderful husband (RMS) and a fucking life.
2. I never really participated in the community much, I only read stories, and as I mentioned the stories are getting very bad. Terrible one should say.
3. I am bored of the terms, "Troll", "Trolling", and "Dvork", they make my skin crawl just like it would make my skin crawl to hear someone use the terms, "Your playa hatin", or "Give me the bling, bling", "Smidge is a sock-puppet troll faggot" or "Far out man". These terms are so commonly used on Slashdot that it is impossible to avoid them and the only possible alternative is to never read anything on Slashdot.
4. Slashdot played an interesting role in the early 2000's, as it was a human funneled aggregator for news stories. As technology has progressed, a different model of story submission has started to thrive and it does not require a select group of humans to filter which stories are good and which stories are not good. I believe the model that Digg, Reddit, and DZone use are far superior to the method of story submission and approval that Slashdot uses.
I feel that the method that Slashdot uses is a dying art, and the very poor quality of stories suggests that the human element responsible for editorial content is either very young, or not very good.
5. RSS Readers have changed the way people read technology and other news, and it has caused people to stop having a "home page" anymore. People now have the ability to create their own custom filters and get their own news in anyway they see fit. The role of Slashdot as the only aggregator for IT news has ended. Given a choice, I would much rather use RSS than the editorial process at Slashdot to get news stories.
6. As evidenced by the responses to MY WELL THOUGHT-OUT POSTS JUST TODAY, it is quite impossible to have a discussion with some outspoken members of the Slashdot community. I call out Eldavojohn in particular. It would take a large amount of patience, time and energy that I, frankly, am not willing to part with, to discuss why I am "liar, hypocrite, troll, etc". It is just not interesting to me, and even if it was I would probably need to quit my job just to respond full time to the complaints.
If you feel the urge to yell at me, please remember this is just m
Is it just my observation, or is eldavojohn an idiot?
Huh? While Churchill's and Roosevelt's Atlantic Charter laid the groundwork for the UN, the organization was not founded until after WWII. It was the Americans and the British Empire who won the war.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
If the dictator Joseph Stalin had not have killed a few million German soldiers and destroyed I think at least 20,000 tanks during the course of the Russio-German war, D-Day would have been awful tough for the United States and Great Britain. What sort of shape would the German army have been in without having endured the winter offensive on Moscow, the battles of Stalingrad and Kursk and then Operation Bagration.
This is my sig.
Even if the Pirate Bay is banned in the United States
I think you're falsely assuming I'm from the US. (English isn't my first language; my using "our lawmakers" in response to "Europeans would [...]" implies I'm European, right?).
I'm from Denmark. When I try to go to thepiratebay.org, I'm faced with this: 84.238.1.5/dom.pdf (in Danish, sorry).
It's a verdict from our second-highest court thing which forces $DANISH_ISP to not allow their customers to access thepiratebay.org (and all its subdomains).
Those were private corporations making those decisions
True. Now, why would they make such decisions? I'd say it's highly plausible they'd make such decisions because they believe it's what the people wants. If they rightfully believe so, then at least you can't say that the American spirit isn't "100% free speech, 0% sensitivity".
Maybe it's 90-10 and Europe is 80-20; maybe it's the other way around. Maybe it's 99-1 and 60-40, I don't know.
What I was trying to say: maybe I'm ignorant, but it's not clear to me that it's safe to a priori assume that European control would be worse than US control. Nor better.
Why am I modded troll?
An Internet troll, or simply troll in Internet slang, is someone who posts controversial, inflammatory, irrelevant or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum or chat room, with the primary intent of provoking other users into an emotional response or to generally disrupt normal on-topic discussion.
Really? I think I'm being on-topic and relevant--I'm discussing particular concerns relating to the relative merits of EU vs. US control over ICANN.
I'm talking about controversial stuff (free speech zone, Mohamed box) but the controversy is whether they're a good thing or not (which I don't talk about), not whether they exist/took place (where I agree with everyone else: they do/did).
The only rude thing I see that I said is "crazy shit goes on in Europe", but that's toward my own people; and I'm being equally rude to US and EU: "I'm not really sure who's worst".
Could someone explain to me why I'm all wrong?
(Or did I just draw the short straw, moderator-wise?)