Slashdot Mirror
Turning Up The Heat On On-Line Registration
Saeed al-Sahaf writes "CNN is running a story on the growing number of print newspapers with on-line editions that are requiring registration. Apparently there are some folks out there who don't like this 'feature'! I found a few things interesting about the story: Privacy groups say it's a dangerous practice and promotes spam; I didn't realize people put real personal info into these things (110-year-old surgeons from Bulgaria named Mickey Mouse). About 15 to 20 percent of the registrations for the Philadelphia Inquirer turned out to be bogus, a figure that was much lower than I would have thought. Also mentioned in the story is a web site called BugMeNot.com, which lists 'communal' logins and passwords for on-line newspapers."
I don't know if its subscription or not, but entering slashdot.org at BufMeNot brings it up.
Unknown host pong.
UPDATE:
That username/password combo doesn't seem to be valid for slashdot at all.
Unknown host pong.
Information. Information about their customers: who is reading their stuff, how old they are, how much money they probably make...in other words, information that defines you as a certain type of consumer who spends their money in a certain way.
They call it "Information Poisoning" and are absolutely baffled why on earth anyone would ever practice it. Just for useful reference for other peoples information poisoning efforts I have an easy one to remember
Young America, MN 55555
This will match the zip code to the city and will pass those systems that try to verify against bogus data.
They don't care about the people who refuse to sign up, this is meaningless to them. But if they get enough bogus data, those databases become significantly devalued.
And to whoever has that bob@jones.com email address, I offer my sincerest apologies.
They are not going to be too impressed with marketing data like this. If people can be proven to be lying about one thing in a survey then all the other data is suspect as well.
Compare it with banners ads sold on number of shows, clicks AND sales. The first are insanely high but also easily faked. Clicks are slightly more reliable but any advertiser is really intrestted in the number of sales generated.
So if your site can sell 1 billion views that is barely worth anything. If it can produce 100.000 clicks that might get you a few bucks. But generate 1000 sales and you are golden.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
There is no reason they need my name to send me their news and ads
Weird. Despite having been registered with the NYTimes for 2 years now, I've never received any communications from them be it news/spam/anything else nor has the email address I provided them been given to anyone.
Backup not found: (A)bort (R)etry (P)anic
For sites that require a valid email address for registration, there's an excellent site called www.dodgeit.com
You don't need to create an account, just invent one.
Then go to the site and you (and anyone) can look at the mail sent to that address. Go try it out, go to the site, and punch in "ihatespam" for example and you can see all email sent to ihatespam@dodgeit.com
If only sites like these were hosted on some sort of P2P network where any browser could access it, but the 'site' could distribute load across many hosts (and have differing information -- bad that it's not global and constant, but good that it's not controlled and thus can always exist -- an acceptible trade-off).
Hmm, that BugMeNot site doesn't seem to work very well. I put in slashdot.org and tried 4 different logins, none of which worked. It's possible it has a problem with people going in and changing the password.
If you can't get a login/password easy, and need a valid email address to confirm registration, try mailinator.com.
They are email accounts that require no passwords, or even any setting up. They are throw away accounts designed to curb spam.
Corporations: your universal scapegoat for all society's ills.
The nytimes is easy, just use a filter so that your referrer URL isn't the automatic registration site (mine is always the page I'm trying to view) and automatic registration works great.
Actually atleast the biggest Newspaper in Finland "Helsingin Sanomat" has the option of subscribing to it via the web. Their web page has basic news for free, but to get the rest, you need to either get the physical paper or pay them 9,95 /month or 3 single.
But on the archive thing, they actualy do not make it free, instead they charge extra for doing searches in old archives, for the daily cost you only get week old papers.
There's also a Firefox plugin that lets you choose "bugmenot" from the context menu. :)
Strange that this should be on slashdot when I only found out about bugmenot.com about a week ago
Homonyms are fun!
You're driving your car, but they're riding their bikes there.
You can include comments in an email address by enclosing them in brackets e.g.
someone(Hello)@somewhere.com
would still be delivered OK to:
someone@somewhere.com
See RFC822 (http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc822.html) for more info.
It wasn't me - I've never mentioned it on here - but customised email addressing is something I've done ever since I bought myself a vanity-domain.
I run a catch-all email policy, so whatever gets sent to any_address@my_vanity_domain.com lands in my inbox.
Any organisation who asks for my email address gets their_own_name@my_vanity_domain.com. The idea is that I can identify the source of any spam, take whatever measures I can, and shut down the address that it comes in on. For that matter, my /. account is registered under slashdot@my_vanity_domain.com. Not because I expect /. to be the origin of any spam - I'm just consistent.
Interestingly, the only addresses I've ever had serious spam problems on have been webmaster@ (which I used to have scattered liberally around my personal website - obviously harvested by 'bots), a couple of addresses that I have used to post on usenet (no surprise), and one that I used to have publically displayed on a car forum (running phpBB2, for what it's worth). I also got a bit of spam on sales@, administrator@, info@, and other obvious spam-server-side inventions...before I blocked them.
