Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

CIA to Sunset the World Factbook

abc.net.au

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 279 posts

Re: CIA to Sunset the World Factbook

#151

Post by cududa »

KellyCriterion wrote: post #125
regenschutz wrote: post #26

Unfortunate. So many essays that I wrote in school cited The World Facebook as a source. I'm worried that the death of these easily accessible sources will push more and more pupils into relying on Wikipedia or even worse: AI. Being critical of what you see online and finding facts yourself is crucial to digital literacy.

Isnt it already in AI as the prior version were publicly and should be in training corpus?

Sure but that doesn't mean it'll perfectly retrieve information it's trained on. There's a lot of conflicting sources, hallucinations, etc.

Re: CIA to Sunset the World Factbook

#152

Post by detourdog »

xphos wrote: post #146
detourdog wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It predated the World Wide Web as a client for browsing. It was developed at the University of Minnesota and named for the School's mascot. The client was not graphical. I felt like it was like swinging from vine to vine with each vine being a gopher site. Once one was on a site one could drill down a directory structure of published data. One would access an initial site by typing in it's IP address or domain name.…

Gosh that actually sounds a amazing I am always annoyed that I have to leave terminal so much to explore I can understand the common person being daunted by that but a terminal accessible browser client sounds lovely for a lot of use cases

I'm pretty nostalgic for Gopher. If the graphical web hadn't been so mind blowing I would have realized how great it was at the time. Before the web had graphical browser I thought it was pretty useless compared to gopher.

Re: CIA to Sunset the World Factbook

#153

Post by hexagonsuns »

sofixa wrote: post #129
hexagonsuns wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There's nothing at all wrong with Wikipedia Well, except for the very obvious political bias https://manhattan.institute/article/new-study-finds-politica...

> Findings show that Wikipedia entries are more likely to attach negative sentiment to terms representative of right-leaning political orientation than to their left-leaning counterparts Is that a bias or just reality? Right leaning politicians in the US include people paying underage girls for sex, people screaming about "Jewish Space lasers", people obviously stealing money in plain sight with crypto pumps and dump…

"Bias isn't bias if I agree with the side it's taking!"

Re: CIA to Sunset the World Factbook

#154

Post by pseudalopex »

xphos wrote: post #146
detourdog wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It predated the World Wide Web as a client for browsing. It was developed at the University of Minnesota and named for the School's mascot. The client was not graphical. I felt like it was like swinging from vine to vine with each vine being a gopher site. Once one was on a site one could drill down a directory structure of published data. One would access an initial site by typing in it's IP address or domain name.…

Gosh that actually sounds a amazing I am always annoyed that I have to leave terminal so much to explore I can understand the common person being daunted by that but a terminal accessible browser client sounds lovely for a lot of use cases

TUI web browsers exist. But many sites are not usable.

Gemini is a newer protocol influenced by Gopher.[1]

[1] https://geminiprotocol.net/

Re: CIA to Sunset the World Factbook

#156

Post by falsemyrmidon »

detourdog wrote: post #114
regenschutz wrote: post #26

Unfortunate. So many essays that I wrote in school cited The World Facebook as a source. I'm worried that the death of these easily accessible sources will push more and more pupils into relying on Wikipedia or even worse: AI. Being critical of what you see online and finding facts yourself is crucial to digital literacy.

The CIA World Factbook was one of the major sites to access for information using Gopher. I discovered it using Gopher and it was proof to me of the usefulness of Internet. I would cite it as a reason that someone might want to access the internet.

[dead]

Re: CIA to Sunset the World Factbook

#157

Post by GJim »

steviedotboston wrote: post #50

Since the world factbook was under the public domain, it would be possible for volunteers to build an archive site of it. It wouldn't be updated under the purview of the CIA but at least the most recent content would be easily accessible.

> it would be possible for volunteers to build an archive site of it

It would. But you are forgetting the whole editorial trust thing, which is what made it so useful and well cited.

Re: CIA to Sunset the World Factbook

#158

Post by sofixa »

hexagonsuns wrote: post #153
sofixa wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Findings show that Wikipedia entries are more likely to attach negative sentiment to terms representative of right-leaning political orientation than to their left-leaning counterparts Is that a bias or just reality? Right leaning politicians in the US include people paying underage girls for sex, people screaming about "Jewish Space lasers", people obviously stealing money in plain sight with crypto pumps and dump…

"Bias isn't bias if I agree with the side it's taking!"

It's not bias if it's factual reality. You not liking it doesn't make it bias.

Re: CIA to Sunset the World Factbook

#159

Post by cfmcdonald »

xphos wrote: post #120
detourdog wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CIA World Factbook was one of the major sites to access for information using Gopher. I discovered it using Gopher and it was proof to me of the usefulness of Internet. I would cite it as a reason that someone might want to access the internet.

Can you add context on what Gopher is for the unknowning? I searched for it but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol) is the only seemingly relavent thing I found not sure if thats exactly what your refering too?

This video [0] shows someone using Gopher (and other common pre-web Internet tools) in the early 90s.

I used Gopher when I did a high school summer science camp at Indiana University in 1994. It was a really interesting time of transition when the graphical Web was just coming on-line with Mosaic, but most tools were still textual/command line (FTP, pine/elm email/Usenet clients, MUDs, etc.)

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDV4zrex18o

Re: CIA to Sunset the World Factbook

#160

Post by bobbylarrybobby »

Havoc wrote: post #123

Of all the organisations you’d think the CIA would understand the value of soft power and having some level of control of facts being published

They do understand, that's why they're doing this. This is a fundamentally anti-fact administration — when facts aren't known, you can fabricate reality for the masses, which is what they want.
Post reply on HN