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 old enough to be this clueless about basics like the difference between a search engine and a web browser and popular examples of each.
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.
There’s a subgroup of the millennial and gen X that grew up with a sweet spot of computers such that you actually need to know how it works in order to use one effectively. Ease enough to do a lot of fun stuff, hard enough that it encourages learning the technical minutiae. The rise of smart phones and net/chrome books means there is a huge chunk of population that has a superficial and passing relationship with tech. It’s big buttons or else it doesn’t register with them. It’s not their fault, the pursue of usability and fool proofing without actually giving tools to dig deep when necessary means they have less exposure to the underlying tech. Thus are less familiar with how things work. It’s an universal phenomenon, I would bet most people have no clue how to raise, grow and process food, but still we don’t starve, we go to the grocery and buy what’s there already cleaned, processed and packaged. There are huge advantages to understanding the chain of production of food, but I’d guess most people would struggle in an agronomy class about what’s a compost bin.
As one of those people who didn’t understand what file systems and directories were at 18, it isn’t taught in early school so you don’t notice it is a thing that exists until you stumble upon it yourself. I distinctly remember the day it clicked and it felt like I had had an epiphany.
Once you break that basic barrier then you rely on your interests to take you further. I went from not understanding that to being a Linux guru in years time, so I fully believe if the desire to learn is there, it will happen. It is just not mandatory to learn anymore. So most people don’t.
School computer classes are often just job training for working in an office doing word processing shit.
And I’m over here meticulously organizing my music library into folders by band, album, year, etc…o the humanity.
beets, it’s a life changer
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.
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.
That just…seems so wrong. My mentally declining grandmother used firefox back in the 00s era (though now that I think about it, my uncle is a developer, so maybe he set up the computer). How have we backslid since then to where so few people know/use firefox?
Actually yes. Around 2010 Firefox still had like 60% market share. Now, chrome dominates the market and Firefox is in single digits. Chrome gives you so many conveniences, and only a small amount of people care about what you give up for those conveniences. “My data isn’t important. Who cares about what I do?” Is a common response to data mining and sharing.
Most people don’t want to put the time and effort into researching these things. Most people just don’t have the energy.
But again if you don’t know anything about a topic you are asked to make a decision on, you should recuse yourself. It’s unfortunate that most people making decisions about tech know very little about it.
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.
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.
Use your favorite search engine (mine is called firefox) to browse the google and connect with your friends on a facebook
By being born between 1940 and 1955. Now it’s mostly a generalization of “people that are older than me”.
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.
So we have two options:
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A 52 year old federal judge is somehow tech illiterate in a way that would imply they have absolutely no idea about the fundamentals of modern technology.
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A federal judge is asking a large number of extremely basic questions to get their answers on official records so that the cases parameters are clearly defined. He is taking extra care because there’s not a lot of direct precedent on these issues.
I’m heavily leaning towards number 2 here. The internet likes to pretend everyone over the age of 40 has no idea how a computer works. The year is 2023. A middle-aged person today was fairly young when computers started to be incorporated into all aspects of society and is well versed in computer literacy. In some ways they are actually much more tech literate than the younger generations. It’s almost certain that he knows the difference between Firefox and Google.
I’m a 53 year old IT person, and I’m leaning towards 1. The level of technology incompetence in the general public is astounding. My wife only knows “Have you tried turning it off and back on again?” And that pretty much makes her a member of the help desk at her job.
My mom uses a computer at her job but confuses the terms computer, internet, browser and email on a regular basis. I wonder what would happen if I restarted the internet as she tells me to sometimes. I could install Linux and she wouldn’t tell.
Still better than her father, who had her operate a casette player for him when she was 2.
I always cringe in horror as both my parents still double click links on the internet.
The law is nuanced out the ass. I sit through depositions every day, and terms of art are a plague, and you can say something, but it can be interpreted differently because in such and such a field it’s a term of art, etc. That’s my hope.
I am fully on board with we need more judges, we need younger judges. But I don’t think that’s because they’re incapable of learning. In fact, I think there’s be value to someone going in blind, being given all the facts, and making their determination that way. It just sucks that something we value so highly can be determined based on the presentation of counsel.
It’s always amazed me of the learning gap… we learned how to get stuff working by hacking config.sys and our peers can it seems barely spell computer.
It’s even worse as people get younger, even though it shouldn’t be. How computers work should be in peoples DNA by now, but they still think you’ve deleted IE if you hide the icon…
My wife only knows “Have you tried turning it off and back on again?” And that pretty much makes her a member of the help desk at her job.
Next step: “Is it even powered?”
To be Dennis Ritchie was born in 40-ies. He would be 80 y.o. if he didn’t die in 2013. And he is most literate person on this planet.
Honestly same. The passage of time is weird
People think 52 is like super old… but really that’s just Gen X
Hell you really wanna know how warped our perception of time is?
Most people think 20 years ago Mario was an 8bit platformer that revitalized interest in video games after Atari killed the medium with oversaturation and nonexistent quality control.
What was Mario 20 years ago? An aging mascot with a divisive summer themed pollution game that I loved but others seemed to hate, on a console that only did well with diehard fans… 20 years ago Nintendo wasn’t the big man on campus, that was Sony with the PS2 despite it being weaker than GCN and Xbox.
Dude SMS was such a great game, big part of my childhood. I loved Luigi’s Mansion, too.
