Re: They gave him their password
Insurance companies mostly have senior Tory party members on the board and have wealthy investors. Different standards apply when these sort of people are asked to cash out.
1026 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Dec 2009
"If publishers want people to turn off adblockers, return the advertising model to the days when the internet first became a necessity of life, the days when the above rules were the de-facto standard."
Well back in the early 2000s I was running this
http://proxomitron.info/45/help/Contents.html
because ads have always been a problem on the web.
Firstly the only country that has ever followed Randian rules is Somalia.
Secondly YT benefits from government regulations regarding net neutrality, the amount of of subsidy that tax payers give to Google is staggering.
Thirdly YT needs a strong central government. When a French ISP filtered out Google Ads where did Google go crying to - yep that's right the French gubmint - make them unfilter our ads.
Fourthly neither gasoline tax nor tolls pay for the road infrastructure. There are far more miles of roads than there are toll roads.
fifthly Mogadishu has a thriving mobile telecoms access. Internet access too. Well until Al-Shabaab forced the largest provider to shut down.
*Gack* so much Randroid bollocks in so little space. If we were to squeeze you would we get pimple puss or gun oil?
Companies like Uber couldn't exist without a strong central government. What they want is all the benefits of road infrastructure and centralized zones which people want to travel into and out of. Zones that are mostly regulated against lawlessness, and where there drivers can operate without fear of being hijacked and robbed. They can operate without a centralized banking system, or without a regulated communications system. Uber don't work out of Mogadishu for a reason.
... need a new business model. It may be as simple as giving us more control over the type of ad content that gets slung at us. A couple of years back Last.fm were stuffing "Asian women want to talk" banners from Ad-Choices that site went from whitelisted to blacklisted. FB wants to shove political ads at me. Not wanted, not needed, my political views are fully formed they aren't going to change. If these companies had any real profiling experience they'd know that.
Don't forget that the Tories have a love for advertisers (Saatchi). As for content I don't see adverts on the Natural History Museum website, nor on Encyclopedia of Life, nor on Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, nor on a whole range of other sites that offer quality contents.
Its not my fault the publishers followed down the route of giving away their content online in return for 100th of the advertising cost that the print versions received. That they were scammed by the digiterati is no one's fault but their own.
We only have ads because 20 years ago there weren't any trustworthy ways to pay for content. No payment processors etc. Ads were a way of doing it back then. The internet should grow up and find a more modern way to finance itself.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/06/technology/personaltech/banner-ads-the-monsters-that-swallowed-the-web.html?_r=2
The banner ads got taken up by one trick ponies like DoubleClick and Google.
... and not enough ability. Lets be honest the WP engineering staff are mostly converted WP wonks. They have little in the way of experience in writing commercial grade software, and the WMF has had little in the way of experience in managing a major open source software project. The result has been that hacks and screw up have dominated in creating the ramshackle product that is wikimedia. The software is unmaintainable and mostly untested. Witness the bugs that kept coming back as they tried to implement a visual editor.
So the current batch of incompetents are in disarray when faced with someone in charge that knows how software engineering should be done, and in true wiki style back stab and screech in message boards. Meanwhile the WMF board are as incompetent as their employees.
Should be fun watchingt this years donation disappear down the drain. Last year they squandered $3 million in travel expenses.
I've been flooded by spam and crap from some locations. Don't really care whether they are Tor exit nodes, proxy servers, or just IP locations where the owners don't give a shit what their users are doing. I block them. If the same IP range appears multiple times then I block the entire range. If multiple blocked ranges are owned ISP by the same ISP then I'll block every IP address allocated to that ISP.
I don't give a shit whether they have legitimate users their fuckwit abusing users get the place blacklisted.
When Henry I discovered that coiners had been cheating by manufacturing sub standard sliver pennies, he invited them all round for Christmas get together at Salisbury cathedral where he ordered that their right hand and gentiles be cut off.
Most people approved of his actions.
"but there's archive.org as a last resort."
A few years back I discovered that a web page that my wife had created had her full name on it. That name is pretty unique and pasting it into a search engine hacked up her full address etc. The page was on archive.org but a quick edition to robots.txt and an email fixed that and 12hrs later all was gone.
"If I have a conversation on Facebook it's all in one place."
I had one of those the other month. At the end the user whose feed it was deleted the entire thing. Most links on wikipedia are dead, most of the flickr accounts that they took images from are deleted. My drupal powered site has 8000 indexed pages on Google and several 1000 images. Linked to by a number of academic institutions but it could go tomorrow, or in a couple of months time if I decide not to renew the hosting.
The web in whatever guise is completely ephemeral.
"It is the parents' responsibility to ensure their children are safe,"
Adults tend to get their lawmakers to make sure that unsavoury material is not readily available to kids. Which is why porn tends to be on shelves out of reach of small kids, and fags and alcohol is age restricted. I seem to recall that Germany already has a age-verification law regarding online porn and kids.
