Slashdot Mirror
The Not-So-Free Web
Big Brass Balls writes: "The NY Times has an article about how freebies are becoming harder to come by on the web." Registration free link, even -- "just doing my bit to promote freebies on the web." And I never got my free 50 photos developed by Shutterfly, either.
The web is free! Is slashdot not free? Is hotmail/yahoo not free? Is google not free? Oh wait, we want physical stuff? puhlez! Is cnn.com not free? once I got cnn.com I cancelled my cable. Talk about free stuff, that is free $15 a month in my wallet. The web is mostly free for most things that I am after, information! I mean, what do we want? free breakfast? Shit, without the net, I got free samples via junk mail, I discard any free sample I get, likewise all those free web thingy pissed me off, and I am glad that they are gone. Cuz guess who gets them, little kids and adults who don't know better, giving out their entire information to whoever for free stuff? What is up with people and free stuff? My friend said if McD gave free fries for a sample of DNA, that many people will line up, I am beginning to believe that is true.
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
Newswire: May 2, 2001: Yahoo! (YHOO) stock quintupled today on news that the New York Times had just signed a $2.3 trillion dollar contract with Yahoo! to publish its stories on Yahoo's site.
One anonymous NYTimes source was quoted as saying: "We just put this story up on how the 'free' model wasn't working, and our web servers crashed under the load of all the people coming from Yahoo's site. Boy, were we wrong!
Our sysadmin keeps screaming something about slashing dots affecting us, and how we're a bunch of clueless idiots, but our marketing department tells us they're positive the users are clicking on our article because they saw it on Yahoo, and besides, they throw much better parties."
--
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
Only now the VCs have stopped picking up the tab.
Lets be realistic about whats free on the Internet. Everything has a price as we all know, so why are many things harder to find then they normally were? The answers are simple.
.03 cent click throughs? its unfeasible. For those who have done IT budgets here we all know how much a mid sized cage can cost in a colo. Its a miracle many survived as long as they did.
Before the tech sector stocks took major dives, we had drones of companies offering everything short of their mothers for free. An influx of companies who never had a definitive game plan for their businesses who thought that by offering X service for free, they'd be the ones and only to capture that segment of the market.
Venture Capital firms went bonkers thinking that by these companies getting users they'd eventually end up having that company convert revenue by turning around, after a set quota of users were met, and offering something for pay.
Well people didn't want to pay and the companies should have clearly seen that from the beginning. If someone is signing up for a free service, what makes you think they'd want to pay for something they can move to the next competitor and get for free?
Aside from that, many people bitch about the freebie services they already have and turn around and abuse it entirely. eg. All those spammers who open up a new Hotmail account daily. So its no surprise the number of companies have declined. How do you expect them to pay bandwidth, colo, equipment fees, with
Hardcore crypto
Want Root?
It's about the fact that the entire cultures of the Web and also of USENET are changing. Content providers aren't just not offering freebies, which as you point out is economically understandable; they are also putting in absurd "copy protection" mechanisms, digital watermarking, etc.
As an example, the number of sites I run across with stupid and ineffectual but nonetheless annoying "anti-copy scripts" is increasing exponentially. Usually they try to disable right-clicking to get a context menu, by throwing up an inane message about not being allowed to copy content. Naturally, the scripts can be disabled by any competent person, or can be bypassed by simply right-clicking and pressing return to get rid of the box and right-clicking again fast enough. But they represent an altogether alarming shift in attitude. No longer are people sharing information, data, resources--they're "displaying" those resources, but not allowing them to be "used" and reused.
The most obvious examples are images and multimedia. If I go to a website, sometimes I see a nice background pattern or image I'd like to save to use on my desktop. But, oh, wait, someone has disabled right-clicking. Bah. I can get around it easily, but most average net surfers will not be able to. Ditto for images--for example, my father was on a website with tractor images, and for some godforsaken reason he actually collects antique tractors; he saw pictures of the same model tractor he has, but in a beautiful already-restored condition, and wanted to save them. Bang, disabled. What would it possibly hurt him to have those images available locally? And of course RealMedia and the Microsoft asf/wmf formats exist mainly for the purpose of streaming video or audio without the user being able to save the clips.
