THE INTERNET IS INSENSITIVE: I clicked on a CNN.com video about the fire in San Bruno, and I had to wait out a commercial for the Blackberry Torch. Not a joke.
Not related to the ads, but I was surprised last night that there wasn't more live coverage on national tv. Once I heard about it I tried CNN, Headline News, Fox, MSNBC, and whatever other news channels we have, and got nothing. We ended up watching the KGO video on my computer (from here in Portland) while flipping channels. We finally saw a couple minutes on CNN at 10 p.m., though it looks like most of the morning programs picked up the story this morning.
You know how, in order to complete some actions on the web, you need to type in two words that they show in funky font, to make sure you're a real person and not a bot? A year or so ago a (Jewish) friend was presented with the two words in order to complete a ticket purchase or bank transaction. One of the words was "kike."
That's offensive, of course, but not that weird - when you have to type in 2 words, one of them is to verify you're not a bot, and the other is to help clarify a word from a digitized text that was unclear when digitized. So one may often see more old-timey words (and, apparently, racial and ethnic epithets) show up, depending on the text. http://www.google.com/recaptcha/learnmore
Not related to the ads, but I was surprised last night that there wasn't more live coverage on national tv. Once I heard about it I tried CNN, Headline News, Fox, MSNBC, and whatever other news channels we have, and got nothing. We ended up watching the KGO video on my computer (from here in Portland) while flipping channels. We finally saw a couple minutes on CNN at 10 p.m., though it looks like most of the morning programs picked up the story this morning.
ReplyDeleteYou know how, in order to complete some actions on the web, you need to type in two words that they show in funky font, to make sure you're a real person and not a bot? A year or so ago a (Jewish) friend was presented with the two words in order to complete a ticket purchase or bank transaction. One of the words was "kike."
ReplyDeleteThat's offensive, of course, but not that weird - when you have to type in 2 words, one of them is to verify you're not a bot, and the other is to help clarify a word from a digitized text that was unclear when digitized. So one may often see more old-timey words (and, apparently, racial and ethnic epithets) show up, depending on the text.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.google.com/recaptcha/learnmore