The Longest Now


When people abuse communication channels…
Sunday January 25th 2004, 8:41 pm
Filed under: metrics

…everything seems ridiculous.  The problems of “Denial of Service” and “spoofing” have been around since long before there was human-generated electricity… now it’s just cheap and easy to carry one out from across a country. 


What prompted this commentary is SCO’s new letter claiming open-source software is a threat to national security.  So:  who’s really behind their current program?  Do they have an arrangement with MS?  Why is this broad extension of their initial lawsuit a profitable foray for them?  [It would seem much more profitable for a larger company with more to gain — MSFT, a thousand times larger than SCO, seems like a more promising suitor] 


And: if people start publishing sincere meaningless letters, and research papers [prompted, say, by business interests, or for personal fame], and books [propaganda, private vendetta, political or financial gain, sincere delusion], and financial reports, historical documents, resumes, instruction manuals, etc — how can the world react in such a way as to efficiently cull truth from fiction?  In which areas of writing/thought is it possible to perform such a separation?


Presumably, in the presence of a quick cheap metric, one could enact spot checks combined with stiff punishments to probabilistically suppress misleading communications.  Else?  How to leverage distributed community efforts, accounting for 2d- and higher-order errors?  This seems to be a significant problem of universal inliquidity.

When people abuse communication channels… …


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