h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A602867

Please take a look at my article.
Thanks

-Slartyweb

Great idea for an article, and it starts off really nicely with extremely valid comments about barriers of age, sex and social status being removed by the net. Trouble is that the article then starts to get a bit sinister and takes on a bit of a tone of vengeance, as if anyone who was picked on at school (surely that would be most people to some degree) can go out and exact revenge on their tormentors by tricking them out of loads of cash. Hmm, first dig two graves as they say.

I didn't get the bit about the dodgy terms and conditions either. Which country are we talking about here? Sounds like an urban legend if ever there was one. Consumers - know your rights!

Anyway, it's still a good idea. How about some more positive stuff - the ability to get hold of practically any CD, video, book etc at lower prices than the 'High Street' (the what?). The ability to create a web site about any obscure subject you like, for no money, have it visible to the whole world within seconds and find that other people somewhere have the same interest. And loads of other stuff I can't think of right now. Go for it.

Okay Dokey, i'll do an update soon. =)

I've updated it

How about changing the title "Stress" to "Home Working" then weigh up the advantages and disadvantages of working at home through the Internet - eg. ad = flexible hours, no child care needed dis = isolated, added stress with more pressure from work.

It might also be a good idea to have a conclusion section where you sum up the two opposing view points of the Internet - general ways it may help society and general problems it may cause.

Good luck!

Updated it again

first, a picky point. the bit about porn on the web needs to say more than just "see article A???????".
even a paragraph with the link would do.

Another thing, you seem to have neglected to mention that a major advantage of the net is that it replaces authority by position with authority by knowledge. this means that anyone who knows their stuff has just as much credibility as someone who has the piece of paper to say so.

I *really* like that home working section now!

Okay i've updated it according to your feedback xvroth

The pornography bit is much better, but how about changing the link to be pornography in that section.

The point about the balance of power change is not that the people who have authority by position lose some of their power, but that anyone can get to that position via knowledge. for example, in a recent survey of the best legal advice on the web, a fifteen year old boy managed to come in the top 200, purely by virtue of the knowledge of the law he had aquired from watching and reading lots of crime fiction. This knowledge (combined with some common sense) then allowed him to know exactly how to advise people with serious legal problems.

Done

The section titled "The Balace of Power" feels a bit off, somehow. It kind of implies all sorts of things that aren't particularly accurate, pandering to stereotypes and hype rather than being accurate.

For example, how exactly were you planning on destroying a £1000 computer remotely? You can do a lot of damage to *data*, formatting disks and suchlike, and cause much inconvenience, but permanently damaging hardware isn't possible. It's also slightly problematic to lump together 'advanced computer users, Geeks, Nerds, Dwebs, Hackers' in a single group.

> "This can even become legal when new users are tricked into accepting terms of agreements allowing Geeks to infect with viruses or enter peoples' computers legally"

Do you happen to have any evidence of this actually happening? Not something I've heard of, certainly, and I can't see that it'd be legal either.

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The section on pornography... slightly over the top, perhaps. Porn sites don't 'dominate' the web, but they do form a significant chunk of it, just as they form a significant chunk of magazines and of TV. And there are plenty of non-porn sites which make serious money out of the web.

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In general, though, this is a good, pretty well-balanced entry. It makes a lot of thought-provoking points, and I'm sure that it will create a lot of discussion when it gets onto the front page!

I see what you mean about the balance of power section. The reason it feels wrong is because there are two sections tied together into a mamoth paragraph, butwhich have totaly different feels. this needs splitting into at least two paragraphs, and then improving to not be as incompatable.

The link to the pornography review would look better if you linked via one of the existing instances of the word pornography, rather than as a seperate comment at the end of the section. Also, as lucinda says, porn sites don't dominate the web. however I think that what you meant was that they are one of the most prominent sections of the web, as they seem incapable of being discrete.

