On 4/27/05, Owen DeLong <owen@delong.com> wrote:

I was referring to the article which contained the schneier quote, not schneier. The article was written by someone at least pretending to be a journalist, and, was put out as news, not editorial or advertising.

As such, it should be held to the standard that should apply to news. Instead, it was yet another example of advertising disguised as news.

The standards of technology journalism involve writing about many different things you don't know much about, and sometimes a few that you do, and getting lots of press releases that were written by PR people who might or might not understand what the companies they're writing for are making, and trying to make it interesting enough that you sell enough advertising while meeting your deadlines. Often it gets better than this, and some journalists are really good, but often it doesn't, and sometimes they're doing well to spell the names right and pick the most relevant couple of sentences to quote. The standards for non-technology journalism are pretty similar - the big differences are that in fields you know something about, you're able to recognize bad fact-checking and lack of insight, and you might know some of the important things that got left out, whereas in non-technical journalism, such as political reporting, you might not know enough about what really occurred or who the people are who are getting quoted/interviewed to recognize bad fact-checking or differentiate between organized propaganda campaigns and naive me-too reporting. So be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what parts of it you actually believe, and try to differentiate between people who have strong opinions vs people who are just being self-serving. I thought the VNUnet article was reasonable for something that short - it hit a couple of issues, and quoted at least one other person who had a somewhat different perspective. On the other hand, most of the other news articles reported on Schneier's criticism of the overuse of terms like "cyber-terrorism" by self-promoting or agency-agenda-promoting people. ---- Thanks; Bill Note that this isn't my regular email account - It's still experimental so far. And Google probably logs and indexes everything you send it.