NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] Stop Online *Privacy* [sic] Act
Stop Online *Privacy* [sic] Act Just a quickie worth a chuckle perhaps. Several persons mentioned that the quoted text from "Wired" that I included for the new Internet Freedoms group posting mentioned SOPA as the "Stop Online Privacy [not Piracy] Act." And in fact, that's the way the original text read, which I copied and pasted intact (Wired has now fixed it). I note this because I've looked into this specific error in the past, with rather amusing results. Almost all of us who have ever discussed SOPA have probably ourselves made that error at some point, but the degree to which it persists is really quite fascinating. For example, if you conduct a "verbatim" (very handy feature!) Google Search on the quoted string "Stop Online Privacy Act" -- (Google will offer you the corrected version of course, but let's look at the wrong version), you'll currently get something on the order of nearly half a million hits, many at major news sites and other major sites. The correct version gets about 20 times more hits of course, but the wrong version's presence is quite noticeable. Perhaps there may be some deep, philosophical moral here about how we subconsciously internalize the concepts of "piracy" and "privacy" beyond the "sounds-similar" aspects ... but I'm definitely not going to go digging for it today. --Lauren-- Lauren Weinstein (lauren@vortex.com): http://www.vortex.com/lauren Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility: http://www.pfir.org/pfir-info Founder: - Network Neutrality Squad: http://www.nnsquad.org - PRIVACY Forum: http://www.vortex.com/privacy-info - Data Wisdom Explorers League: http://www.dwel.org - Global Coalition for Transparent Internet Performance: http://www.gctip.org Member: ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com Google+: http://vortex.com/g+lauren / Twitter: http://vortex.com/t-lauren Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800 / Skype: vortex.com _______________________________________________ nnsquad mailing list http://lists.nnsquad.org/mailman/listinfo/nnsquad