Slashdot Mirror
The Tech Industry Is Getting Ridiculous
An anonymous reader writes "Columnist Jon Evans points out that the tech industry has been slowly getting stranger over the past several years. When you look at the headlines individually, they all seem to make sense, but putting them together and trying to imagine them popping up a decade ago really illustrates how odd it has become. Quoting: 'In Japan, some half-billion dollars' worth of cryptocurrency vanished from a site founded to trade Magic: The Gathering cards. In New Zealand, the world's greatest Call of Duty player has launched a political party to revenge himself on those who had him arrested and seized his sports cars. In Britain, the secret service is busy collecting and watching homegrown porn. Here in Silicon Valley, mighty Apple just revealed that a flagrant, basic programming error gutted the security of all its devices for years. Google, "more wood behind fewer arrows" Google, now has its own navy, to go with its air force and robot army.'"
The Secret Service loves their porn. Not that there is anything wrong with that. Good for them!
It has been ridiculous for a long time. It is just now that more people are noticing that it is getting embarrassing... :)
generalization based upon outliers
Places that handle large amounts of money get taken by thieves and embezzlers, people of all stripes go into politics because they're vengeful, overgrown security services monitor lots of petty and unimportant things, minor errors get overlooked for years on end, and massively wealthy people maintain semi-militarized forces.
Congratulations, you've just described literally any point of time in human history.
Most of the incidents mentioned have nothing to do with the "tech industry". Mt Gox was not part of the "tech industry" - it was a financial exchange. Neither are the NSA or GCHQ or the world's best Call of Battle player (although he might have a day job in the tech industry, dunno). These stories are about various nontechnical parts of society adapting old behaviors to a new medium. This is mostly a consequence of real, mostly invisible tech industry being so successful.
Google, now has its own navy, to go with its air force and robot army.'"
How else do you expect them to defend themselves from Oracle?
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
TFA's premise is off...the whole 20th Century was a giant clusterfuck of human rights & technology.
"getting" ridiculous...that notion itself is ridiculous
Here's what I find really ridiculous...this happened in 1968 & basically all computing now is just an upscale version of that tech...faster, more colors, bigger...
The only difference is that so many people have been screwed over by so many different expressions of our modern greed that **they can't hide anymore**
Thank you Dave Raggett
Over the last 10 years, the NSA has declared war on privacy while having secret courts and our president got the nobel peace prize for something he didn't end up doing.
Egypt has gone through 2 governments, and there have been uprisings in many other places, including now Ukraine.
I could legally marry another man while smoking pot, but telling people in Russia being gay isn't evil is now a crime.
All these would seem pretty crazy 10 years ago. Its not just Tech, its simply time: Things happen, and stuff changes. Heck, the CoD players's political stuff isn't even tech news, thats political and could have happened at any point.
Boy, when you remove context from misleading headline excerpts, things sure do get wacky!
You know those jokes that sometimes aren't funny from old movies, that your relatives laugh real hard about? A large number of those came from the same logic - taking a topical story, removing the context, and applying hyperbole to the idea. They know the idea is misleading, and are 'in' on a joke that they just can't explain to you and still be funny.
Just bundling some of those together with a 'technology' theme isn't making a point - its bungling a joke. Not as bad as that whole 'beta' attempt, but still, a bad attempt at a joke.
Ryan Fenton
These are not examples of the tech industry getting ridiculous. These are examples of PEOPLE getting ridiculous.
MtGox didn't happen because of tech getting ridiculous. It happened because there were ridiculous people willing to go in on an insane premise, their greed blinding them.
If a gamer can form a political party that is able to accomplish shady things, shame on the PEOPLE that let it happen. Where is the tech?
Busy collecting and watching homegrown porn? Uhh...okay dude. No tech needed there. Just sick people.
For Apple...hey, shit happens. All software manufacturers will experience this one day. Guess what? It's because of PEOPLE.
And Google has an air force and robot army? LOL! Perhaps a slight exaggeration?
I've got one for ya, this article's premise is ridiculous.
That's how you know you're getting old. Stand aside, grandpa, we have a future to build!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I can describe that insanity in 140 characters or less.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
... and counter control.
In Britain we're surprised to learn we have a Secret Service. We have GCHQ, MI5, MI6, and various other things, but I don't think we have a Secret Service.
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
The tech industry does what people are willing to pay for, within the limits of the law (usually). We are bending norms at a pace far exceeding anything humanity has ever had to deal with before. It's enough to make even staunch liberals question their orthodoxy. Just because it's new doesn't mean it's better. Change is easier than ever before, but there are good reasons for putting limits on the rate of change. We need time to adapt. "Revolution" used to be an anomaly, but these days it's becoming so commonplace that it's almost boring. It's a very large train, and it is moving very fast, so IMO, it's well worth considering what we should do to keep the train from running off the rails.
I'd bet that someone else got the #1 spot in COD and then Kim Dotcom pirated the account. Publicity stunts and piracy are his MO.
%sub%
Zactly. Every day we are confronted with what, to the old tech guard is old new, stories about what you post online is not private etc and so on. Everyone who got on the tech train early needs to learn how to be patient with the latecomers. They will keep getting online for a long time. Forever, actually. We need to figure out how to give everyone a gentle introduction. We can't just shame people for being ignorant of internet norms. IT literacy, whatever that means, should be societies number one priority.
Back in the day, the April issue of Byte used to run several parody articles. Funny stuff, I miss it. They quit because too many people took the bait.
