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But there's still hope for intelligent life on the Internet. A team of software developers is hard at work on a "stupid filter" that promises to do to idiotic online comments what a spam filter does to junk and unwanted e-mail: put it in a place where it can't hurt anyone anymore.
That's the mission, anyway, of the cadre of techies toiling under the leadership of Gabriel Ortiz, a 27-year-old systems administrator in Albuquerque. Ortiz's team is readying a free, open-source version they hope to release by year's end and make available as a standard plug-in on the popular Firefox browser by early next year.
How does it work? Say a user wants to post a really, really dumb comment on, for example, cnnmoney.com, where some of you might be reading this now.
If cnnmoney had the filter installed on its servers, it would intercept the comment just before it was published and flash a little alert at the author that reads: "This comment is more or less unintelligible. Please try to restate it."
The writer would get another crack at it, and another, until at last he was able to muster a few words of intelligence, or in frustration wandered off to inflict those LOL!!!!!s and OMG!!!!s on some more tolerant site.
That's the mission, anyway, of the cadre of techies toiling under the leadership of Gabriel Ortiz, a 27-year-old systems administrator in Albuquerque. Ortiz's team is readying a free, open-source version they hope to release by year's end and make available as a standard plug-in on the popular Firefox browser by early next year.
How does it work? Say a user wants to post a really, really dumb comment on, for example, cnnmoney.com, where some of you might be reading this now.
If cnnmoney had the filter installed on its servers, it would intercept the comment just before it was published and flash a little alert at the author that reads: "This comment is more or less unintelligible. Please try to restate it."
The writer would get another crack at it, and another, until at last he was able to muster a few words of intelligence, or in frustration wandered off to inflict those LOL!!!!!s and OMG!!!!s on some more tolerant site.
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