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Re: Schneier: ISPs should bear security burden

  • From: Bill Stewart
  • Date: Wed Apr 27 20:42:41 2005
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On 4/27/05, Owen DeLong <[email protected]> wrote:
> I was referring to the article which contained the schneier quote, not
> schneier.  The article was written by someone at least pretending to be
> a journalist, and, was put out as news, not editorial or advertising.
> 
> As such, it should be held to the standard that should apply to news.
> Instead, it was yet another example of advertising disguised as news.

The standards of technology journalism involve writing about
many different things you don't know much about,
and sometimes a few that you do, and getting lots of press releases
that were written by PR people who might or might not understand what the
companies they're writing for are making, and trying to make it
interesting enough
that you sell enough advertising while meeting your deadlines.  Often
it gets better than this,
and some journalists are really good, but often it doesn't,
and sometimes they're doing well to spell the names right and pick the 
most relevant couple of sentences to quote.

The standards for non-technology journalism are pretty similar -
the big differences are that in fields you know something about,
you're able to recognize bad fact-checking and lack of insight,
and you might know some of the important things that got left out,
whereas in non-technical journalism, such as political reporting,
you might not know enough about what really occurred
or who the people are who are getting quoted/interviewed
to recognize bad fact-checking or differentiate between
organized propaganda campaigns and naive me-too reporting.

So be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what parts of it
you actually believe,
and try to differentiate between people who have strong opinions vs
people who are just being self-serving.    I thought the VNUnet article was
reasonable for something that short - it hit a couple of issues, and
quoted at least one other person who had a somewhat different perspective.
On the other hand, most of the other news articles reported on Schneier's
criticism of the overuse of terms like "cyber-terrorism" by self-promoting or
agency-agenda-promoting people.


----
             Thanks;     Bill

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