Any significant industry is going to be ridiculous if you first cherry-pick your examples, selecting for lunacy/idiocy, and then state them in the most exaggerated, sensationalist way you can think of.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I wanted to live in the future, the future I read about, the future I saw on tv, in movies. Now that that future is here, I find myself increasingly wanting to go back to a past that's no longer there, scheduling 'no internet' days and turning off my cell phone so that I can go back to a more peaceful time, a more thoughtful time, a time with more focus, if only for a few hours.
Much was already predicted, society and hence laws if needed don't adapt as fast as 'progress' is made.
Keiretsu on the rize, interesting times indeed.
Not that surprising though for people who are into tech and into SiFi or other literature, and for most stuff you don't need a Ph D to predict them.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Weird outliers exist in every industry, and in every time. It's just that now get mroe examples of it worldwide, in realtime.
Five bits of anecdotal weirdness do not a trend make.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Yeah, victims of bad laws and crooked cops should be forced to enjoy their misfortune! Or maybe, this is why politicians shouldn't piss-off rich people. A millionaire in Australia has also started a political party. We're seeing a return to the 1960s where people didn't blindly follow the rules of the rich moral minority.
Information technology is the only large-scale class of science/engineering work that "activists" will still allow to be built in the US, because its origins were too decentralized to attract their attention. There is no single large structure, like a dam, that they can focus their attention against. And because this area of technology has flourished, the inevitable mistakes that occur from time to time are what makes our news. You have to look at Asian news for stories about nuclear meltdowns, cost overruns on giant buildings, and bullet train wrecks.
There needs to be new challenges to the whole human race, or we need to start living over 200 years old to have enough time to retrain to something we consider meaningful. Perhaps the rapid rate of change is corroding the experienced value of the work. Tech industry is like the cycles of history in Battlestar Galactica, only sped up.
The tech industry was ridiculous back in 1999.
And the most ridiculous bit this year was missed in the headline: facebook paying $19Billion Dollars for WhatsApp.
Wait, some people believe "goto fail" was a "programming error"?
Heh.
A former cowboy became President of the United States. Oh, that was in 1901. And the U.S. overthrew the government of Guatemala to help out a fruit company. Oh, that was in 1954.
You can make anything sound crazy if you just say it in a silly enough way and leave out most of the important details. Heck, conservatives are fond of pointing out that Obama is a "former community organizer." Also a former senator, but who cares about that?
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
It's Android that has contained a massive (Master Key) vulnerability for 4+ years--since Android 1.6--and for which most existing handsets will never see a patch. [Related: Android 4.3 contains a second MK vulnerability that was fixed in 4.4]
You have in USA alone the next generation indebted to their masters for a trillion dollars!, and if you dont pay it back they take ALL your stuff and bankruptcy isn't even an option, thats a pretty good incentive to do ANYTHING to pay it back, be it illegal, immoral, underhand whatever makes that loan payment at the end of the month, every month, for the next 25 years!
good luck with that
I usually do not post and just read here and took the advice posted to use nobeta=1. But it is not working on this page. I am beginning to wonder if this has more to do with boosting page refreshes for their Ads since how many others like I have refreshed this page using nobeta=1 and it did not work.
Techies have always been strange - for example, consider the average /. reader. Or Richard Stallman.
Another great example of an outlier is the so-called "Spam King", Dale Begg-Smith, who, when not making millions off spam and malware, won two Olympic medals and three World Cup championships in mogul skiing, starting in 2006. If that isn't a bizarre combination of pursuits, I don't know what is.
Have you read my blog lately?
Ah, the modern tech industry, creating solutions for problems that don't exist.
Such as Windows 8 or the Slashdot beta.
You're only just now noticing this? I've been feeling like I've been living in a Bruce Sterling novel for the past seven years or so.
egypt urnash minimal art.
How about the early 1900's when business leaders hired mercenary armies to combat labour unions (Pinkerton among them) by attacking rallies and shooting labour leaders. Having a private army have long been part of the big-business picture.
Seriously, I'm not sure it gets any weirder than that.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
I believe that the "Ridiculous" label should be placed on the journalists that attempt to put the most sensational title on their article... why do they do that... because shocking sells...
and thus Money is at the root of this.... did you ever read the Tabloid papers? I suggest you look at those headlines... so what is actually happening is that the morals and the professionalism of the journalists have gone in the toilet... because they get more money for crazy titles on the articles they write...
A realist.
"putting them together and trying to imagine them popping up a decade ago really illustrates how odd it has become"
So news stories today wouldn't have made sense ten years ago, when we had different technology and expectations. That's some crack journalism right there.
Far more than ridiculous, non-specialised IT magazines are B-O-R-I-N-G. Bigger hard disk, bigger RAM, faster processor, new anti-virus, how to clean your PC from anti-virus, rinse, repeat.
Weird, Hey! I was just getting comfortable!
How is this the tech industry and not the news media? The media is devising the click bait; Evans is just piling on.
Sounds like a Rudy Rucker novel.
I thought the article was going to talk about all the hipsters and Apple-lovers reducing the idea of geek culture to some big bang theory pussy with an iPad.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
This.
I can't say I'm surprised that neither the OP nor any editor did any actual research before making such a claim, though. This is slashdot, after all.
http://undecidedgames.blogspot.com
A former cowboy became President... and in 1981 wasn't it (Reagan)