www.nickhodge.com

Sen­sa­tion­al­ist Titles

“Router crashes blamed on Win­dows XP SP3” rings the alarm bells of Aus­tralian Per­sonal Com­puter. Thanks Dan Warne, now every owner of a router (that is, every­one con­nec­ted to the Inter­net) is going to blame SP3 for weird inter­net issues.

Does this mean there is a series bug in XP SP3? Do all routers have this issue?

A con­cerned net­izen, and Win­dows XP SP3 user: I click on the link and read the article.

 

Journ­al­ism Fail.

Bil­lion, a premiuim brand of home ADSL inter­net router which I per­son­ally own, evan­gel­ise and enjoy, is blam­ing Win­dows XP SP3 for crash­ing one series of their routers.

Accord­ing to Billion’s doc­u­ment­a­tion (22^nd May 2008) on this issue,

Win­dows XP SP3 uses Option 43 data in its DHCP packet; and Option 43 was not com­pat­ible with Billion’s Ori­ginal defintion.

Fur­ther research into DHCP, and this “Option 43” using the industry’s spe­cific­a­tion, the Request-for-Comments (RFC) and spe­cific­ally RFC 2132.

RFC 2132 details Option 43 in sec­tion 8.4 of the spe­cific­a­tion, a spe­cific­a­tion last updated in March 1997. 11 years ago.

In other words, Bil­lion routers were not fully com­pli­ant with an 11 year old spe­cific­a­tion; or at min­imum not tested in accord­ance with the RFC.

My con­ten­tion is that the sen­sa­tion­al­ist title should read: “Bil­lion 5200-series Routers need Firm­ware Upgrade for Full DHCP Com­pat­ib­il­ity”

 

Advert­ising Win.

The sep­ar­a­tion between edit­or­ial and advert­ising does not exist on the Inter­net. Truth in titles does not attract eye-balls, and more import­antly, ad click-through stats.

Truth in titles, usu­ally the domain of the little-talked about subed­itor (known as copy-editor in Wiki­pe­dia), is the key to online read­er­ship in a dark-art called SEO. Search Engine Optimisation.

Secondly, as con­tex­tual advert­ising sys­tems such as Adsense (sense is the oper­at­ive part of online news­peak) is tied to the con­tent of the story, ensur­ing a title that res­ults in a series of highly valu­able advert­ise­ments is para­mount. In this example, writ­ing a bland story on DHCP, Bil­lion and Option 43 will prob­ably res­ult in niche books such as Douglas Comer’s appearing.

In both instances, the edit­or­ial side of the tra­di­tional chinese wall is broken. The pre­cepts of truth and inde­pend­ence in journ­al­ism online are diminishing.

 

A Call

Come on, journ­al­ists (and subed­it­ors) We do not want this fledgling world of Inter­net journ­al­ism to be fur­ther sullied.

And a call out to the online advert­ising engine com­munity. Time to move bey­ond algorithmic big con­tex­tual text engines. The money behind these engines is cor­rupt­ing journalism.

And for APC, please stop throw­ing fake rocks at Microsoft. By all means, blame us for when we do wrong. But the con­stant hail­storm of neg­at­iv­ity hides the res­on­ant truth.

8^th June Fol­lowup:

• This story has hit Techmeme
• Slashdot.org is sur­pris­ingly even-handed in com­ments.  (for the record, my Slash­dot ID is 79314)
• And other non-researched blog entries fol­low. (read the links from the ori­ginal art­icle, research please!)