As regards destroying a £1000+ computer, I can think of quite a few way to do it by overdriving the hardware (which can be done from software), but I don't think it would be wise to mention the details. However it is incredibly simple to destroy irreplacable data, which can result in (and has) businesses going bust because they cannot recover esential info like how much money company XXX needs to pay them.

As regards lumping advanced copmputer users and the rest together, you can do this simple by mentioning the advanced users, but these people were only there first. It just means that they have up to twenty years more experience of seeing what is possible, and are thus better able to exploit the technology. anyone else can become an advanced computer user quite simply, they just need to learn stuff.

Thankyou for backing be up on the damage hardware

Try searching for "Cool Bikes" or something and see how many porn sites come up. Try typing in a domain that seems complety fine, it will probaballty be a porn site. Look at [URL removed by moderator] it's a porn site and it's designed to get users who miss speall h2g2 to go there. That is why i think porn sites dominate. The underground of the internet is paid for by porn sites, look how many adverts you get on a no cd program site.

I'll re do the balance of power thing soon, i'll wait for your replies before updating the porn section.

Lucinda, yes i do have evidence of the terms and conditions allowing advanced computer users to planet viruses on people's computers.

Rescently Real Networks was court red handed putting 'spyware' on users computers. Whenever someone downloaded Real player, hidden in the massive terms and conditions was a clause allowing Real Networks to place spyware on the user's computers. Spyware is a small program, usually a .dll which tracks what sites you go to, what ads you click on and what programs you have on your computer.

Advanced computer users can use the means by putting their viruses into freeware and shareware programs found on the net and then having massive terms and conditions (that frankly no body can be arsed to read) which contain a clause giving them permissiont to put the virus on.

Well, most modern hardware and O/Ses have safeguards against you overdriving the hardware - monitors will blink off if you try to set the refresh rate too high, hard disks no longer need to be parked, etcetera. You could probably destroy an old computer, perhaps five years back, but then that wouldn't be worth £1000, would it? However, possibly I am mislead on this, so I'll drop the issue happilly enough.

I would mention that damage to data is *far* more important than damage to the hardware. The word 'inconvenience' in my earlier post was understating the case a fair bit.

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Regarding porn... well, it's partly a matter of perception, isn't it? But there are specific comments you make which I see as definately wrong, though they were probably right five years ago:

> "Pornography sites are the only web sites that actually make serious money on the internet"

There definately *are* sites making serious money out of the web which aren't porn sites. For EG, There is a book called "Strikingitrich.com: Profiles of 23 Incredibly Successful Websites You've Probably Never Heard Of" ; by Jaclyn Easton, Jeff Bezos (Foreword) ; ISBN: 0071355790 which lists 23 such sites just for starters. It has a website of its own if you want to have a look for yourself at what they are. Words like 'only' are always dangerous.

> "The internet is dominated by domain names with a sexual nature owned by pornography web sites that charge a small entry fee"

'Domination', for me, implies more than 50%, which just isn't the case. If you're looking at domain names, you have to consider cyber-squatters, companies protecting intellectual copyright, et al. Then there's all the personal websites with pictures of someone's cat, all the company websites, and the rest.

Obviously, what we need here are actual statistics - they do exist, I know, but I can't seem to find them, and I certainly don't want to rely on my dodgy memory...

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regarding T&Cs, spyware is most definately *not* a virus. Viruses are transmissable, whereas the sort of stuff that RealNetworks did only affected you when you used their software, hence not a virus. You *might* get away with calling them trojans, but even that is probably over-egging the cake. The spyware did not allow them to 'enter your computer', which really implies full access, it just sent some key pieces of information. For marketing purposes, as I recall.

If you deliberately infect a program with an actual virus and distribute it online, then you are breaking the law. Contracts, such as those found in T&Cs, have to be fair and reasonable in every country I know about, and allowing a word processor to format disks would not be. In practice, prosecution might be difficult, as you would have to prove intent or gross negligence, but legally it seems to me to be pretty cut and dried.

OKay fine, lot's of comments here but your not *helping* me with this article your just making me remove large parts of it. Please tell me what i should write about instead, or how should i rephrase it?

