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Is it usual for the perspective of NPR articles to be this bizarrely biased?: > ... in retrospect, some of the decisions his team made seem hopelessly naive, e

• lucideer 9y ago
  More minor nitpick... the telephone analogy is a bit silly. You can get a burner phone, and networked computers are identifiable by a number: it's called an IP. It could even be persistently identifiable if it weren't for IPv4 address space exhaustion.
  • tritium 9y ago
    Yeah, I have to scratch my head about the whole anonymous lack of a unique number. Were IP addresses not part of early packet switched networks like ARPA net? Still, worse than IP addresses are IMEI numbers, on your person frequently, as you move from place to place, trackable in crowds, and from aircraft overhead.
    • swiley 9y ago
      Furthermore, changing IMEI numbers is some kind of terrible federal crime.
  • pmlnr 9y ago
    He was talking about landline numbers.
    • joe_the_user 9y ago
      Back in the day, there were a variety of ways to enter the landline network anonymously, from phone booths to whistling the right tones for call routing. For quite a while, there was a race between those seeking free long distance and companies trying to stop them.
    • rb808 9y ago
      Given the amount of spam calls I get now, landlines are pretty much anonymous too.
    • Bartweiss 9y ago
      Even so - if 'cybercrime' and 'industrial espionage' are made possible by the lack of personal identifiers online, how are we supposed to understand telephone scams and pre-digital espionage? Landlines may have been unique identifiers in common usage, but they weren't identifiable when someone was seeking to misbehave. Which is exactly the problem with the metaphor.
• adventured 9y ago
  Three or four years ago, no. NPR is a left leaning media outlet. All left leaning media outlets are now on a crusade against the evil anonymous hordes that stole the election. They're not being subtle about it. Anonomity has increasingly been declared a public enemy over the last year. Most likely it's going to lead the Democrats to support some form of a required online identification system (in the vein of what eg Eric Schmidt has pushed at various times). edit: downvoters, give it some time, you'll see. It won't be long now. There's nowhere else to go politically from where we're at now. To push further, they're going to have to start isolating people by identification online, tying behavior to a known ID, to restrict & control political influence online. There is no possible alternative, based on where they're pushing, and given the US Govt always seeks greater control. This will be overwhelmingly supported by Congress, it won't be a left / right issue, they'll work together to screw the US public as they always do on privacy.
  • dang 9y ago
    This comment breaks the HN guidelines, this one in particular: Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents. Could you please not do that? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• gowld 9y ago
  > Is it usual for the perspective of NPR articles to be this bizarrely biased?: Yes. It's embarrassing. NPR favors that gonzo folksy editorial style over attempting to appear impartial. > The primary bad actors on the internet are not individuals exploiting anonymity. "international espionage" are not 'individuals'.
  • Bartweiss 9y ago
    > "international espionage" are not 'individuals'. Exactly, but that example still shows up as part of "people abusing anonymity". After all, the article gives us "unlike a telephone, you don't have a unique number that announces who you are" - judging by that line and the chosen examples of online misbehavior, shouldn't we expect telephone scams to be nonexistent?
• erikpukinskis 9y ago
  I think it's somewhat of a subjective question. I'm curious to who you think are the primary bad actors on the internet. I can imagine, if someone is primarily concerned with the free expression of ideas, then individuals exploiting anonymity to harass people are actually pretty bad. There are huge swaths of public opinion that simply don't show up on the internet because they're the kinds of opinions internet bullies tend not to like. That's a big loss to free speech.
  • TangoTrotFox 9y ago
    I look at things the other way. Imagine we were living in times when we were still legally segregating people by race. Speaking against this was like to raise the ire of many individuals and groups. People could, and did, lose their livelihoods and even their lives as a result of these interactions. I don't really think the civil rights movement changed things as much as it worked as a protective anonymizing mechanism by aggregating people. For those that remained with the message more directly connected to themselves, such as Martin Luther King, their fates were still what we see in times when you state unpopular things without the protection of anonymity. As a thought experiment, imagine the internet and complete anonymization of speech was available from 1776 onward. It certainly would have a massive effect on things like slavery, and segregation. Would positive change have come about sooner, or later? Anonymity enables people to speak without fear of repercussion. Possibly having an anonymous account being called some names by other anonymous individuals does not really compare to the possible consequences of making unpopular statements when your traceable identity is connected to what is said. So on the same note if somebody is concerned enough to decide to not speak, even anonymously, for fear of anonymous messages from others - would they really be confident enough to then state such things with their name and identity attached to them? Ultimately I think the positive value gained by people being able express themselves positively and anonymously far outweighs the negative cost of people stating intentionally malicious things under the same guise of anonymity.
  • syshum 9y ago
    It always amazes me how people can look at the same set of data and come away with completely opposite views.. You see anonymous speech as a hindrance to the free exchange of idea's, where from my view of the world where you have people in many nations persecuted for their speech, where you have outrage mobs that use their collective outrage to get people fired or removed from organizations, employment, events over their "controversial" speech, where you have protests over "wrong think" speakers... in this world I see anonymous speech is required for the free exchange of idea's I wonder how the founding of the United States would have changed if the Authors of some of the most important papers and commentaries where disallowed from using pseudonyms when their letters where published in the popular press. Would they have self censored or been less than forthcoming with their thoughts...
• headmelted 9y ago
  The reason the Internet has become so successful is in large part due to optional anonymity. Clearly NPR and myself have very different views on what makes the Internet what it is. Also, I love me some Vint Cerf - and his contributions have unquestionably been massive - but no one person invented the Internet. Please let's leave the cult of personality for the "unwashed masses" as NPR calls them.
