Wall Street Journal: What Did U $@y? Online Language Finds Its Voice

This is another case of: "The story isn't news, the publication it's reported in, is."

In this hard hitting expose by the Wall Street Journal, arguably one of the pre-eminent business newspapers of the world, reporter Christopher Rhoads takes a hard look at a matter of vital importance to the world economy. Apparently, gamer's shorthand, or "leetspeak" is changing the way that human beings communicate.

Apparently, referring to things by slang and acronyms is a major breaking news story for an organization which is commonly referred to as "the WSJ" and competes with "the NYT," and was recently bought by News Corporation, which is commonly known as "Fox."

Lest you think I exaggerate the seriousness which the WSJ has decided to cover this story, they even included a stipple portrait of Pure Pwnage's Jarett Cale.

"I pone you, you're going down dude, lawl!" is how Johnathan Wendel says he likes to taunt opponents in person at online gaming tournaments. Pone is how he pronounces "pwn," and lawl is how "LOL" usually sounds when spoken…

"There used to be a time when people cared about how they spoke and wrote," laments Robert Hartwell Fiske, who has written or edited several books on proper English usage, including one on overused words titled "The Dimwit's Dictionary."…

"Leet: slang for 'good' or 'great,' apparently, and 'idiotic,' certainly," he wrote on the Vocabula Web site. "Leet" is in dictionaries with other meanings, including a soft-finned fish…

Gail Kern Paster, director of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., has reason to believe that a certain English poet and playwright would cheer the latest linguistic leap. Just as the rise of the printed word and the theater spurred many new expressions during Shakespeare's time, the computer revolution, she notes, has necessitated its own vocabulary -- like "logging in" and "Web site."

"The issue of correctness didn't bother him," says Ms. Paster. "He loved to play with language." As for leet, "He would say, 'Bring it on,' absolutely."

In order to advance this hard breaking story, I interviewed some participants in PurePwnage's IRC chat room.

<bboyko> Did you see the WSJ report on leetspeak?
<bboyko> working on a story for NetworkPerformanceDaily.com.
<PwnDaddy123> NO WAIIII!!
<Damilkman> gtfo
<PwnDaddy123> u a reporter??
<PwnDaddy123> wtf mann
<Max[Tuna`age]> [expletive deleted]
<Max[Tuna`age]> report that

TimesOnline: The Internet is dead. Long live the Internet.

Japan's Communication Minister, Yoshihide Suga pronounced that Japan wants to build a new internet that would be ready by 2020 that would create quicker and more reliable data transfer, and would be less susceptible to virus outbreaks and hacking.

For the rest of us, Mr Suga's proposal merits consideration. The current net is fine if you don't mind the occasional virus outbreak, the mounting presence of extortion-minded hackers or the bandwidth hiccups that make net video a jerky, pixelated approximation of TV. The net, while stable and functioning admirably, and capable, as many network engineers say, of surviving a catastrophic explosion, is still in a precarious state, particularly when you consider it has become the linchpin of the global economy. Telecoms and cable companies, tech firms and the like, have been building on top of 1960s era architecture for decades. The net is a mixed bag of networks - a bit of copper here, maybe some fibre there and wireless hotspots attached here and there to extend its range. This mishmash of technologies called the internet has got us this far, but will it hold up as our personal and collective bandwidth needs skyrocket?

BBC News: Troubled times for home networks

This BBC News article takes a look at the difficulty of home networking for the average consumer, a valid concern in the age of multiple computers in the household, Windows Home Server, etc.

And then there are the technologies that prove how useless they are when you actually try them. Take for instance, home networking.

The problem, [Gartner's Van Baker] said, was the sheer complexity of getting all those different devices to work together and swap data via a home network….

"Mention WPA or encryption or SSID or DHCP and you have lost the vast majority of consumers already," he said. "Most of them are not going to deal with that level of complexity and knowledge." The technical know-how required to set up a network and run music or video across cables or wi-fi, was, he said, "the elephant in the room that no-one wants to talk about."

Networking across Windows computers gives me a headache in my current setup - so much so that I'm considering switching from using Network Places to operating FTP daemons on each machine and using that. The one bright spot is that I can access my MythTV box in the living room from my bedroom computer. Of course, now that I can't get a channel guide, that's rather moot, but for the month that I had it, it was a pretty swell setup! (Anyone want to buy a formerly useful PVR?)