I just don't see any evidence that the internet is becoming unusable. The goodies have made it possible to filter my spam with amazing accuracy. It is now better than it has been in the last decade.
My computer is so secure that I don't need any antivirus software. That never used to be the case. (Though this malicious flash thingy suggests that it may become the case again.) Even Microsoft's security is improving. Vista is plainly much more secure than 98, 2000, early XP, etc.
If the internet as a whole (or any component of it) is easily broken, that needs to be fixed technologically and/or legislatively. When infrastructure fails, you never blame the user, whether they were ignorant or malicious. At best, it is merely pointless and irresponsible.
The only serious question the GGP implies is whether the technological fixes will be worthwhile. They are better now than ever before, why shouldn't that continue?
Your doom-and-gloom is misguided. The internet won't get wrecked by scams like this. The only thing that distinguishes the internet from the rest of life is the connectivity. Individual behaviours that are recognisable as sociopathic outside the internet (scamming, bullying, stalking, spamming) are not somehow going to win on the internet.
Yes, the connectivity allows sociopaths to make life suck for more people simultaneously than was previously possible, or make it suck more for one person than was previously possible. But the goodies have the same connectivity improvement as the baddies. The non-sociopaths just want to get online and do their thing (read, communicate, buy, sell, make spam filters, prosecute child molesters) without trampling on people. The goodies have always outweighed the baddies on the internet, and there is no reason to believe the balance is changing.
The real threat to the internet is from organisations who use PR machines to avoid transferring common decency from the rest of life. For example, companies who compete unfairly (Microsoft), get laws passed to define "internet only" crimes in their favour, sue people they would otherwise leave alone (RIAA), inadequately protect private data publicly accessible, and of course, nations who spy on everyone. These organisations leave everyone with a feeling of distrust that they cannot overcome.
I'm sorry, but he doesn't deserve those Insightful mods. Ironic that he predicted Flamebait mods, but as of right now no one's tagged him as such.
One straightforward way of getting moderated highly is to insult the moderators' intelligence. Usually "I know I'll get modded down but..." or "slashdot fanbois of course will mod me down but..."
I wish posts were moderated on their substance, not the comments to the moderators.
You're confusing "unsolicited" with "spam." "Spam" is a subjective term, and means different things for different people, though we generally agree that factors like unsolicited, commercial, irritating, unwanted, impersonal, "mass", and antisocial contribute to the "spam" character of email. The law tries to limit spam by prohibiting the most easily defined and clearly damaging emails (e.g. those which are clearly fraudulent).
Yahoo also tries to limit spam, but they are not a judge and are interested in a social definition of spam. Yahoo is trying to discover what people (automatically) want removed from their inbox, without feeling any obligation to contact the sender. It turns out that lots of people don't want this email, and don't feel much obligation to the sender. Fair enough-if they think it's spam, then for them it is spam. Blaming the users for seeing things differently is just arrogant*.
Yahoo made the mistake of inferring that nobody wants this email and acting accordingly. The fault is Yahoo's, not the users who marked it as spam. Yahoo's algorithm should have noticed that lots of their users did not mark it as spam, and realised that they should treat it differently to penis enlargement emails.
*Requiring users to agree to your definition of spam so that it doesn't inconvenience other people is just absurd. You are always responsible for the behaviour of your system, whatever your users do. That is a basic principle of computer security, and applies to spam inference just as much as operating system kernel design. If you provide an easily-broken system and it breaks, you suck. Yes, you can hope that your users are not entirely antisocial or uncooperative, but ultimately users is as users does.
An unsubscribe process takes more clicks then hitting 'mark as spam'. That's all the reason people need to use the spam button.
It's not the reason I do it. If I think an email is spam, I mark it as such. Regardless of how you get my email address, it's your responsibility not to spam me.
(If I sign up to an opt-in list thinking I'll get something I want, I sometimes get something useless---or, often enough, far too much of what I wanted. If I consider an email to be spam, I mark it as such. I consider it a legitimate form of protest, and at least as effective as contacting a company. OTOH if I consider an email to be legitimate but something I don't want, I unsubscribe.)
The problem in this case, is that Yahoo has requested and misinterpreted user feedback. People disagree on the definition of spam: I think something's spam and mark it as such-it's not your business to tell me I'm wrong. Yahoo might find my opinion interesting, and they are welcome to use their knowledge of whether I reported it however they like. But their algorithms need to be able to figure out whether an email is "spam for me" or "spam for everyone."
And another thing. Opt-out and opt-in are not binary things, they're on a spectrum. E.g. by doing XYZ (registering for a software update, entering a draw) you 'agree' or 'elect' to receive product information... I don't care if it's opt out or opt in, it's spam.
OLPC laptops are presumably sufficiently identical that Apple could adapt OS X to OLPC relatively easily... supporting the things that make OLPC "special" would be harder.
But who knows? Steve Jobs might repeat his original offer of OS X, but make it directly to the governments rather than the foundation.
