'This sort of item is totally unnecessary and totally cool.'—Posted on Wired.com by DAN1101 re: Ray Ozzie____Well, now we know which readers we want reviewing our parole board applications. It turns out that you really can divide the world into two classes of people: Those who think companies can change, who trust that under the leadership of Ray Ozzie, the Microsoft machine can become less of a behemoth and more of a pixie. And others who think "once a villain, always a villain." Unlucky for Microsoft, most readers fall into the latter category. Lucky for us, we have a good lawyer.
Bad Connections
Feedback
December story topics that attracted the most reader response. Two articles in your December issue have connotations that connect them to each other: The piece on Microsoft and cloud computing ("Ray Ozzie Has a Plan") and the one on Dan Kaminsky's discovery of the flaw in the domain-name system ("Collapse!") combine to form a very loud warning. Ask any war strategist about the concentration of assets and the stupidity of cloud data storage is evident. It is a bad thing. There's a war going on between hackers and the Web; the more concentrated the data, the more attractive the target—and the higher the payoff for the compromise of its security.
Another tenet of war is that the defense always falls behind the offense. It's going to be a while before Web security is perfect, if ever. Until then, concentrations of data are at risk. Cloud concentrations are dumb.
Give me "local host" anytime!
David Sannella
Brooklyn, New York
---
How could the DNS and the computer security communities keep this massive vulnerability secret and not offer the info to the FBI ("Collapse!")? The potential for a crash was huge. Isn't there any moral or social obligation to reveal this to so-called "authorities"?
Gerard Whelan
St. John's, Newfoundland
WoW Factors
If you liked our tale of Brock Pierce and the rise and fall of IGE, the company that sold virtual currency to gamers ("The Kingpin of Azeroth," issue 16.12), chances are you don't spend a whole lot of time conducting raids with your guild in online universes. Because while n00b readers thought it was an "amazing, informative" story, hardcore gamers wanted us to get over Pierce already and "focus on the real issues plaguing both pro-RMT and anti-RMT players." We'll get right on that.
Office Economy
Dow Jones Industrial Average
Hours per day we spent flattering our boss* * The editor in chief says three hours is optimal for layoff protection. Note to selfs: Pick up Chris' laundry on Monday.
An MMORPG's only value is that it kills time. Only an idiot is going to pay cash to get a big virtual sword, and thus a bigger e-penis.
The change IGE helped usher in may have been inevitable, but it's still quite negative. At least now many companies are selling the currency for their own games. This means they can reinvest that money into the game itself, which adds value to the experience for everyone, making up for the uneven playing field.
Excerpted from a comment posted on Wired.com by Stromko
---
I was a "6 boxer" back in the day in EverQuest. I was worth tens of millions of platinum. I was in it for a good time—and to actually earn the right to wear the gear I possessed. To see people taking advantage of others in the way Pierce did makes me sick. It ruined the economy and, most important, tainted the gaming experience by providing so-called players "easy" ways to acquire "things" that they actually did not earn the right to don.
I applaud Blizzard for taking action, long overdue, to crush these markets.
Excerpted from a comment posted on Wired.com by Grue
---
Jumping to Conclusions
What a sinister question you published in Mr. Know-It-All (issue 16.12). The reader was upset by the presence on someone else's laptop of material they supposed might be offensive to them. My bookshelf includes Mein Kampf, Manifesto of the Communist Party, Why I Am Not a Christian, the Quran, the Talmud, the Bible, and about a thousand other books. So how would you classify me? Presuming someone's opinions from the literature and media they consume is very dangerous.
Nick Beard
Seattle, Washington
---
Mr. Know-It-All does not! In your December issue he should have written: "I like to know whom I'm dealing with."
Ellie Dupuis
East Bridgewater, Massachusetts
Whom is an archaic pronoun, pedantic and fussy, but it's occasionally dusted off and deployed to priss up a sentence. Most modern grammarians agree that in informal writing who may replace whom when it starts a clause, as in the example cited—and these are the language experts with whom Wired agrees. —Jennifer Prior, Wired copy chief
---
Lost and Found
The back page of our magazine is called "Found: Artifacts From the Future." It's pretty popular—so much so that when it went on hiatus a while back, there was a reader uprising and we quickly reinstated it. The page is meant as a satirical snapshot of a theoretical future, but evidently not everyone gets the joke. After we published the December issue's Found on Wired.com, the befuddled got to grousing and our defenders set them straight. The conversation went like this:
Shame on you—the American flag is backward.
by benka
I don't suppose you or anyone else there knows China already has stock exchanges of its own.
by BBnet3000
What are the editors smoking? To believe that by 2013 China will take over the US is stupid. Stop being so negative. Isn't the purpose of a magazine or news program solely for the purpose of giving an account of an event that actually happened?
by plyreliant85
It is crap articles like this that inflame the average consumer's fears and will eventually lead to the disintegration of the economy.
by kaikunane
This article is meant to be a joke! BBnet and Plyreliant, you two are retarded. Leave wired now. K thx!
by bhaberle
It's a vision of a possible future, not the warnings of Nostradamus. Get a grip, people. Time machine futures? Scratch and win 401(k)? Please, if you can't take a joke...
by Makabriel
Thanks for the laugh, Wired. I've never heard so many butthurt Americans whining at once.
by shizuka
---
Shall We Play a Game?
