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This week, I talked with Dan Russell, a search anthropologist at Google, about the time he spends with random people studying how they search for stuff. One statistic blew my mind. 90 percent of people in their studies don't know how to use CTRL/Command + F to find a word in a document or web page! I probably use that trick 20 times per day and yet the vast majority of people don't use it at all.
"90 percent of the US Internet population does not know that. This is on a sample size of thousands," Russell said. "I do these field studies and I can't tell you how many hours I've sat in somebody's house as they've read through a long document trying to find the result they're looking for. At the end I'll say to them, 'Let me show one little trick here,' and very often people will say, 'I can't believe I've been wasting my life!'"
(Score: 4, Informative) by canopic jug on Monday December 23 2019, @05:59PM
Disabling javascript is not enough any more. There are some CSS-based bariers as well. For now, they can be circumvented in several ways, but with Tim Berners-Lee throwing in with Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) techologies and allowing them inside the official web standards, those work-arounds will soon go away. The fight carry our rights from meat space to the digital realm has suffered several setbacks and this is one of them.
If you want a taste of DRM, not being able copy text from any random part of a web page is just that, a taste of things to come. More of the same is already in the pipeline and will arrive in the next few years unless there is enough pushback. John Perry Barlow is gone. It is up to the rest of us now.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.