Haystack and the Myth of the Boy Wizard

Jamie sent in an interesting writeup about The Myth of the Boy Wizard. No, it's not about Hogwarts, but rather about Haystack and its creator, Austin Heap. Last summer the media covered the programmer, the software, and its supposed effect on Iranian censorship. But as is often the case, truth is less interesting than reality. What happened is that the story managed to press some magic buttons, and the media ran with it. This one is worth a read.

Comments

Re:Not surprising

[gorzek]

In fact, I see this sort of thing all the time. There are some people I deal with who are really big on privacy issues and they view all technology information through that lens. Rather than having any kind of nuanced opinion on technology, they just assume every new bit of techno-gadgetry is an insidious privacy threat and will inevitably be used to track you and then oppress you.

The point being, I guess, that people will see what they want to see, especially if they are ignorant and unwilling to be educated beyond paranoid worst-case scenarios (or rosy, pie-in-the-sky ideals.) I suspect journalists are just as susceptible to this as the man on the street.