Honestly, I’m a software developer and I still don’t get why all this mocking is necessary.
What did the NYT do wrong, or in a tech-illiterate manner in this article? Admit that not everyone reading the article knows what all these tools are?
Let’s look at all these quoted tweets mocking the article. #1:
Matt Blaze joked about the fact that children (children!) might download wget:
This has nothing to do with the article. #2:
Snowden, a $120k a year sys admin, knowing how to use web scraping tools, is like a chef knowing how to use a vegetable peeler. Not A1 news.
Exactly. That’s why it’s interesting. To quote the article itself:
The findings are striking because the N.S.A.’s mission includes protecting the nation’s most sensitive military and intelligence computer systems from cyberattacks, especially the sophisticated attacks that emanate from Russia and China. Mr. Snowden’s “insider attack,” by contrast, was hardly sophisticated and should have been easily detected, investigators found.
Ok, mock #3:
NYT: ‘Snowden used “web crawler” software to “scrape” NSA networks…’
The gardener used a “lawn mower” to “mow” the lawn.
The two are not equivalent. The first is jargon that most non-tech literate (probably the majority of the US) aren’t expected to know off-hand. The second is non-jargon and is something every adult knows.
And… wait, that’s it? Those three things are all it takes to call the Times “technologically illiterate?”
That’s completely stupid. Does no one actually understand the difference between the Times being technologically illiterate, and the Times recognizing that the majority of adults aren’t familiar with these technologies? Does everyone on the internet have a false-consensus bias and think that all of America is just like themselves? Oh wait, we knew the answer to that one already.
Hmmm… Have we mocked Ars Technica for being technologically illiterate yet?
Wget can be and is often used to set up “mirror” websites. ([arstechnica:
NSA let Snowden crawl all over its intranet unchecked][1])
Guffaw… ‘A photocopier is often used to create “duplicate” copies…’ How stupid can this ‘arse technica’ site be…?
[1]: NSA let Snowden crawl all over its intranet unchecked | Ars Technica
