.bullshit

Tim Berners-Lee says the Internet is full of lies

He’s quite right in saying there’s a hell of a lot of unsubstantiated and downright erroneous rubbish out there – look around FreeRepublic or StormFront or RaptureReady or the Church Of Scientology for example (and despair for humanity) and his comments makes perfect sense.

But we’re not all Cecil Adams or the good folks at Snopes – I’d love to see them cloned but there’s no chance of that given the state of science funding – so we’re going to have to take another approach.

ICANN have recently pimped out top-level domains and while many have seen this as a bad move, suddenly it has advantages. How’s this for a proposal:

– Pass the hat around, register a .bullshit top level domain

– create 2nd-level “racist.bullshit”, “partisan.bullshit”, “psuedoreligious.bullshit” etc. DNS zones.

– Populate them like a DNS blacklist (“right hand side” style a-la rfc-ignorant.org for the techies reading) – assign them 127.0.0.2 and a text record explanation “stormfront.com Listed: Neo-Nazi hillbillies still smarting over the Civil Rights Act”

– Write a browser plugin to work in a similar fashion to SSL Extended Verification: Plugin looks up the domain on the various .bullshit DNS lists, if a match is found pops up an warning “Content on this site is likely complete and unadulterated bollocks: Take as seriously as 4chan threads” to warn the visitor that This Site Is Full Of Shit.

I see a great need. Who’s with me? ?