Re: FW: Bashing "Wired"

At 09:32 AM 6/21/96 -0700, you wrote:
>And notice that increasingly the "journalists" are the quoted thinkers and
>strategists in important areas? Someone majors in English, starts writing
>for "Netizen" or "HotWired," and the next thing you know they're debating
>crypto policy with Conrad Burns and Dorothy Denning. We're in an age where
>the medium truly is the message

You don't think the rest of the press is truly any better, do you?
At least on the net, you get to see the horse's mouth on a bad day,
and sometimes you can even meet the people and track down the rumors 
hat eventually become headlines, and pull the wool over your own eyes.

Dorothy Denning may know a lot of mathematics about cryptography, 
but that doesn't make her any more fit to decide what policies the 
government ought to enforce than I am.  She'll get the 
technical details correct far more often than Senator Burns,
as would most people here, but being a trained ethicist would perhaps
be more relevant than being a trained mathematician - it doesn't take
that much technical explanation to know that crypto lets you have
private conversations.


#				Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com
# http://www.idiom.com/~wcs
#				Dispel Authority!

Excerpts from internet.cypherpunks: 22-Jun-96 Re: FW: Bashing "Wired" by
Bill Stewart@ix.netcom.c 
> At 09:32 AM 6/21/96 -0700, Tim May wrote:
> >And notice that increasingly the "journalists" are the quoted thinkers and
> >strategists in important areas? Someone majors in English, starts writing
> >for "Netizen" or "HotWired," and the next thing you know they're debating
> >crypto policy with Conrad Burns and Dorothy Denning. We're in an age where
> >the medium truly is the message
>  
> You don't think the rest of the press is truly any better, do you?
> At least on the net, you get to see the horse's mouth on a bad day,
> and sometimes you can even meet the people and track down the rumors 
> hat eventually become headlines, and pull the wool over your own eyes.

Bashing Wired is, in fact, a bit tired itself. I recommend checking out
<http://www.howtired.com/> for one treatment.

Now I'm no fan of Katz's front-pager -- I thought it maundered about and
was twice as long as it needed to be. But folks who write for Wired like
Jim Warren, Brock Meeks, and Mike Godwin (and Katz) do hang out online,
basically know what's going on, and are approachable.

Somehow, I suspect that cypherpunks aren't Wired's target audience...

-Declan