Slashdot Mirror
I just don't see any evidence that the internet is becoming unusable. The goodies have made it possible to filter my spam with amazing accuracy. It is now better than it has been in the last decade.
My computer is so secure that I don't need any antivirus software. That never used to be the case. (Though this malicious flash thingy suggests that it may become the case again.) Even Microsoft's security is improving. Vista is plainly much more secure than 98, 2000, early XP, etc.
If the internet as a whole (or any component of it) is easily broken, that needs to be fixed technologically and/or legislatively. When infrastructure fails, you never blame the user, whether they were ignorant or malicious. At best, it is merely pointless and irresponsible.
The only serious question the GGP implies is whether the technological fixes will be worthwhile. They are better now than ever before, why shouldn't that continue?
Your doom-and-gloom is misguided. The internet won't get wrecked by scams like this. The only thing that distinguishes the internet from the rest of life is the connectivity. Individual behaviours that are recognisable as sociopathic outside the internet (scamming, bullying, stalking, spamming) are not somehow going to win on the internet.
Yes, the connectivity allows sociopaths to make life suck for more people simultaneously than was previously possible, or make it suck more for one person than was previously possible. But the goodies have the same connectivity improvement as the baddies. The non-sociopaths just want to get online and do their thing (read, communicate, buy, sell, make spam filters, prosecute child molesters) without trampling on people. The goodies have always outweighed the baddies on the internet, and there is no reason to believe the balance is changing.
The real threat to the internet is from organisations who use PR machines to avoid transferring common decency from the rest of life. For example, companies who compete unfairly (Microsoft), get laws passed to define "internet only" crimes in their favour, sue people they would otherwise leave alone (RIAA), inadequately protect private data publicly accessible, and of course, nations who spy on everyone. These organisations leave everyone with a feeling of distrust that they cannot overcome.
I'm sorry, but he doesn't deserve those Insightful mods. Ironic that he predicted Flamebait mods, but as of right now no one's tagged him as such.
One straightforward way of getting moderated highly is to insult the moderators' intelligence. Usually "I know I'll get modded down but..." or "slashdot fanbois of course will mod me down but..."
I wish posts were moderated on their substance, not the comments to the moderators.
You're confusing "unsolicited" with "spam." "Spam" is a subjective term, and means different things for different people, though we generally agree that factors like unsolicited, commercial, irritating, unwanted, impersonal, "mass", and antisocial contribute to the "spam" character of email. The law tries to limit spam by prohibiting the most easily defined and clearly damaging emails (e.g. those which are clearly fraudulent).
Yahoo also tries to limit spam, but they are not a judge and are interested in a social definition of spam. Yahoo is trying to discover what people (automatically) want removed from their inbox, without feeling any obligation to contact the sender. It turns out that lots of people don't want this email, and don't feel much obligation to the sender. Fair enough-if they think it's spam, then for them it is spam. Blaming the users for seeing things differently is just arrogant*.
Yahoo made the mistake of inferring that nobody wants this email and acting accordingly. The fault is Yahoo's, not the users who marked it as spam. Yahoo's algorithm should have noticed that lots of their users did not mark it as spam, and realised that they should treat it differently to penis enlargement emails.
*Requiring users to agree to your definition of spam so that it doesn't inconvenience other people is just absurd. You are always responsible for the behaviour of your system, whatever your users do. That is a basic principle of computer security, and applies to spam inference just as much as operating system kernel design. If you provide an easily-broken system and it breaks, you suck. Yes, you can hope that your users are not entirely antisocial or uncooperative, but ultimately users is as users does.
An unsubscribe process takes more clicks then hitting 'mark as spam'. That's all the reason people need to use the spam button.
It's not the reason I do it. If I think an email is spam, I mark it as such. Regardless of how you get my email address, it's your responsibility not to spam me.
(If I sign up to an opt-in list thinking I'll get something I want, I sometimes get something useless---or, often enough, far too much of what I wanted. If I consider an email to be spam, I mark it as such. I consider it a legitimate form of protest, and at least as effective as contacting a company. OTOH if I consider an email to be legitimate but something I don't want, I unsubscribe.)
The problem in this case, is that Yahoo has requested and misinterpreted user feedback. People disagree on the definition of spam: I think something's spam and mark it as such-it's not your business to tell me I'm wrong. Yahoo might find my opinion interesting, and they are welcome to use their knowledge of whether I reported it however they like. But their algorithms need to be able to figure out whether an email is "spam for me" or "spam for everyone."
And another thing. Opt-out and opt-in are not binary things, they're on a spectrum. E.g. by doing XYZ (registering for a software update, entering a draw) you 'agree' or 'elect' to receive product information... I don't care if it's opt out or opt in, it's spam.
Yoda, is that you?
OLPC laptops are presumably sufficiently identical that Apple could adapt OS X to OLPC relatively easily... supporting the things that make OLPC "special" would be harder.
But who knows? Steve Jobs might repeat his original offer of OS X, but make it directly to the governments rather than the foundation.