Judge in US v. Google trial didn’t know if Firefox is a browser or search engine::Google accused DOJ of aiming to force people to use “inferior” search products.
Judge in US v. Google trial didn’t know if Firefox is a browser or search engine::Google accused DOJ of aiming to force people to use “inferior” search products.
The judge in question is 51 years old. He’s not quite old enough to be this clueless about basics like the difference between a search engine and a web browser.
Kids often don’t know the difference between “wifi” and the Internet. It’s not an age thing these days.
Since smartphone became a thing it has always been my theory that millenials, and up to a point GenX, would be the only two generations to be forced into being tech-savy. Boomers and GenZ have been overwhelmingly tablet and phone users. Whoever still logging on a PC nowadays will have a vastly different experience than what it used to be.
It is a different world really. I am a huge geek and I have been in tech for a long time now, but I still get confused look at family gathering when I tell them I have no idea how to fix someone’s Ipad or what app/settings/touch gesture to do whatever.
Kids often aren’t explained the difference and if they have been they just don’t understand, wifi IS the internet to them.
A 51 year old Judge has a vastly different brain and should be able to retain the difference when explained.
You’d think they’d notice they can use the internet from their phones when there’s no wifi.
Pretty sure they call cellular data “wifi”.
I’m 46 and I know the difference.
Yeah but your on lemmy so your a write off (and so am I)
Hey there! Don’t want to nitpick, but it is spelled „you‘re“ in your case. „Your“ is used when you‘re talking about possessive attribution. „Your car“ vs „you‘re (you are) driving a car“.
Only a few years older than me. Absolutely not yet old enough to be a boomer.
Yet? How would one turn into a boomer?
Use your favorite search engine (mine is called firefox) to browse the google and connect with your friends on a facebook
We don’t have Facebook is AltaVista okay?
By being born between 1940 and 1955. Now it’s mostly a generalization of “people that are older than me”.
1946 to 1964 actually.
you need to declare it yourself, like possession
Lawmakers and judges should not be allowed to make decisions on something they know nothing about. This is a huge problem with people not even wanting to educate themselves, and then deciding how the rest of us get to interact with the internet.
That being said, Firefox is only popular with tech folk. They have just over a 3% market share. I’m a developer and I don’t know anyone but myself that uses it. My mother would think I was talking about a cartoon if I brought it up. A lot of lemmings use it, but o would not call it a popular example.
Experts are supposed to break it down to them. But yeah, this is a flawed system but I fear the honnest take is that most humans know nothing about most things (even if we’re tempted to believe otherwise), so you’d be running out of avalaible judges real quick.
That’s a fair point. This case is even more complicated, as either the author of the article doesn’t know what they’re talking about, or a word was missing. The article says the judge wasn’t sure if mozilla was a browser or search engine, and Mozilla is neither.
I still hate the confidently incorrect assertions people in charge are making to negatively impact the way the largest and most complete telecommunications and information system works. Just look at facebooks trial where zuck had to explain how the internet works to the people who were deciding if his company was doing something wrong.
Another thing not being considered by all the “judge doesn’t know anything” crowd is that they’re failing to consider that this case isn’t really about search engines or Alphabet as a company.
It’s about monopoly laws. In this case, pertaining to Google and Mozilla, but monopolies nonetheless.
Lots of people of my gen were utterly clueless about computers growing up-- it was arcane nerd shit.
You didn’t have to know how to use a computer until much later in life in a number of careers.
Hell, my university still had rentable typewriters in the library, which still had a physical card catalog (alongside the new computerized one), and we still wrote tests by hand (essay or otherwise). Laptops weren’t a thing. And not everyone had a PC/Mac. The Internet was something most students were oblivious to. The web was only just in its infancy and only the nerds knew about it as a curious novelty. Hell, there wasn’t even DNS back then. Everyone downloaded a “hosts” file.
Even so, I’m still struggling to imagine how a person still doesn’t know the difference between a search engine and a browser, though.
Then again, I suppose some people are just really awful at analytical thinking – understanding how to decompose complex things. Understanding how the parts and pieces work. The people who were really bad at that kind of thing probably would have steered clear of computers as much as possible.
So, ok, maybe if a person avoids computers in undergrad and law school in the 90s then becomes a lawyer, they can just actively avoid computers in their job. That’s one career where maybe that’s possible because, by the time computers become truly ubiquitous, your assistants that can do the computer stuff for you.
I teach a programming class to young adults (18-25, usually) and was flabbergasted last semester when I realized that a couple of them didn’t know what a directory hierarchy/file system was.
My suspicion is that the ease of use angle of “just tell me what you want and I’ll find it” led to this. Not saying ease of use is bad, but I expected more from people wanting to learn programming.
And I’m over here meticulously organizing my music library into folders by band, album, year, etc…o the humanity.
Imo it’s because most of them used crap-ass Chromebooks in school since the US school system is underfunded and allowed Uncle Googs to foot the bill and teach an entire generation the shitty Chrome “OS” is how computers work.
No. It’s phones. Phones hide their file directories.
iPhones do, I can get to them on android
iOS has had a files app that looks very similar to the one on android for at least 5 years. Android had it first, but iPhones do not hide this app. It is installed by default just like on android.