Re: "Internet's future in 2020 debated"

[Nick FitzGerald <nick () virus-l demon co uk>]

Paul Vixie wrote:

> in <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5370688.stm> we see absolutely no
> mention of the vast permanent floating population of malbots.  it's funny.

> From the second para:

   The Pew report on the future internet surveyed 742 experts in the
   fields of computing, politics and business.

it's obvious where they went wrong...

Note "742 experts", not "742 _leading_ experts" (and would the Pew 
Center know one were it trip over one?).  Everyone in IT is a bleeding 
expert (usually "expert tosser" and mot much else, but I digress).

How many of us were interviewed?

Can we all say "sampling bias"?

A classic case of GIGO...

The media loves to interview folk like Billy Boy about their vision of 
the future based on the utterly (almost necessarily) flawed assumption 
that because someone heads some industry or market leading company they 
"know what's what", and the even more fundamentally flawed asssumption 
that they also "know where things are heading".  (_AND_ they persist in 
this nonsense despite repeated, massive evidence that these folk really 
are not in touch with either what's happening now or what's likely to 
happen in the future.  As an example, Billy Boy was recently given a 
swath of CNN airspace to dribble on about his vision of the future of 
the media and entertainment industries based largely on the fact he 
_is_ Billy Boy.  This is the guy, you may recall, who about a decade 
ago lost several modest-sized African nations' GDPs investing in 
interactive television -- remember that buzzword -- and who a little 
more than 32 months ago totally confidently predicted the end of 80% of 
the Email I'm still receiving (and about 90-99% of all inter-domain 
Email sent) more than eight months past his "Two years from now, spam 
will be solved" claim.  And to bring this back on thread somewhat -- 
none of the components of Billy Boy's proposed set of spam fixes will 
work at all well because of botnets...)


Regards,

Nick FitzGerald

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