CNet is not evil

  • Post author:
  • Post category:Uncategorized

There has been a pretty wild discussion the past few days in the ColdFusion (CF) community surrounding CF’s cookie management and the NSA, sparked by a column written by cnet’s Declan McCullagh.I have been a cnet fan for years, since probably about 1997 or so. They have a lot of really good content beyond news (shopper.com, downloads.com, and yes news.com). As far as their news, I do see a bias sometimes when it comes to privacy issues, and sometimes an anti Microsoft bias (what’s wrong with that? ;)). But news.com has some very professional reporters, and I for one really respect and admire them for not being afraid of offending their advertisers (like Microsoft).I do disagree with this cookie/privacy nonsense everybody keeps spouting about (it should be mentioned that Declan McCullagh is a commentary columnist, he is supposed to write about his opinions, similar to John Stewart or Larry King). But most of their stories tell both sides of an argument, and give good evidence to support both opinions. So try not to throw the baby out with the bath water. Just because one news.com writer implied some negative things about CF (by quoting an industry expert that stated loose facts) doesn’t mean the entire organization is bad!One time I saw an error in one of news.com’s articles. It was a minor technical error, but I went ahead and clicked on the reporter’s name at the top of the article. I expected to be sent to a generic ‘contact us’ form, but instead I was actually sending an email to this reporter using his real email address! I never expected my email to be read, let alone responded to. However, within a few hours I not only got a response from the reporter, but he immediately went and corrected his story! That is a lot better than most news papers today, who are content to print a correction buried in the back of one of their minor sections, and that is if they decide to print a correction!