So I wonder what they a digital missionary should make of these three stories.
1. MySpace to curb access to youths
MySpace.com is planning new restrictions on how adults may contact its younger users in response to growing concerns about the safety of teenagers who frequent the popular online social networking site.
The site already prohibits kids 13 and under from setting up accounts and displays only partial profiles for those registered as 14 or 15 years old unless the person viewing the profile is already on the teen's list of friends.
Under the changes, expected to be announced Wednesday and taking effect next week, MySpace users who are 18 or over could no longer request to be on a 14- or 15-year-old's friends' list unless they already know either the youth's e-mail address or full name.
Any user will still be able to get a partial profile of younger users by searching for other attributes, such as display name. The difference is that currently, adults can then request to be added to a youth's list to view the full profile; that option will disappear for adults registered as 18 and over.
Of course, adults who prey on children would never be so underhand as to, umm, lie about their age to get better access to information about them would they? Oh, wait.
However, users under 18 can still make such contact, and MySpace has no mechanism for verifying that users submit their true age when registering. That means adults can sign up as teens and request to join a 14-year-old's list of friends, which would enable the full profiles.
The partial profiles display gender, age and city. Full profiles describe hobbies, schools and any other personal details a user may provide.
So, as anyone with half a brain can see, these so-called security measure amount to exactly nothing at all. MySpace has made cosmetic and irrelevant changes to their process without in any way changing the facts. There is a special status for that kind of stuff; its called BS.
2. Technical Glitch Opens Window Into Leak Case
About eight pages of a 51-page government brief filed in federal court in San Francisco on Wednesday were electronically blacked out to protect what prosecutors said was sensitive material concerning a grand jury's investigation into steroid use in baseball.
But the secret passages can be viewed by simply pasting the document into a word processing program. The passages open a window onto a particularly aggressive government leak investigation, one that seeks to force two San Francisco Chronicle reporters to reveal the identity of a confidential source.
Precisely this problem happened in October 2003. Check Tippex on the Monitor. The most interesting part of this is that in both cases the perpetrators committed exactly the same mistake and were employed by the US Justice Department. In two and a half years the departments institutional learning on this most essential part of its information management process has been exactly zero.
Now I think I know why this happened. The vast majority of people who use the technology are blinded, deceived and betrayed by the metaphor of the "page". They create the "page" on their computer, they edit the "page", they print the "page" and, because they have an absolute, 1 to 1 correspondence in their mind that a "page" is what they see and what it IS, and that what they see IS, they attach it to an email and send to the media and make it downloadable from their website.
Which is just another reason that we have to get our slow wits to the point where we really, deeply, understand that digital information is NOT documentary, that its form and format are purely arbitrary and that it exists completely independently of any "view" we may have of it.
And that we lie.
MySpace has committed the same mistake in a slightly different place. They still think that their online tool is a "space", that it has familiar, if differently presented dimensions, that "it" is inhabited by "people" who fill in "forms" that they "sign" and that somehow those "signatures" testify to the veracity of the "people" who fill in the forms. All wrong.
That both groups of people are functionally ignorant of the tools they use is beyond doubt, that the knowledge they need to understand those tools correctly is cheaply, universally available is also true. That their bosses permit them to continue using those tools in ignorance is culpable. And the problem with digital hell is that it is infinitely replicable with no loss of temperature.
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