Judge in US v. Google trial didn’t know if Firefox is a browser or search engine
Judge in US v. Google trial didn’t know if Firefox is a browser or search engine
Google accused DOJ of aiming to force people to use “inferior” search products.
Judge in US v. Google trial didn’t know if Firefox is a browser or search engine::Google accused DOJ of aiming to force people to use “inferior” search products.
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The judge in question is 51 years old. He’s not old enough to be this clueless about basics like the difference between a search engine and a web browser and popular examples of each.
I teach a programming class to young adults (18-25, usually) and was flabbergasted last semester when I realized that a couple of them didn't know what a directory hierarchy/file system was.
My suspicion is that the ease of use angle of "just tell me what you want and I'll find it" led to this. Not saying ease of use is bad, but I expected more from people wanting to learn programming.
And I'm over here meticulously organizing my music library into folders by band, album, year, etc...o the humanity.
There's a subgroup of the millennial and gen X that grew up with a sweet spot of computers such that you actually need to know how it works in order to use one effectively. Ease enough to do a lot of fun stuff, hard enough that it encourages learning the technical minutiae. The rise of smart phones and net/chrome books means there is a huge chunk of population that has a superficial and passing relationship with tech. It's big buttons or else it doesn't register with them. It's not their fault, the pursue of usability and fool proofing without actually giving tools to dig deep when necessary means they have less exposure to the underlying tech. Thus are less familiar with how things work. It's an universal phenomenon, I would bet most people have no clue how to raise, grow and process food, but still we don't starve, we go to the grocery and buy what's there already cleaned, processed and packaged. There are huge advantages to understanding the chain of production of food, but I'd guess most people would struggle in an agronomy class about what's a compost bin.
100% agree. Great description that dives into particulars of what I hand waved at.
As one of those people who didn't understand what file systems and directories were at 18, it isn't taught in early school so you don't notice it is a thing that exists until you stumble upon it yourself. I distinctly remember the day it clicked and it felt like I had had an epiphany.
Once you break that basic barrier then you rely on your interests to take you further. I went from not understanding that to being a Linux guru in years time, so I fully believe if the desire to learn is there, it will happen. It is just not mandatory to learn anymore. So most people don't.
This is a fan-fucking-tastic article! Thanks bud.
And I'm over here meticulously organizing my music library into folders by band, album, year, etc...o the humanity.
beets, it's a life changer
A music folder is like a zen garden. Where's the zen in automating it all?
Kids often don't know the difference between "wifi" and the Internet. It's not an age thing these days.
Since smartphone became a thing it has always been my theory that millenials, and up to a point GenX, would be the only two generations to be forced into being tech-savy. Boomers and GenZ have been overwhelmingly tablet and phone users. Whoever still logging on a PC nowadays will have a vastly different experience than what it used to be.
It is a different world really. I am a huge geek and I have been in tech for a long time now, but I still get confused look at family gathering when I tell them I have no idea how to fix someone's Ipad or what app/settings/touch gesture to do whatever.
Kids often aren’t explained the difference and if they have been they just don’t understand, wifi IS the internet to them.
A 51 year old Judge has a vastly different brain and should be able to retain the difference when explained.
You'd think they'd notice they can use the internet from their phones when there's no wifi.
If it’s not connected to a cord, it’s wifi. Now try and explaining those nuances to them that there’s more than one-type of wireless signal.
Wifi is easier and simpler. Sometime I find myself making the mistake…
In construction there’s a similar issue (with grown men even). A circular saw is the tool, but everyone calls it a skilsaw, which is a brand name. You can correct them, they just don’t care, that’s what the tool is called, a skilsaw.
I hold out hope they'll figure out the difference when they have to pay for separate subscriptions for cellular data and home internet service.
Some places have mobile (cellular and internet) and home internet, so that’s not likely to help some people.
But is this like Kleenex?
TIL skilsaw was a brand name. I thought it just just the guy making Doom maps.
Pretty sure they call cellular data “wifi”.
Or you’d think it would also be very easy to demonstrate you can be on wifi and not on the internet.
Lawmakers and judges should not be allowed to make decisions on something they know nothing about. This is a huge problem with people not even wanting to educate themselves, and then deciding how the rest of us get to interact with the internet.
That being said, Firefox is only popular with tech folk. They have just over a 3% market share. I’m a developer and I don’t know anyone but myself that uses it. My mother would think I was talking about a cartoon if I brought it up. A lot of lemmings use it, but o would not call it a popular example.