Not the point. They know they can't stop someone that is determined to access something. What they are looking to do is limit the cases where someone just happens into a porn site. Similarly they know they can't stop some kid from buying drugs, but they put in place laws to discourage dealers from selling skunk outside schools.
They took RSS geodata feeds from flickr and put them into their web search. So if someone had put holiday pics from X on flickr maps a search for X would provide an KLM wrapper of the RSS feed which pointed directly to Google maps with thumbs of the images plastered over it. So photos of someone's kid playing on the sand got used to promote a commercial website.
That wasn't the whole problem though. Because the relevance of the images was dependent on how often some one was updating flickr and how often Google trawled the RSS feeds. So yesterday someone might have uploaded beach photos from X which Google trawled and the following day conference photos from Y. The RSS feed would now be pointing to Y so a search for X got the KLM wrapper which plastered photos from Y. The whole exercise (which lasted for several years) was useless as a search option as it was hardly ever relevant, it was simply a sparkle for GM.
If you are accessing facebook then you have something other than a basic mobile phone. How much in terms of the yearly income of a villager is a basic internet enabled phone? The data consumption is due to large amounts of unwanted adverts, and other irrelevant shite, being dumped onto the device. We all pay a large premium in terms of data charges to allow these corporation to bombard us with their crapola. As a charitable act facebook should be providing people with a FB sans adverts.
Consolidation happens because the small players cannot weather a downturn in sales, they go bust or sell to a major. Freetardary is part of that cause. It happened in the software industry. For each software application there are now at most 2 alternatives. None of them are the best that could be, they are simply the ones that survived the piracy of the 90s and 20s.
Back in the day people stood in corners and collected 100,000s of signatures which were delivered to Downing Street or wherever and promptly ignored. Did anyone think that clicking a box on a website or sending a form email would result in anything different? Email is extremely easy to ignore it can be filtered on keywords subject lines whatever. If you want to disrupt them don't use email, use normal mail. They at least have to sort that manually. Send your complaints about the BBC to the Inland Revenue, send complaints about copyright infringement to the Ministry of Defence or the DVLA. They need to sort it from their normal mail. Execute an analogue DDoS there is nothing illegal in that.
In the relativity of wrong.
[
The curvature of such a sphere is about 0.000126 per mile, a quantity very close to 0 per mile, as you can see, and one not easily measured by the techniques at the disposal of the ancients. The tiny difference between 0 and 0.000126 accounts for the fact that it took so long to pass from the flat earth to the spherical earth.
http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm
]
a subject I feel knowledgeable about and catch them out in some unambiguous factual error or omission.
Oh I've seen photographs or organisms which are of the wrong species. Links from articles on 15th century subjects go to people living in the 18th century. Dates of European monarchs wrong. A described as a contemporary of B when A had died 100 years before B was born. Etc, etc. There is hardly any article that I care about there where I could be confident that the information was correct.
Example:
Quantum Gravity
You would never see that much detail, or that many links to related topics, in Britannica.
This article may contain improper references to self-published sources. Please help improve it by removing references to unreliable sources, where they are used inappropriately.
The issue is that WP gets pushed about by every crank with a internet connection and a keyboard. Gets swamped over by under-grads posting up their lecture notes, post-grads adding in their research, and the result is that the article is a hodge-podge of kookery, undergrad wankery, and the esoteric.
So, "30% more errors" is the same thing as "as accurate".
Even better, many of the articles were those that WP had originally cribbed from the 1911 version of EB. In effect the report said that the modern version of EB had less errors than it had 100 years previously, and WP hadn't been arsed to fix them.
"And it was bl**dy expensive, quickly out of date if you wanted any scientific information"
Probably not as it had a yearly update. Very little changes in science year on year, and wikipedia is in no position to make any significant update if things do change. For example each wikipedia 'fact' has to be referenced and new 'facts' that contradict old facts are almost invariable reverted. There are very few scientist editing the articles capable of appraising new facts. OTOH Britannica having practicing science editors can make the appropriate changes far quicker once the new is established.
It makes money by not having to invest in search. Actually it seems to have abandoned indexing the web about 10 year ago. Now it just scrapes wikipedia, which won't be the worst pile of shite out there, and will satisfy the vaguely curious.
OW if Google and the other search engines throw a few wikipedia pages up for any given search, plus links to sites they know you like, you won't notice that the information being provided is pretty low quality.
"Library users should not be denied access to sites that contain information about, for example, abortion, sex education and LGBT issues, but many people will be reluctant to make libraries aware of this when it happens,"
What is wrong with the modern day equivalent of the playground, and behind the bike shed, for learning such things (wikipedia)?