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Looking at multiple descriptions of how Scroll will work, they explicitly say the Scroll subscription fee won't cover individual news site paywalls -- you'll also have to have a subscription to the underlying site to get unlimited (or, in some cases, any) articles.

So unless I'm missing something, the only apparent benefit from my $5/month to Scroll is to get ad-free content (and, I suppose, less anti-adblocker cat and mouse).

Looking at multiple descriptions of how Scroll will work, they explicitly say the Scroll subscription fee won't cover individual news site paywalls -- you'll also have to have a subscription to the underlying site to get unlimited (or, in some cases, any) articles.

So unless I'm missing something, the only apparent benefit from my $5/month to Scroll is to get ad-free content (and, I suppose, less anti-adblocker cat and mouse).

Professor Melissa Zimdars' list of "fake news" sites, which is now making the rounds as some sort of authoritative resource, even making its way into browser extensions to "protect" users from fake news sites.

http://www.dailydot.com/layer8...

http://nymag.com/selectall/201...

http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/...

http://reason.com/blog/2016/11...

There is a danger that all the sites providing this news are, in fact, fake news sites themselves...
 

How the rise of fake Facebook news - and the fall of local papers - fueled #Trump http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/...

Sounds like #Brazil, where in week leading up to impeachment, 3/5 of most shared articles on Facebook were false http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/p..."

ANYBODY who gets their news from only one source simply doesn't care whether it's true.

And we all know what they say about news without truth, right?

It gets repeated...

Adblocking is coming to the iPhone with iOS 9

The next version of Safari will let users block ads on iPhones and iPads.

With the roll-out of iOS 9, Apple is giving app developers an easy way to create mobile ad blockers for Safari on iPhones and iPads. The new "Content Blocking" feature allows developers to pass a JSON file with a set of rules for images, popups, cookies, resources and other elements in Safari.

Sources like The Next Web point out that such a feature would allow ad blocking and privacy apps "to exist on iOS for the first time since launch".

On the other hand the Marketing Land warns that this move "could chip away at Google's and other ad networks' mobile ad revenue from iOS devices", NiemanLab calls it "a blow for mobile advertising" and Cult of Mac asks if that is a good thing and proposes as an answer:

Is that a good thing? Well, maybe for the average user, for a period of time. But when you block ads on the web, you prevent content providers from earning any revenue from them. If we all did that, our favorite sites would have to find other sources of revenue, or stop supplying content altogether.

I have no idea why, in a technical and privacy oriented forum as ours, the focus of the accepted submission was not on the fact that this is an "Adblocker app enabler" move instead of a "Google killer move".

Ted Nelson and Jaron Lanier would like to have a word with you...

Chris Anderson is on line two...

Actually, presenting facts to people opposed to them only seems to harden their opinion further in that direction. People are so invested in being right that they dig in deeper when their beliefs are "under attack" by facts that don't agree with what they believe.

Amusingly, you know what makes partisanship disappear? Money. If you give a financial incentive for correct answers or for admitting ignorance, people of different political strips start giving much more similar answers rather than just spouting off whatever sound bite they've heard from their own party members.

Why are so many insistent on free exchange of copyrighted material? Content creators don't like the idea, they'd like to earn a living. Publishers hate it even more, they want monopolies to extract every bit of value from their 'properties' as possible. The only people who like it are consumers who must go through the walled gardens publishers have set up. And therein lies the problem, publishers seek to extract perpetual rents, coddling a slim number of creators while sucking up value created for free by the general populace.

Jaron Lanier recently came out with a book, Who Owns the Future?, where he argues that digital networking has had a decimating effect on the middle classes of the world. In this Nieman Journalism Lab interview at the Harvard School for Journalism, Lanier outlines a micropayment solution whereby the general public would be paid back for information collection and content creation directly in a distributed manner, thereby cutting out the centralized collection and distribution points that content monopolies have created.

The point is that people are doing a tremendous amount of work for free all across the 'net, often in ways that don't resemble pure craft work yet represent tremendous value for large companies like Google, Microsoft, Sony, Facebook, and the other big players. Yet those companies want every cent in perpetual rent for the work they perform in creating and distributing their goods. He is not arguing 'income inequality' in the sense of wealth redistribution - say, using government taxation to collect revenue and provide welfare payments to an underclass - but instead to distribute payments to every value add created.

For example, were you to translate a document from one language to the next, and google uses it as part of for statistical analysis in their language translation engine, then every time your work is referenced you should get paid for that effort. If you use a camera to document and tag a new pothole in the street, and Google Streetview uses that as part of a pothole map, you should be paid for that effort every time this is referenced (until the data becomes defuncts). This is similar to copyright in that for content creators, many of whom craft and distribute work for free instead of receiving payment for the work.

It's as if whole populations have decided that because content monopolies are taking all the work out on the net for free they can get to monetize, while demanding enforcement of intellectual property rights in an unequal exchange, that people are justified in taking what they want for free. Yet even if this were the case, the trade is still pretty bad for the people doing so much free work. You can't eat a pirated song or movie. And yet every step we take on the internet is used by the big players to aggregate vast wealth at our expense.

I can see some problems with Lanier's approach. For example, he's like to do away with monopolies and move to a distributed payment system. Yet how is one to handle those payments without a banking monopoly? Bitcoin? How do governments tax those transactions? (Yes, I know many people would prefer they didn't - but that doesn't mean such a system is viable given political realities). How do governments control and track criminal trade? (Yes, I know many people would prefer they didn't - but that doesn't mean such a system is viable given law enforcement realities).

Still, I think Lanier has put his finger on the central problem of inequality between people and these companies. It's not income inequality per se, but that the system provides no payment for value add to the vast majority of people while at the same time monetizing that very value to sell back to us. All while IT systems automate labor that used to be paid work, and companies outsource across national lines to the lowest bidder. People ar

Yes, but it looks better. It gives the UI a consistent design metaphor, something to design around besides the default GUI toolkit. I mean, which looks better: the stolen design metaphor, or the default UI elements?

Ideally, a creative artist could come up with something that breaks free from the constraints of reality, and transcends traditional UI design to become something great. Until we have such a Neo-Picasso, using physical objects as a design metaphor is better than design dictated by default UI elements.

Now, if they somehow become more difficult to use because of their metaphor, then that's a true fail. Form must follow function, but in the case of the podcast player, I think they found a good balance.

This is precisely why I don't give most companies this information -- because I don't trust them with it. Not to keep it safe, not to use it as they say, and not to provide it to someone else.

We are Internet. We know who you are. Resistance is futile.

Thanks to browser fingerprinting, flash cookies, ad network beacons, content beacons, and traffic bugs we put in every web page (digg, stumbleupon, facebook 'like this', twitter), you cannot escape our eye, we know every site you view. We also know your ip address and where you live.

Oh, and we already know your real favorite pet, you sure were naive back when you had that geocities account. Lying at this point is futile.

Oh.....You mean something more like this??? I know it's not a "site" but rather an App with politics contrary to Apples likely, unlike iFart, which is cool.
http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/04/mark-fiore-can-win-a-pulitzer-prize-but-he-cant-get-his-iphone-cartoon-app-past-apples-satire-police/

The truth is no longer an absolute defense against libel in the U.S. anymore either:

http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/02/the-most-dangerous-libel-decision-in-decades/

Read the recent posts about . Newspapers are failing and it won't be stopped. Shirky has made the best point about. It's not really Google's fault either. You might lay the blame with Craig's list more than google. They've changed the revenue model by taking classified ads. Advertising in general has changed and that is killing every ad supported business model.