Robert Pogson

“I recently petitioned Wikipedia to delete this misstatement, along with two others, my interlocutor was told by the “English Wikipedia Administrator”—in a letter dated August 25th and addressed to my interlocutor—that I, Roth, was not a credible source: “I understand your point that the author is the greatest authority on their own work,” writes the Wikipedia Administrator—“but we require secondary sources.””

see An Open Letter to Wikipedia About Anatole Broyard and "The Human Stain" : The New Yorker.

This just goes to show that a community, for all the best of intentions and developing techniques for dealing with all kinds of situations can and does get it rather wrong. They’ve painted themselves into a corner, not trusting anyone but the web… It’s a form of paranoia, fearing real people.

I have encountered this myself. I have contributed to Wikipedia occasionally for years whenever I had some information I felt would improve an article. It used to be that one could just add the information. Now that’s unacceptable to the crowd. Guardians of truth protect each article to the extent they want a link to the web for each sentence. Otherwise, they see it as unsubstantiated. They have thrown the baby out with the bathwater in their intense fear of dirt.

The result is that powerful and well-connected people and organizations can provide all the links they want through “technological evangelization“, astroturfing and other means fair and foul while real people are shut out. The wisdom of the crowd can be replaced by the ignorance of the few.

“seemingly an unlimited number of zero-day exploits”, is how Symantec describes it. The monoculture created by M$ not only allows everyone to be threatened by random encounters with malware, evildoers who target particular businesses or organizations using M$’s OS overcome every defence. The reason Google switched to GNU/Linux was to escape the Wintel treadmill of vulnerabilities.

see 3 years later, hackers who hit Google continue string of potent attacks | Ars Technica.

At the very least the existence of organizations aiming at particular IT systems using the string of vulnerabilities cranked out by M$ should encourage everyone to use a mixture of GNU/Linux and other operating sytems as well as or in place of M$’s. Making yourself a smaller target or camouflage works. Ask any infantryman.

I use Debian GNU/Linux.

Update – The US executive branch is considering an executive order along the lines of the failed bill on cybersecurity. The idea seems to be to wake people and organizations up about the issue. I can see the possibility of renewed interest in desktop GNU/Linux if public knowledge of the cost of monopoly is raised.