Experts are supposed to break it down to them. But yeah, this is a flawed system but I fear the honnest take is that most humans know nothing about most things (even if we're tempted to believe otherwise), so you'd be running out of avalaible judges real quick.
That’s a fair point. This case is even more complicated, as either the author of the article doesn’t know what they’re talking about, or a word was missing. The article says the judge wasn’t sure if mozilla was a browser or search engine, and Mozilla is neither.
I still hate the confidently incorrect assertions people in charge are making to negatively impact the way the largest and most complete telecommunications and information system works. Just look at facebooks trial where zuck had to explain how the internet works to the people who were deciding if his company was doing something wrong.
That just...seems so wrong. My mentally declining grandmother used firefox back in the 00s era (though now that I think about it, my uncle is a developer, so maybe he set up the computer). How have we backslid since then to where so few people know/use firefox?
Actually yes. Around 2010 Firefox still had like 60% market share. Now, chrome dominates the market and Firefox is in single digits. Chrome gives you so many conveniences, and only a small amount of people care about what you give up for those conveniences. “My data isn’t important. Who cares about what I do?” Is a common response to data mining and sharing.
Most people don’t want to put the time and effort into researching these things. Most people just don’t have the energy.
But again if you don’t know anything about a topic you are asked to make a decision on, you should recuse yourself. It’s unfortunate that most people making decisions about tech know very little about it.
Another thing not being considered by all the "judge doesn't know anything" crowd is that they're failing to consider that this case isn't really about search engines or Alphabet as a company.
It's about monopoly laws. In this case, pertaining to Google and Mozilla, but monopolies nonetheless.
Only a few years older than me. Absolutely not yet old enough to be a boomer.
Yet? How would one turn into a boomer?
Use your favorite search engine (mine is called firefox) to browse the google and connect with your friends on a facebook
We don't have Facebook is AltaVista okay?
I was thinking of cancelling my Internet service, I only use the facebooks and sometimes emails I don't use the Internet anymore.
-my mom.
I have heard of this social media called MSN Messenger but it doesn't seem available on the AOL? I don't see it, anyway. Maybe I should just email Bill Gate?
No, you should be using Fark.
When you start posting searches in your Facebook status.
"Mysterious purple spot on butt cheek"
By being born between 1940 and 1955. Now it’s mostly a generalization of “people that are older than me”.
1946 to 1964 actually.
Post second war indeed. I knew something was off.
you need to declare it yourself, like possession
OK boomer (someone had to say it)
I'm 46 and I know the difference.
Yeah but your on lemmy so your a write off (and so am I)
Hey there! Don’t want to nitpick, but it is spelled „you‘re“ in your case. „Your“ is used when you‘re talking about possessive attribution. „Your car“ vs „you‘re (you are) driving a car“.
As long as we're nitpicking, in English, we only use the upper quotation marks, e.g. "you're".
That’s good to know, thank you! I‘ll try to keep it in mind from now on.
Wait, you actually didn't know? No judgement, I'm just surprised.
The other thing you might want to know is that if you want to get fancy and use different opening and closing quotation marks, they curve the opposite way to what you're used to, “like this.”
I did at some point, but I keep mixing it up with my native language rule for quotations. I study both german and english language and should actually know better, lol. The rules of written language are fascinating to me, so I appreciate any corrections!
Lots of people of my gen were utterly clueless about computers growing up-- it was arcane nerd shit.
You didn't have to know how to use a computer until much later in life in a number of careers.
Hell, my university still had rentable typewriters in the library, which still had a physical card catalog (alongside the new computerized one), and we still wrote tests by hand (essay or otherwise). Laptops weren't a thing. And not everyone had a PC/Mac. The Internet was something most students were oblivious to. The web was only just in its infancy and only the nerds knew about it as a curious novelty. Hell, there wasn't even DNS back then. Everyone downloaded a "hosts" file.
Even so, I'm still struggling to imagine how a person still doesn't know the difference between a search engine and a browser, though.
Then again, I suppose some people are just really awful at analytical thinking -- understanding how to decompose complex things. Understanding how the parts and pieces work. The people who were really bad at that kind of thing probably would have steered clear of computers as much as possible.
So, ok, maybe if a person avoids computers in undergrad and law school in the 90s then becomes a lawyer, they can just actively avoid computers in their job. That's one career where maybe that's possible because, by the time computers become truly ubiquitous, your assistants that can do the computer stuff for you.