Unfortunately, the people who need this the most will probably never think to look at it.
(I sometimes have really fascinating dreams, the kind that I wake up and think, “hey, that would make a perfect science fiction story.” Until I review them several hours later, and almost always realize that there’s nothing even vaguely interesting about them. Oh well.)
Don’t mourn for the Weekly World News. It turns out that Google has preserved its corpse so that our children and grandchildren can know just how stupid incredibly intelligent we all were around the turn of the century. Thanks a million, Google, I don’t know what we would have done without you.
This does look like a problem. Here’s an idea for an easy solution, though.
In the address bar, the browser could display both the address (as it does now) and the script name. Unicode is split up into different well-defined sections for different language scripts, so this shouldn’t be very difficult to implement. In the case of the Russian “raural” text that the article shows, you’d be able to tell that the site wasn’t really PayPal because you’d immediately see that it was from the Cyrillic section of Unicode, not the Latin section (which English uses) that you expected. Or you’d see that it was from mixed scripts, which would be a huge red flag in most cases.
It’s not a perfect solution, but it would allow moderately savvy Internet users protect themselves from this kind of thing.
If no one else attempts this, I might try writing a Firefox extension that does it, once Unicode domain names are possible.
This sounds like a really good idea. Anybody want to start a new business, fact-checking things for serious bloggers?
(FYI, I would not be a customer. I’m cheap, I’m not terribly serious, and I fancy that I can check my own facts, especially as this blog has so few of them. 😉 )
Haven’t they ever heard the old saying, “beware of geeks attempting grift”?
As you can probably see by the fact that I’m posting this, we’ve got Internet access back. Turns out the cable modem had gone bad. So much for blaming it on the snow.
You don’t really realize just how dependent you are on the Internet until it’s gone for a day. I couldn’t pay my bills, do any online banking, continue personal conversations via e-mail, keep an ear on what’s going on in the world, or research a math problem I’d run into on one of my programs. My main sources of entertainment are Internet based too. Every time I turned around, it seemed that I was tripping over the fact that the Internet wasn’t available.
Sure, there are other ways to do all of those things. I still get my bills by mail, so I could always mail in a payment too. A trip to the bank would let me do any kind of banking I want. I could pick up the phone and call the people I was having conversations with. I could turn on the TV and hear about anything big that happened in the world, and the library would have provided everything I needed to figure out the math problem. The library and TV could solve most of my entertainment needs as well. But Internet access means that I don’t have to make a trip to the library or the bank, or wait several days for my payments to be delivered, or spend a lot of money on long distance calls, or waste half an hour or more in front of the TV for the five minutes worth of news that I want.
The Internet is “merely” a convenience, but it also saves both time and money — something that few mere conveniences can boast.
I’ve long thought that Internet access should be a public utility, like electricity or water. It’s the two-way flow of information and communication, and it’s as vital to the modern way of life as any other utility… even more so for information workers like myself. Now I see why some countries — and the United Nations — are calling Internet access a basic human right.
I. Hate. Snow.
It snowed here all yesterday and all last night, on top of a huge dump from the day before. By this morning, we had to break down and dig ourselves out, or we’d’ve been stuck until the Spring thaw. Left to my own devices, I’d just hibernate, but for some reason GoddessJ likes to eat every once in a while, and the pickin’s in our pantry were getting mighty slim.
For some reason, our Internet connection started slowing down last night too, and by this morning it was so slow that it was all but unusable. I timed it… on one of the rare occasions that it deigned to allow a request through at all, it took six and a half minutes to load the Google homepage this morning. Google — the site with the super-minimalist homepage and data centers less than five miles from everywhere! I have no idea what’s wrong with it (it looks like it’s something between our house and our ISP, and the earliest a technician could be scheduled was tomorrow morning), but I’m blaming the snow for that too.
(After we dug ourselves out and got groceries, we went to GoddessJ’s parents’ place. Fortunately, their Internet connection is having no problems, or I wouldn’t be able to post at all today.)
And before anyone comments that I should expect it, living so far north, I have an answer for that too: I live here so that I will remember how much I hate snow. If I moved down to Florida or Nevada, I might forget.
Happy freakin’ New Year.
(Okay, it really isn’t as bad as I make it out to be. Everything that I say above is true, but we’ve got a snowblower; once we get it working each year, digging out is merely an unpleasant chore, rather than the back-breaking manual labor that shoveling everything would be. But this was the first big snow of the season, so I had to manually dig a path from the shed to the house and drag the snowblower up along it, so I could get to a power outlet and use the electric starter — after it sits unused for a few months, it won’t start easily anymore. And to think that I thought the electric starter was a frippery that I’d never use! From here on out, it should be easier. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it.)
Hm… how inefficient would it be to use a flamethrower to clear the snow away, I wonder…?
And neither can fairies, according to this fellow. What a bummer. Tinkerbell and Archangel Michael will be so disappointed when I tell them about his research. 😉
To ring in the new year, here’s some predictions on technology for the next decade. A lot of them sound a little optimistic, to say the least — but this guy’s got the credentials to back them up if anyone does.
An excellent question to end the decade on… albeit one that only us geeks would think to ask.