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Cliff Stoll told all of the adults in my life constantly on television that home computers were creating criminals and that you should be suspect of anyone in l

• lukan 3y ago
  Is it normal, that this clip has no sound? Then it is hard to check the rhetoric. Also instagram is aweful, even more so for those without an account. Scrolling a bit down (looking for colume control) ends the clip and tells me to register to watch it again. No thank you, but so I cannot review your criticism.
  • th0ma5 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • lukan 3y ago
      Maybe you could use videosources that do not offer such a horrible user experience? But you don't have to and I don't have to check your links. Edit: seriously, I won't click any instagramlinks anymore. After reloading, yes, there is a little volume button, but it was half hidden under the "register popup" "check this out" banner etc. Which went away after scrolling down. Then there is no timeline. No replay like mentioned. And the content: nothing about teenage hacker criminals All in all, not convincing.
      • th0ma5 3y ago
        Not sure what you want me to do dude, I'm sorry I'm speaking my truth and it is upsetting I guess. Take care. Edit to your edits: he wrote several books talking about computers, or more specifically, the computers of the 80s and 90s, being worthless and would lead us all astray.
        • mlyle 3y ago
          One book-- Silicon Snake Oil. And criticism of that is worthwhile. Your exaggeration, on the other hand, is not.
          • th0ma5 3y ago
            High-Tech Heretic: Reflections of a Computer Contrarian is literally about stopping computer education.
            • mlyle 3y ago
              And as I've discussed with you elsewhere-- I feel like most of that criticism is spot on. Computers in education are great for: * Education on how to use computing or programming (... though when I teach these subjects, I do a whole lot of it offline) * Independent research (though you'd better stand at the back of the classroom and monitor what's going on very closely... and do this sparingly). * Occasional rapid feedback through a Kahoot about how much your class understands a given set of subject matter. * Letting students write and revise a paper quickly now and then * Occasional individualized practice through something like Khan. On the other hand, they're greatly overused even today. Instructors do things like: * Use a Kahoot every class to convey key learning material, which results in a disorganized, flash-card experience. * Perform enough of the work on computers that plagiarism and academic integrity become a huge concern. * Displace valuable classroom practice performing labs or doing arithmetic with inferior virtual eqiuvalents. * Allow students (without any type of learning or physical disability which would necessitate this) to take notes online, which under the best of circumstances is demonstrably inferior to paper note-taking for retention and also invites massive amounts of abuse. I feel like the case was similar in the 1990s: there was little evidence of benefit. There was less of the online abuse of computing, but there was still a lot of abuse and misuse.
    • defrost 3y ago
      > Maybe you should leave computers to professionals? Seriously? You're the one that linked to Insta, and to a clip that doesn't feature Clifford warning of hackers but to Clifford making the valid point that at a particular time in history a great deal of money was being spent on computers in education that largely sat idle for a shortage of teachers, courses, supporting resources.
      • th0ma5 3y ago
        Just referencing his opinions ironically. He didn't have a valid point either. He simply didn't understand computers enough to see how they were being used.
        • defrost 3y ago
          Sure, just barely enough to wing it as a systems administrator at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and to last just a few years as a school physics teacher. It's not like he had any first hand experience of either computers or computers in schools /s You might not like his opinions but they were his and of that time.
          • th0ma5 3y ago
            > Any computer undergrounder can identify with and appreciate Stoll's obsession and patience in attempting to trace the hacker through a maze of international gateways and computer systems. But, Stoll apparently misses the obvious affinity he has with those he condemns. He simply dismisses hackers as 'monsters' and displays virtually no recognition of the similarities between his own activity and those of the computer underground. This is what makes Stoll's work so dangerous: His work is an unreflective exercise in self-promotion, a tome that divides the sacred world of technocrats from the profane activities of those who would challenge it; Stoll stigmatises without understanding (Thomas 1990). https://insecure.org/stf/them_and_us.txt https://insecure.org/stf/them_and_us.txt Just because I don't like his opinions or that they are old doesn't make him right for doing this. The appeal to his alleged authority of the time was part of the problem.
  • dark-star 3y ago
    Really? You did not see that there is a button in the lower right that enables audio? It looks like a loudspeaker, the universal symbol for "audio". Although there's no volume control, so turn down your speakers first (the audio is rather loud)
    • lukan 3y ago
      No, I did not see it, it was covered by a "check out something else" banner on my small mobile screen.
