Rescrig

Newspapers Fold

An article in USA Today (ironically, the digital edition), on February 15, lamented not only the demise of the printed news industry, but purported that digital news was on its way out, as well.

The suspect in the homicide of printed news is, quite obviously, digital news, favored by today’s internet savvy populace. The result of the migration to digital news has been an alarming drop in circulation numbers for print, thus discouraging advertisers, and thereby substantially reducing the bottom line for printed newspapers (that have actually never even been close to being completely supported by subscription).

And now, apparently, digital news is being slain. The culprit in this heinous crime is thought to be ad-blockers that are now so easily installed in the plethora of browsers in use by today’s news readers. This use of ad-blockers has further curbed the enthusiasm of potential advertisers. Why should they pony up for the cost of on-line ad placement when many won’t even see their ads?

What Happened, Anyway?

Prior to the advent of digital news, printed news provided a wide-open advertising venue. It had the advantage of being there on the page, whether you wanted it or not — no way to block it. The disadvantages of the print model, what are advantages of the digital form, were that the ads were not necessarily relevant to the reader beyond potentially relating to the content of the page the reader was viewing, AND, the reader’s interest in any advertising could only be tracked if the reader responded to the ad by establishing direct contact, i.e., the advertiser had no idea if their ad had actually been displayed to the reader until the reader wrote, made a telephone call, or dropped in.

Skip ahead a page, so to speak, to the digital age, and advertisers, hungry for data about potential customers, now resort to display-tracking and click-tracking services. These services, or “marketers,” such as double-click and google, do provide the reader access to the original advertiser, but in a way that is embedded in a link that is associated with their tracking servers so that they can track (and charge for) data. It is the key words in the marketers’ links that are recognized by ad-blockers, thereby making them possible to block.

For instance, an advertiser named ACME Hammers might have the domain name “acmehammer.com“, and, placing an ad for tracking by double-click, might result in the digital news paper displaying an ad with an underlying URL of “http://doubleclick.adserver.com/ads/acmehammer.js“, thereby directing some JavaScript routine to run which would capture the data and then open a new page to the advertiser’s website, ACME Hammers. It is that very use of ad tracking, motivated by advertiser informational greed, that makes ad-blocking successful. They’ve killed their own method of reaching customers — not-so-curiously, an Aesop’s fable comes to mind.

Can Digital News Be Rescued from Obsolescence?

Perhaps a new paradigm is needed. And perhaps a lesson from history.

If, instead of using ad tracking, the digital newspapers simply placed the equivalent of print ads — with a URL that simply goes to the advertisers site, i.e., “http://www.acmehammers.com“; no tracking, no muss, no keywords in the URL — ad blockers would no longer block them. The algorithms used by ad blocking programs only look for the marketer keywords; they do not have sufficient granularity to seek out all potential domain names of advertisers. The news outlets would also have to make a point of using naming conventions for the paths to advertising content that avoided the use of potential keywords that trigger ad blocking, such as “banner,” “ads,” “adserver,” etc.

Let That Be a Lesson!

I viewed the Feb. 15 issue of USA Today on my tablet, for which I have not yet found an adequate ad-blocker, so I’m still inundated with advertising there. Furthermore, unlike a browser, where I can hover over a given advertisement to discern the marketer from the browser’s display of the target URL, my tablet has no hover state, so I have no way to view the potential result of what I tap on before I tap on it.

Mobile devices are, in that way, somewhat crippled, but it’s only a matter of time before ad-blocking apps become readily available for mobile devices, and the last bastion of control-free wild-west advertising will fade into the sunset.

Time to wake up, advertisers! Smell the coffee! Your insatiable lust for big data is killing your goose.

The website that purports to auction off homes that are in some form of economic distress, i.e., short sales or foreclosures, auction.com, is an ABSOLUTE SCAM! They have a reserve amount, that they will not reveal, and the auctioneer is free to bid up the price if the starting bid has been set lower than the reserve amount and existing REAL bids have not yet met the reserve price, and then, when the auction is over, they conceal all details of the bidding. It is not only unfair, it borders on criminal.

Just say “no” to auction.com.

I registered to bid on a house for which the starting bid was $40K, and subsequent bids were, by rule of the website, in $10K increments.

The house had, at one time, been listed for $129K, and more recently listed for $148,100.

Someone started off early with the starting bid amount of $40K.

I bid $50K, and was fairly quickly outbid 4 more times, so that the current bid was at $90K, where it stayed for a couple days, until around noon of the day the auction was scheduled to close.

