** UPDATE **
I’m a moron. Please disregard this post. I’d delete it if I didn’t have strong view on censorship.
** /UPDATE **
I was browsing digg.com, trolling for news stories, trying to get my fix. Digg is social link propogation website, relying on individuals to submit new links and users to ‘digg’ it or not. Sites that are dugg enough make it to the front page and the vast, unseen lurkernet. I’m a link junky, and digg provies my fix with its digall page. This is the melting pot where all new stories get dumped; From here a meme is ya’d or nay’d. I clicked on a link that I guess I shouldn’t have, and unfortunatley (or maybe fortunately) I since cannot find. The page took me to a site which said ‘entertainment.com’ in the URL (going to that url directly is not what appeared on my screen), and congratulated me on having a virus. Since I clicked that link, the behaviour of my firefox has changed. It seems as if the stylesheets are messed, or something’s not rendering correctly. At first I thought google had changed their page because the ads didn’t appear in shaded boxes. But since going to other sites show the same effect, I can only conclude that I do, indeed, have a virus.
So why am I writing this? I’m not terribly upset, as I’ve wanted to do a clean install of my computer for a couple weeks, and I can probably live with the changes and I’m too lazy to figure out what’s wrong. I don’t want to bash digg.com, as I’m very happy with it as it was quickly adopted into my ‘must read’ site set for each day. I guess I just want to point out a flaw in the digg.com philosophy, much like the controversy lately with Wikipedia, that allowing unfettered access to changes opens us up to all sorts of potential griefing. Is there some way to figure out if someone is trustworthy or not? Or are we always doomed to have at least one soldier in the battle take the bullet or step on the landmine?
Digg is an interesting conception. In the ‘geekosphere’, rarely has any website ever come close to challenging the venerable ‘slashdot.org‘ in terms of cutting edge, geek-centric news. Digg though has seemingly done so in a time frame that is in scope with popular internet memes. Also, a recent infusion of capital can only mean that soon more people then just geeks will know about it. The only question, as with any niche website, is how well will it fair once the vacous eye of the general public focuses on it?