• dark-star 3y ago
  yeah, and he made sure the public thought that the "hacker" that got into his system was a dangerous communist criminal, when it was a fact just a scool kid that even got killed as a result of that whole ordeal. Mr. Stoll has (or at least had) a weird sense of right and wrong, and if what happened to Karl Koch would happen today, he would surely get canceled into oblivion. He might have started the actual "cybersecurity" idea, but he did it with methods similar to todays companies that paint security researchers as evil hackers or "the bad guys" Edit: I just want to add the disclaimer that it's hard to fault him for what he did though, times were different back then, and the cold war was still ongoing... So probably every American would have acted in a similar way
  • mlyle 3y ago
    > yeah, and he made sure the public thought that the "hacker" that got into his system was a dangerous communist criminal, when it was a fact just a scool kid that even got killed as a result of that whole ordeal. Hess sold information to the KGB. He was 26 years old at the time of the Cuckoo's Egg. He was prosecuted successfully for espionage. As far as I know, he is still alive. You're referring to one person in the ring that penetrated US governmental facilities, Karl Koch. He was 20 at the time. He had been granted immunity from prosecution. He died 3 years later, potentially from suicide. Your comment seems either disingenuous or wrong.
    • th0ma5 3y ago
      There was an additional edit. I agree with that sentiment, I don't necessarily blame Mr. Stoll and I would probably do the same if I were in his shoes to be honest, but the exaggerations had a major developmental detriment to me. The god damned bottles are pretty amazing. The damn criminals were wrong, and it is good that he was able to bring justice. For all the things I have fault with, he increased visibility on a lot of issues.
• mlyle 3y ago
  > This rhetoric is apparent in this clip: That isn't what the clip says. He says that technology in schools is expensive and that the educational value is unclear. As a teacher-- and a lover of technology, teaching engineering in middle and high school-- this is a true statement even today. I definitely see some benefits to ed-tech, but it is overused, has unclear educational value, and invites abuse.
  • th0ma5 3y ago
    The software he was talking about at the time, and my mother did her master's thesis on the several years before that clip, included Math Blasters, Oregon Trail, and several other Commodore 64 titles. Interactive media like this was absolutely foundational to my entire computing career from typing, to gaining procedural literacy. I'm sorry your software experience hasn't been as rich as my entire educational experience to professional learning software and things like Duo Lingo. And social media and news sites. Where do you think it went wrong and what kinds of products are you talking about? Matlab?
    • mlyle 3y ago
      > included Math Blasters This type of practice has been shown to be harmful compared to conventional math practice. > Oregon Trail Oregon Trail was great. The dozens of hours I spent playing Big Top, One on One, Lode Runner, Pipe Dream, Test Drive I, etc, in schools--- less so. And even for Oregon Trail, you got most of the value out of a couple of playthroughs. And mostly it's to learn "life on the frontier was hard" and "it's fun to shoot buffalo." You could have basically the same fun and more learning with a classroom-scale simulation. (Rocky's Boots was fantastic, too). > things like Duo Lingo. Things like Duolingo, MathCounts Trainer, etc-- they have limited educational value but there's a huge subpopulation of students who will become addicted to them and use them in amounts that are well past the point of diminishing returns and a distraction to their learning overall. > Where do you think it went wrong and what kinds of products are you talking about? There's also a big tendency as instructors to pick up things like Kahoot/Quizizz/Khan and just give them to your class instead of actively instructing. It's easy. It takes little prep. Small amounts of these things with adequate supervision can absolutely enrich the educational environment and provide feedback on how things are going. But they are overused and harm is readily observable. Not to mention that you need to be vigilant as a hawk to prevent cyberbullying, gaming, and abuse in alternate tabs. There's a zillion edtech vendors who tell you they can sell you something to make your classroom run better. But in the end, the way a school really works is based on a social relationship between the students and the instructor, and excessive use of technology gets in the way of this. And when I say "excessive", I really mean "more than a little bit."
• aiman3 3y ago
  he was(may still is) type of people trying to control people, exactly like the current OpenAI's Sam, why they have that kind of mindset, build in their DNA?
  • mlyle 3y ago
    Saying that edtech was a poor investment of public funds and not good for education is hardly "trying to control people."