Suddenly the bid amount shot up to $143,100, and the bid increment was changed from $10K to $5K, which seems to me just a bit too convenient — that the next bid would take it to the list price of $148,100, the original list price, and furthermore, there was no way a “real” bidder could have gotten to $143,100 by using $10K increments from any prior bid. Had to have been the auctioneer that bid the price up to $143,100.

That’s not an auction; it is, at best, wasting “real” bidders’ time, and, at worst, it is deliberately deceptive.

(Refer to pissedconsumer.com review #787129.)

 

Successfully migrated this WordPress site from hosting at iPage to my usual hosting account at Dreamhost (along with all my others). Can have purportedly unlimited domains on my Dreamhost account, and since the only reason I had byroncanfield.com elsewhere was to have an alternate mail server, which is now more than satisfied by a simple gMail account, I decided not to pay the exorbitant regular price at iPage.

iPage advertises $1.99/mo hosting and reviews of inexpensive hosting sites echo that advertising, but what those reviews don’t tell you is that the low price is an introductory price for the first year only (and must pay for 12 months in advance). The regular price, which kicks in after the first year, is $12.95/mo (if paid 12 months in advance), which is quite a bit higher than most of the low-cost hosting services.

When I got my invoice for the amount coming due in March, it was a bit of sticker-shock, as I had not noticed, when I initially signed up, the asterisk after the iPage home page advertised price, which refers to the tiny footnote disclaimer regarding it being a first-year introductory price. Doesn’t say, even there, what the regular price is.

So, I migrated the site and closed my iPage account.

I have noted a peculiarity about this particular WordPress site, a phenomenon that does not occur with the other dozen or so WordPress sites I maintain: I keep getting notices about new subscribers, despite the fact that I make no effort whatsoever to publicize this site (it’s basically just a gratuitous repository for little more than a diary), but the subscriber user names bear no resemblance to the associated subscriber email addresses, such as the latest user name, ValerieMoor00, with the email address of terrianne.borawski_2303701@yahoo.com.

So what’s your name, bitch, Valerie or Terrianne?

So far, all of them, to a one, have been yahoo email addresses, which, in itself, is an immediate and HUGE red flag. But also, not a one of them has exhibited any resemblance between the user name and the email address — most of the user names have been quite clearly contrived to deceive.

Just a point of note to those pursuing this misguided activity, such subscriber accounts will be, without notice, summarily deleted. You can just fuck off!

Furthermore, I intend to invoke demons to aid me in visiting mischief and calamities on your computer. Be prepared to have your computer cursed.

And just now, another one: ConsueloMaye240 — maribeth.snell_283463@yahoo.com

And more:

Username: GilbertoZ79, Email: brena.link_469205@yahoo.com

 

Had a bit of an intense day, today, attempting to research and propose some specific Linux distribution with emphasis on security and encryption. Found some articles simply searching on the phrase “most secure version of linux”. One had only 3 recommendations: Tails (The Amnesic Incognito Live System), LPS (Lightweight Portable Security), and Surprise!

Another article had so many recommendations, mostly directed at those intending to use it to penetrate security measures, that I found it unuseful.

Settled on Tails, based on Debian, which, though its user interface is a bit clunky (may be an issue for the intended client), appears to have the necessary applications to provide encryption, as well as standard applications (Libre Office). An added cute attribute is that it provides an optional UI that appears to be Windows 8.

The idea, for the client in question, is to have a bootable USB 3.0 thumb-drive, containing the operating system (obviously), as well as all the necessary applications for his purposes, but have a separate encrypted thumb-drive (need not be USB 3.0, as it will be data only), just for his files. At the end of the day, both are removed from the computer on which they are used, and, as a function of its operation, Tails wipes the computer’s memory before shutting down, leaving no trace of anything that was performed on that computer.

This solution provides the desired security for any given session, as well as completely eliminating the insecure aspect of a physical storage device on a system that may be, from time to time, unattended and subject to direct physical OR remote intrusion.

Ran out of time, and so was not able to complete my tests, today, and still waiting to see how well the persistent files function works, allowing new application installations and updates to be saved to the bootable thumb-drive.

 

Recent Posts: No Font Control

Have been trying to figure out why this theme, Twenty Fifteen, has no control over what it calls the “theme default” font. Because of that, font in the sidebar, under Recent Posts, does not appear to be changeable in the customization options.