I was very disappointed with Luigi’s Mansion sequels. I like that the original Luigi’s Mansion was able to have a genuinely haunting atmosphere, that still managed to feel in place with the Mario universe. I was disappointed that portrait ghosts never really made a return, and that our ghosts were downgraded from actually scary premises like a baby that can warp dimensions to generic cartoon antics. Like this really was baby’s first horror game. A Fatal Frame for the kiddos, or is it more accurate to say that Fatal Frame is Luigi’s Mansion for the non kiddos? I think Fatal Frame came after Luigi’s Mansion
Luigi’s Mansion 3 is especially bad with this because although I do like the main villain a lot, most of the ghosts you see are just the standard blue one again and again, you don’t have the rich variety that even Dark Moon pulled off. And oh boy did I love the ghosts of shy guys in the first game.
I agree, none of that comparison made sense. It relies too much on prior knowledge/association.
In the 1990s if you wanted to play a PC game you had install it manually with a CD, typically configure ini files in a text editor and fix irq requests for your peripherals just to play. In the contemporary world a zoomer only needs to tap the install icon on the screen, Gen Z may have more experience usually technology than any previous generation, but the days of asking grandma to fix your computer seem a certainty on the horizon.
Yep, the digital illiteracy of the z gen is terrifying. Apparently contemporary teens have no understanding of the folder structure. Like, at all. Of the concept of files having their location. It’s all because they were brought up with iPhones for everything just is, and iCloud where everything just is.
Maybe they imagine tag-based filesystem or content-addressed? Like porn sites.
Apparently contemporary teens have no understanding of the folder structure. Like, at all.
I met numerous 20- and 30- somethings in the 90s who had no idea either. When asked why they didn’t know where did they save the documents they “lost”, they usually answered that they hadn’t studied Computer Sciences and therefore they didn’t have any reason to know (!).
Appelations to learn to use better their tools usually got nowhere.
It’s a bit like how cars used to be really unreliable but easy to work on so a lot of people learned to fix some basic things, but now it’s more complicated and difficult to fix anything so even a lot of handy people don’t bother.
It’s easier to build a PC in 2023 than it was in 1993. Modern motherboard’s typically don’t require separate cards for sound, network and video (unless you’re gaming). It’s mostly integrated now and you don’t need hours manually manipulating jumpers and trying to affix terribly designed IDE cables now replaced with SATA. I’d much rather work on repairing my modern PC vs trying to troubleshoot a Compaq 486 20+ years ago.
I work as a website developer and I think number one is so, so much more likely. The average person barely knows how to use a computer at all, let alone how it works and different terminology.
An older, non-IT person - an actual judge, yeah I’m not giving them the benefit of the doubt here - they likely don’t know lol
Not sure why “old+judge” automatically equals “tech illiterate.” The judge in another high-profile Google case taught himself to code
The article you link says the judge already knew how to code beforehand.
He’s been coding in BASIC for decades, actually, writing programs for the fun of it: a program to play Bridge, written as a gift for his wife; an automatic solution for the board game Mastermind, which he is immensely fond of; and most ambitiously, a sprawling multifunctional program with a graphical interface that helps him with yet another of his many hobbies, ham radio.
It’s because these things work by probabilities. Generally when you think of older people who aren’t working as IT professionals, you wouldn’t expect them to be great with computers - and you’d probably be right.
Do you really think that a judge that taught himself to code would be common-place and would be the norm? That judge is awesome, but he is very clearly an outlier lol
I have soon a PhD in computer tech related subject, program for living, and am a lot younger than the judge, and if you ask me if Mozilla makes a search engine I would say I have no idea, they’ve made a lot of stuff. And if you asked me how Google’s SEM tools work I would ask wtf is SEM.
I’m disappointed in arstechnica for only supporting their provocative headline (Judge in US v. Google trial didn’t know if Firefox is a browser or search engine) with this vagueness in the article:
While Cavanaugh delivered his opening statement, Mehta even appeared briefly confused by some of the references to today’s tech, unable to keep straight if Mozilla was a browser or a search engine. He also appeared unclear about how SEM works and struggled to understand the options for Microsoft to promote Bing ads outside of Google’s SEM tools.
What did he actually say?!
Plus it’s an opening statement. It’s an intro that tells the finder of fact (traditionally a jury, but for cases like this it’s the judge) what evidence you’re going to present during the trial. You want that person to be able to place that argument in context, but the very nature of explaining that “I’m going to show you a bunch of stuff” is going to have a bunch of “well I haven’t seen it yet, so can you tell me what to expect” responses.
Especially if there’s a discussion of the different contractual relationships and the different companies and products. I’ve seen plenty of judges insist on clarity when communicating about things that might have more than one meaning: a company that has the same name as a product that company produces (Toyota makes Toyotas), a legal entity that has the same name as a place (Madison Square Garden banned someone from Madison Square Garden), etc.
For all we know, the confusion might be one of the lawyer’s fault, for using the words Mozilla or Firefox interchangeably, the way this article seems to.
I think its also important to note, he was not explicitly unclear about what Firefox was, he was unclear about what Mozilla was. It’s admittedly still not great, but I think it’s a little more understandable a thing to be unfamiliar with than the browser itself. I’d really rather the title referred to Mozilla because of this, as really there’s little to definitively back up its claim that the judge is unfamiliar with Firefox, just that he is to some degree unfamiliar with the company that makes it. Again, still far from ideal, but not nearly as egregious as they’re trying to make it sound.
|unable to keep straight if Mozilla was a browser or a search engine
It is neither. It is a foundation that maintains a browser. It is like asking if Microsoft is a browser or a search engine.
It would be naive to expect Google to be broken by anti-trust laws, just look how microsoft dodged that in the 2000 and went back to the same practices today . this is a circus show