Bastard robots took our jobs, and now they're going for our hotel comps ("Ante Up, Human: The Adventures of Polaris, the Poker-Playing Robot," issue 16.12)!
From a comment posted on Wired.com by lando35mm
---
Ad Nauseum
Television is 33 percent advertising (20 minutes out of 60). wired is 56 percent advertising (130 pages out of 235). FWIW.
Tracy Valleau
Marina, California
Hi, Tracy! We know that some readers don't like having to flip through advertisements to get to our stories. Those ads pay the bills and salaries, however, so we're unlikely to turn them away. We take slight issue with your metrics, though. Say you don't have TiVo and you really spend 33 percent of your tube time learning that there's a sale on at Penney's. If you figure that it takes, oh, 5 minutes to read a full page of text and 5 seconds to scan the adjacent ad, that's about 9 hours of reading time for about 11 minutes of ad perusal. What's that ratio, about 2 percent? Seems pretty good to us.
P.S.: Advertisers, please do not read this note.
Onion Royale
All one needs to know the future is a subscription to The Onion and the 007 movie collection.
From a comment posted on Wired.com by Shonda
---
Point. Taken.
In your December issue, you categorize "Can of whup-ass" as Tired on page 28 and then proceed to use the phrase in the Playlist entry about the Natural Disaster Feed. Come on, I'd think Wired would use only the up-to-date language you deem cool.
If I were you, I'd throw a bag of hurt at whoever wrote Playlist.
Brenner Spear
West Linn, Oregon
Posted on Wired.com by dan1101
Microsoft Words
Pleeezzze give me a break. Microsoft has shown that it can't be anything but second-rate ("Ray Ozzie Has a Plan," issue 16.12). A restart would only subject humanity to more of the same. A great die-off is best for dinosaurs.
Excerpted from a comment posted on Wired.com by Darwufche
---
Personally, I'm glad to see Microsoft attempting to evolve. It's been relatively stagnant since Windows XP, but now with the threat of Google, it's finally looking at what it's doing. Does it expect to make a profit? Absolutely. But if it can deliver a compelling product that provides a real benefit, then I don't mind.
Excerpted from a comment posted on Wired.com by coldwave007
---
I'm getting so fed up with executives wanting their large corporations to act like startups. What are you gonna do? Lock your employees in a garage with a dialup modem? Give each employee 5 percent equity? And here's a piece of news for you, Ray: Most startups fail in the first five years. Good luck.
Excerpted from a comment posted on Wired.com by LightningUX
---
Pfff. Microsoft is great because Microsoft is big, and it's fine like that. Nobody wants a reboot. People who want an easy ride and relative power buy Macs. I do. People who need basic and cheap computers to stack in a closet, use as servers, and do most office chores buy PCs and Windows. We all use Google for our Web searches, and most everyone is happy.
Excerpted from a comment posted on Wired.com by louis
---
Numbers Racket
Remember those imposing metal numbers we used as props to accompany the wares in the December Wish List? Well, getting those big, shiny digits into the office was not as easy as 1, 2, 3. We wanted the numbers to match one of the fonts we use, so we called dozens of fabricators, sign makers, and metal shops looking for someone who could produce them for us in just a few days. One Oakland-based artist was up for the challenge, and after a few setbacks (lilliputian samples and unpolished prototypes), she delivered the 18-inch-high, 5-inch-deep brushed-aluminum digits just in time for the photo shoot.
---
Kaminsky, Three Ways
Our story on Dan Kaminsky's discovery of an Internet Domain Name Server flaw ("Collapse!" issue 16.12) hit the stands about the same time as similar pieces in IEEE Spectrum and Technology Review. Test your reading comprehension (and attention span) with this quiz.
- 1. Match the quote to the magazine.
- a) "I realized the scope of this pretty quickly."
- b) "My stomach dropped, I thought, What the heck am I going to do about this?"
- c) "Oh shit. I just broke the Internet."
- 2. Match the reference to the magazine.
- a) The Lord of the Dance
- b) Mother Teresa
- c) The Pwnie for pwning the media
- 3. Which magazine(s) mentions:
- a) The cookies Kaminsky's grandmother baked for the Black Hat conference
- b) The number of cookies baked
- c) The type of cookie baked
Rollover here for anwer...
