Flashes of Panic

Ben Hammersley has me pegged:

…you’re a rare beast on the internet. Put it this way, if you know what SSH means, you’re technically a freak. On average. Sorry.

Actually, Ben’s larger point, about the ability to filter out signal from noise on the internet, echoes one made by Neal Stephenson about the separation of people into technical Morlocks and Eloi, but Ben goes one further and suggests that it’s the responsibility of us Morlocks to bring the Eloi up to speed, “lest they drag everyone back with them.”

It’s a generous sentiment, though difficult to put in play; as Stephenson points out, those who aren’t freaks don’t really want to learn. The only way to bring them up is to make filtering easier: make it easy to block pop-ups, stop the spread of viruses, and can spam.

To date, most efforts in that direction have been relatively ineffective; it’s easy to block pop-ups with Mozilla, for instance, but few enough people want to haul their bookmarks/passwords/cookies over to Firefox even though the IE they’re driving is unsafe at any speed. Filtering spam is still done gingerly for fear of incorrectly labeling good mail as spam. Spam filtering and virus protection is something that has to strive for 100% effectiveness. Like antibiotics, there is the danger of surviving microbes evolving into super-parasites.

So, essentially, we need to get it right, or not bother; and, excepting a few valiant souls, most people are in the “not bother” camp.

Now playing: Somebody To Shove from Grave Dancers Union by Soul Asylum