It seems like you know your stuff so i won't argue, I've hacked into my own LAN loads of times to see it's securiy flaws and i have blown up a few processors via trojan clocking for a laugh (old 486s) but their are probally safe guards on the net.

Well, I'm certainly not making you do anything: I'm just a researcher like yourself - I'm not even a volunteer.

Write about what you like, really. The topics you've chosen are certainly appropriate, interesting, and you'll get a lot of discussion out of them. More easily available pornography is certainly an effect of the internet on society, and you are quite right to bring it up, though I feel scaling down the language might be a good idea. I still think some stats would be a good idea, if you can find any.

Regarding crackers and such... I'm not sure how much of an impact they have *on society*, which is what you're article is about. I don't feel intimidated by crackers, nor do I feel they have much actual power. Maybe that's just me, or maybe I'm misunderstanding what you are trying to say? The general employability of 'geeks' I'd say is much more an effect of the rise of the computer, rather than the internet specifically.

Other topics... well, there's the loss of privacy associated with spyware and cookies and similar things, which you touch briefly on. That's certainly worth a big mention. Then there's the whole 'information wants to be free' thing - open source, piracy, napster, that kind of thing.

Anywho, I'll leave this conversation alone for a little while, see who else comments, and what they say. Like I say, this is a really thought-provoking topic, so you shouldn't be short of help...

Up to a point, you're right. There are too many factual objections to your piece, and not enough practical advice about how to express yourself. But you're wrong to think that cutting things out is not helping you. Really, the secret of good writing is good editing - lots of cutting out.


I'll just give a small example from the second paragraph, which begins, "In a real life situation the majority of people....." Now that word "situation" is not just a waste of space, its effect is actually more subtly destructive. Like its sister-word, "environment", it's one you hear all the time from people who talk on automatic-pilot, llke politicians or PR people. They'll say "In the classroom situation" or "in an office environment", when all they mean is "in the classroom" or "in an office". They just don't like plain English. But writers shouldn't copy them. Words like those are pudding words, designed to bulk up a sentence and make the speaker sound educated, whereas their actual effect on the reader, largely sub-conscious, is to make them think "oh, burble, burble, burble". Cutting out pudding words will make all your sentences pack a bigger punch. "In real life" is a more effective phrase than "In a real life situation".

A second point: writers should always scan their sentences for alternative meanings. The second sentence of the first paragraph needs revision.

"The Internet has also changed the way society treats people and the balance of power."

On first reading, I see society treating people and I see them treating the balance of power. A micro-second later, I realize I've made a mistake. You mean the internet has changed the way society treats people and it's also changed the balance of power. The structure of your sentence made me, the reader, connect the phrase "balance of power" with the word "treats" instead of the word "changed". Okay, what's a wasted micro-second? Well, it's one pin-prick of annoyance that could add up to a lot over a whole article. Forcing your reader to go back and read sentences twice is something to be avoided. If I had to rewrite that sentence, I think I would put it like this: "The Internet has also changed the way society treats people, and it has shifted the balance of power."


Is that more the type of thing you were looking for?

I tried to do some research about the dominance of pornography on the web, but when I typed "domination" and "pornography" into a search engine I got... well, REALLY!

Anyway, this article has got to be published one way or another. It's a great topic. Regarding the possible damage which can be done by hackers/crackers and whether it's being over-emphasised: has anyone heard of 'httpcity'? Kind of like Geocities, hosting all sorts of personal sites of varying levels of interest. Couple of weeks ago they were hacked and all data was wiped off their servers. They had no back up. I lost a couple of very minor sites (and had my own back-up anyway) but it must have had a major effect on a lot of users. People put a hell of a lot of work into these sites, not just in design and coding but in factual research and creative writing. In many cases, I'm sure that kind of work at a university would result in a degree at least. That's a lot of damage done.

Don't give up on the article. Just keep refining for a couple of weeks and it's bound to get through to publication. Best of luck.