I don't know about you, but I don't like what that represents. The sad part is that even podunk personal sites are getting into the act and restricting content from being copied to a local disk. This is just not in the spirit of sharing and goodwill and community; it's extending meatspace limits on property into the digital realm where those limits are entirely artificial and do not belong. If you release something into the digital webbified world, you should expect people to want to copy it, and you should welcome that as the result of a cyberworld where copying items has virtually no cost. Otherwise, release it somewhere else, not on the net.
To make matters worse, this is a very short-sighted attitude. Web sites disappear all the time, and if no one can copy their content locally, that content will disappear along with the website if the content was copy-protected and view-only.
Plus, the whole attitude behind that is just selfish and contrary to the principles the Web and USENET were founded on. Just think of the recent story about gaming sites closing right and left--this didn't involve copy-protection, but it does involve that attitude of not being part of the community so much as being a business first last and always. Many excellent gaming sites had worthwhile, even unique content, and were forced to close. Yet I can't recall a single one making their resources available to the rest of the community, say by giving a free licence to host any of the dead site's resources on other more successful gaming sites, temporarily at least. Funny, I thought gaming was such a community thing, and that gaming sites are an outgrowth of that community. Yet no one seems to share like a community; if a site dies, usually all its unique content dies with it, never to be seen again.
Another issue is the artificial restrictions and dangers created by digital watermarking. Today watermarking is used almost exclusively on images, but the applications for the future are unlimited. Today, it is most commonly membership sites that insert personally identifiable UserID and date and IP information into images, so that if those images turn up elsewhere, someone particular can be blamed and kicked out. But with the technologies companies like Microsoft are pushing, even non-membership sites could watermark content and persecute people for noncommercial copying of it. Watermarks will turn up in audio and video streams, background images, every kind of data. And when that happens, there will be no community on the Net; resources will never again be shared; the rules of meatspace will effectively have been artificially grafted onto cyberspace.
Even today watermarking causes problems. For a very long time USENET has been a place where people noncommercially share not just chat and other text, but any sort of data and information they are mutually interested in. There's a group my dad can post to about tractors, and even post pictures of his tractors or get images or video involving tractors. You can find groups which post high-res scans of photographic art. You can find groups for freeware and groups for pirated applications, groups for start-up sounds and groups for full mp3s, groups for pr0n and groups for bird photography. The spirit of USENET was always the spirit of noncommercial sharing of digital content, both original and borrowed from the Web and scanned from meatspace.
But, companies from the Web feel free to spam USENET with ads for commercial websites, causing my service provider costs to skyrocket, and then complain when their content is posted for free to USENET. They shouldn't spam USENET users if they don't want their stuff to be posted onto USENET. I think it's rightfully open season on content providers who spam us without our consent; we damn well should reproduce their content without their consent. Tit-for-tat.
Yet, a few days ago I was scanning through some groups and ran across a poster who was not only told by a commercial website to stop posting their images, but this commercial website posted the man's name, address, and telephone number to USENET based on matching the digital watermark in the images to a UserID and billing information in their database. He repeated the message several times. I could not believe it. They published his personal info for all to see, for posting a few images he got from them after they spammed USENET with ads. That is a violation of the highest order. And this is the sort of attitude some arrogant content providers are getting. We're not in for a rosy future.
That's all I really have to say about that, except to say that the site that published this man's personal info was http://www.photostudio17.com and I hope there's a script kiddie or haxor out there with his name on them. The USENET article in question is--aw hell, my crappy news server expired the original articles, but some message-IDs that are related are MPG.1558a2f6e185166a989de4@news.cncdsl.com kaTH6.49361$U4.11780044@news1.rdc1.tn.home.com MPG.1559893ed8cd22a6989de5@news.cncdsl.com and many others you'll find in the stated group, to corroborate the story.