  • wjoe 9y ago
    I've noticed that American articles cite Vint Cerf as the "father/inventor of the internet", while British press give the same titles to Tim Berners-Lee. Of course both were instrumental, but as you say, many people and teams were involved in the creation of what we know as the Internet today.
    • headmelted 9y ago
      Being in the UK I don't see a valid claim to TBL's involvement in the creation of the Internet. I see it more as Vint Cerf being instrumental in the creation of the Internet, and Tim-Berners Lee of the world-wide web. Now, if any one person were to be credited for the creation of the Internet as a whole, that honour would undoubtedly go to Al Gore. Exhibit A: https://goo.gl/X8D3yb https://goo.gl/X8D3yb
      • wickawic 9y ago
        It is funny in a sense because TBL really invented the 'internet' as people know it, Vint Cerf just created that pesky TCP/IP thing nerds talk about.
      • michrassena 9y ago
        It's such a great piece of political rhetoric that pushed the false idea of Al Gore claiming to have "invented the Internet". If you accept that Vint Cerf was a key person in the creation of the Internet as we know it, you'll probably be interested in his opinion of Al Gore's actual role. https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~fessler/misc/funny/gore,net.txt https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~fessler/misc/funny/gore,net.txt Here's an excerpt from the first paragraphs: Al Gore and the Internet By Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development. No one person or even small group of persons exclusively "invented" the Internet. It is the result of many years of ongoing collaboration among people in government and the university community. But as the two people who designed the basic architecture and the core protocols that make the Internet work, we would like to acknowledge VP Gore's contributions as a Congressman, Senator and as Vice President. No other elected official, to our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time.
• acdha 9y ago
  That doesn’t seem biased as much as something you’re uncomfortable hearing. Your last sentence in particular is simply wrong - from spam emails to phishing, the internet’s lack of strong client IDs has made a lot of attacks possible or cheaper. You didn’t have spam, gamergate-style hate mobs, etc. on the conventional phone system where the police could show up at the caller’s door 20 minutes later. The fact that it’s also lead to a bunch of good things shouldn’t mean that we ignore the negative outcomes. Something as simple as mandated egress filtering would make life harder for a lot of abusers but a bunch of companies want to shirk even that low cost.
• deleted 9y ago
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• sanderjd 9y ago
  I heard this report in the car yesterday. My impression was not that it was biased, but that it was embarrassingly out of touch. It sort of reminded me of Brendan Fraser's character in Blast From the Past where he grew up in a bunker stuck in the 50s and was discovering life in the 90s with wide-eyed wonderment. At one point, the reporter realizes that science fiction might have interesting things to say about society. Vint Cerf and the guy from Black Mirror were super interesting though! It would have been a better report with more direct audio from their interviews.
  • croon 9y ago
    Bit of a side-track on the last point: Brooker ("the guy from Black Mirror") is kind of a cynical jerk, but he's always been really prescient as well as super funny. Watch Nathan Barley some time if you get the chance, and keep in mind that it's 13 years old at this point. (Don't know how other stuff like Dead Set or Brass Eye holds up). He also used to do a weekly wipe show (sort of a Last Week Tonight before Last Week Tonight), and later a yearly wipe, but he seems to have abandoned those after 2016. I also always read any op-ed he writes in the Guardian as they're generally insightful (and funny).
• Bartweiss 9y ago
  That's unusual for NPR, and Laura Sydell is usually quite good at what she does. But yes - it's an unsupported and alarming transition, and it's what brought me to the comments here. It's not exactly novel, though. Since online harassment on message boards and games started, people have been calling for an end to anonymity as a cure. Either a total end, meaning real names everywhere, or partial, meaning providing real names to sites that can be looked up if you behave badly. Wil Wheaton called for it loudly a few years back, and a string of other generally-progressive, internet-savvy voices have done so before and since. (Along with a lot of raving loons who know nothing about the internet, like Jack Thompson.) There seems to be a pattern in these calls that I think explains it: they all come from people whose identities are already public and controversial online. Laura Sydell and Wil Wheaton spend lots of time being non-anonymous on the internet, and so their experience would probably improve if everyone else was 'onymized'. Meanwhile an awful lot of anonymous private individuals, especially from groups that get targeted for harassment, would suffer far more online.
  • Xeoncross 9y ago
    Especially since these western people you mention aren't in danger of being jailed or executed for expressing the wrong views online.
  • Pokepokalypse 9y ago
    End-to-online-anonymity has been floated as a cure to many things for a long time. However: we still have anonymity in the form of; - abusive telemarketers/harassers who spoof caller id. And get away with it. - criminal organizations who use LLC's and shell corporations to illegally launder money, hide wealth, peddle influence, sell drugs, sell weapons, bribe congressmen.. . etc. (LLC's are the "sock puppet" accounts of the business world - let that sink in). - Facebook: you have to use your real name (even if you're Trans, right?) but Ivan can pose as "Bob Jimbob" and get you riled up about them libruls coming to take your guns. It's all bullshit, and giving up our anonymity and privacy amounts to unilateral disarmament while our enemies are holding us hostage at gunpoint.
    • pixl97 9y ago
• kbenson 9y ago
  > Is it usual for the perspective of NPR articles to be this bizarrely biased?: I think it usually depends on how far they step outside their area of expertise. I've always gotten an Ivy league liberal arts vibe from NPR correspondents. In some of their side shows you can hear them expound on some great classics author or another. My perception has always been that many people with that background tend to discount the usefulness of science fiction.
• IntronExon 9y ago
  Is it usual for the perspective of NPR articles to be this bizarrely biased? Depends on the author, sometimes definitely yes. The primary bad actors though, are certainly anonymous. IMO the worst of the internet are child abusers, who have absolutely thrived on anonymity.