If the quality of technical reporting wasn't already under threat from the inexorable spread of spotty bloggers pontificating on graphics cards from the back bedroom of their mum's houses, it only takes a total non-story about the world running out of IP addresses to appear once and within hours, every two-bit rag on the planet is repeating the story as if it were fact.

All a useless hack needs to back up a story is that it has appeared in either a 'reputable' publication or a couple of others. No matter if they've all copied the story themselves. This cut and paste churnalism means that a story can be given the appearance of accuracy by the sheer weight of coverage.

Yesterday, Vint Cerf, an old grey haired bloke, so he obviously knows what he's talking about, spoke to hacks from the London Times and Daily Telegraph and mentioned that it was important that the current addressing system used for Internet addresses, IPv4, would run out of numbers in a few years time. This is no big deal, it has been known about for at least a decade and a replacement system, IPv6, is already installed on most people's computers without their even knowing it. It has been implemented in Windows since XP SP1 came out in 2002 and comes as standard in Vista.

Don't ask me what happened to IPv5, I have absolutely no idea.

On the IT Examiner, we looked at running Cerf's comments yesterday, but because we actually know a bit about the technology we write about, we realised it was a non-story. Sadly, it would appear that 2,276 other self-appointed technology newspapers, Websites and blogs ran stories about the Internet blowing up next Tuesday, on the basis that the Times and Telegraph had got hold of entirely the wrong end of the IP stack and screamed that the Web was doomed.

What caused us particular amusement was that the freelancer we told not to bother with the story yesterday has today managed to flog it to another site of our acquaintance, The Inquirer.

Over on the Guardian, our old chum Jack Schofield has often highlighted the hysteria and crap reporting running amok in technology circles, pointing out that there is enough addressing capacity in IPv6 to allocate 2⁵² addresses for each of the 70 sextillion observable stars in the known universe, which, he rightly points out, is a reasonably comfortable amount of headroom.

Of course, the scourge of churnalism doesn't only affect technology reporting. Another fine example is the endless stream of global warming rubbish spewed out by jobbing hacks around the world, each of them copying and pasting from each other in an incestuous orgy of self-righteous bombast - global warming must be true, look at all the coverage!

If you do actually examine that coverage you will find that the vast bulk of it is waffle containing unsubstantiated lines such as 'scientists agree' and 'top climate experts are concerned'. These people are never named because the writer has merely copied the 'facts' from another journo who copied them from someone else who probably made it up in the first place.

Trust no one and you will be OK.

Trust me, I'm a journalist. X

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