In addition, does anyone have information on how to remove various types of digital watermarks? I can post the images in question somewhere, if you can't find them in the group but would like to look into the particular watermarking these abusive privacy-breakers used; but perhaps the images in the preview section of their site have similar watermarking.
I'm not really interested in these clothed pictures of late teens and twentysomethings; I'm just interested in getting back at someone who's violated internet privacy in a very real and annoying way. Comments, suggestions?
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
... just the other day i saw a page with loads of links saying things like "click here for free naked teenage pictures"
I haven't gotten anything free off the web in a while. The last time I got something was about 4 or 5 years ago when I got a mug from a RAID company (I didn't know what a RAID was at the time - I just thought the mug was cool). Anyway - about a week later I started getting phone calls (I wasn't smart enough to not put my real phone number on the request form - I figured if I put a fake number, I wouldn't get the mug) from the company asking if I liked the mug my employees ordered for me (I had a growing staff of 20) and if I had a chance to look over their catalogue. I had said we already owned a couple of their products and we were using them in our NT servers. By the 3rd call I was quite annoyed so I asked the guy to hold on a second, put down the phone and started yelling at my 'co-workers' what did they mean the RAID controller just went down? When I picked up the phone again, the guy wasn't there and he never called back again :)
Like sex? Read and write about it! Indecent Blogging
Check out my free SI swimsuit calendar that I signed up for on a website and you'll know why it is free. Can't believe they jacked up the number of days in April...
Yeah.. I'm still waiting for my cash from GET CASH NOW!, a free holiday from Disney and Microsoft, and that new kidney for the kid in Florida.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
The following section from the NYT article cited has been refuted by Salon. They've said they have no such plans & that David Talbot was completely misquoted.
"A lot of our audience pays $300 a year to join National Public Radio and they don't have to pay anything," he said. As early as next year, Mr. Talbot said, Salon hopes to impose a fee of $75 to $150 a year to read any of its site with ads. Why not just impose the full fee now? "That's jumping off a cliff with no net," Mr. Talbot said. Sites that have imposed fees, like Yahoo Auctions, have experienced declines in volume of as much as 90 percent. And the biggest subscription content site, The Wall Street Journal Online, has 574,000 subscribers at $29 to $59 a year, one-tenth the monthly audience of the largest free financial news sites.
Guess the NYT just ain't what she used to be.
The only tool you've got against psychosis is experience.
From salon.com
"Others have written to us wondering whether today's Premium is simply a nose-in-the-tent kind of deal, preparing the way for an entirely subscribers-only site in the future. (An erroneous media report misquoting our founder, David Talbot, outlining such a plan helped fan such suspicions.) That's not our plan."
The rest of the article can be found here: http://www.salon.com/letters/editor/2001/05/02/pre mium_progress/index.html
What? You're providing a service on the internet with the full knowledge that you're not going to make money? I suppose you're doing this because you like it? :-)
It's sites like yours that are what makes the internet worthwhile for me. You have some knowledge that you are willing to share with the rest of the world, and you are happy to do it without needing to make a buck. True, you've got some ads to try and defray some of your costs, but you're not trying to make a living off of them.
It's the big companies who are going in and really trying to make money with poor business models that will always fail. The only ones that seem to be surviving are the ones who got in early with something innovative that actually works, or brick-and-mortar companies who are using the internet as an extension of themselves - kind of like an online catalog store.
It's damn hard to break even doing freebies. My site CoasterCount.com offers a free service to roller coaster enthusiasts. The web hosting runs me about $30 a month, and I *just* barely make that back in advertising. Any service that has actual overhead and material costs is NOT going to break even, because generally it is now possible to make about .2c per add view. If your expenses thus exceed about 1 penny per customer visit, you can toss your dreams of any providing it at cost out the window.
TODO: Something witty here...