I look after my (technophobic) sister's business domain, using a similar policy. She had a persistent pr0n spammer, using an invented address (hhy@, iirc). It turns out that she was opening their html-formatted messages through a webmail interface, which was downloading and displaying uniquely-named images - so identifying hhy@ as a live address. Sneaky. Not a problem after I blocked all mail to hhy@ ;-)
Unfortunately, my catch-all email policy has become a problem with all the recent address-spoofing Outlook worms, which send themselve to and from spoofed_address@my_vanity_domain.com from every infected winbox that has ever had contact with any_address@my_vanitydomain.com. They fill my inbox with worm-laden junk (as well as auto-generated courtesy messages from various postmasters, informing me that spoofed_address@ needs to run an antivirus program). But I guess this is not news to most /.ers who manage mail servers.
If nothing else, tracking spam sources is a harmless hobby. Worth the price of admission ($20/year, or whatever a domain costs these days) alone.
Newspapers should do the same thing. Keep the online edition free, and have no soul-sucking registration to view, but only allow the viewing of articles from non-current newspapers.
Ironically, it's the complete opposite. I work for a newspaper, and the only thing we charge for is archive access.
A newspaper's archive is priceless. Where else are you going to get the obit for a relative who died 15 years ago? Only one place, your local newspaper's library.
If you're mailhost is running the qmail mailserver, you can create aliases on the fly by appending -alias to your email address. So if you're email is bob@example.com, mail to bob-nytimes@example.com will be delivered to your mailbox as well.
Off course, a catch-all account like someone else suggested would accomplish the same thing.
One thing: just like writing bob AT example DOT com is painfully obvious to any mail harvester, the qmail alias trick is compromized as well. Once I received some virus mails after signing up with an online newspaper. Apparently, the newspaper gathered all emailaddresses in the addresbook in outlook(!), which was subsequently harvested by a virus. I noticed this, because I started receiving identical mails on bob@example.com and bob-newspaper@example.com simultaneously....
So far for that little trick.
I believe the poster is thinking of SMTP features such as the following:
l e.com
user(slashdot)@example.com
user+slashdot@examp
Depending on your ISP, these may or may not work, because these are not supported by all mail hosts.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
That's why I use:
:)
@example.com
@example.net
@example.org
(see http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2606.txt )
me@example.com works fine on most web pages
brgnever
As one of those unfortunate domain addicts, I have an over-abundance of domain names. Being king of your own domain means you can have any email address you want, so I register with unique addresses for each site I sign up for. NYC@[domain].com at newyorktimes.com, slash@[domain].com here, charlotte@[domain].com at charlotte.com, etc, etc.
In 3 years of doing this, the only spam I have ever gotten from signing up for ANYTHING, EVER, was from Honda.
The truth doesn't care what I think.
bugmenot has a firefox extension; seems to work right click on the page select bugmenot you get a popup with a username password works for me
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
It will be a criminal offence in the UK shortly if the proposals for new fraud laws go into effect. Then the bogus readers can be jailed!
Don't you just love it when you watch your country slide into authoritarianism little by little each day.
It would be nice, but any site checking their HTTP Referrer could lock all accounts coming from the bugmenot.com
Heh...actually, there's a firefox extension for bugmenot. Not exactly what you want, but its getting there.
Bugmenot
The business model here is the same as for the dead tree version ==> Advertising. Tradional newspapers make money from advertising, not from selling newspapers. The money you pay when buying a copy of a newspaper doesn't cover production costs for most papers. The rest is made up by advertising money.
--
Simon
New York NY 10001
They're not asking gender and salary information for purposes of ad targeting; they're simply doing this for demographic. Being able to tell your advertisers that your core audience is males age 30-35 making an average of $135k/year is a big deal to publishers. It means they can draw in advertisers specific to their audience they can make more money.
Mailinator is: http://www.mailinator.net/mailinator/Welcome.do
They answer this in the FAQ. It's to keep the sites from seeing referrers all over their weblogs.
Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo - H. G. Wells
I think everybody realizes that "privacy policies" are worthless.
Welcome to the Turing Tarpit, where everything is possible but nothing interesting is easy.
It's all but certain that the poor overworked mail administrators who are tasked with monitoring the abuse@ role account have nothing to do with the editorial content nor the web site or web site registration policy.
You'd do much better by abusing the letters-to-the-editor mailbox :)
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
For the Statesman, just go the the registration page. Click next without filling in any login information. When you get to the registration page, type in that you were born in 1999 and submit without entering any other information. Two clicks 1999 and your in.
Others already have posted the obvious answer that newspapers make most of their money on advertising, not circulation. I'll add some precision. (I am a strategist for a newspaper company.)
... which happens to work extraordinarily well on the Internet.
:-)
... please demonstrate where a newspaper has abused the email addresses provided by its users. No newspaper shares those addresses with advertisers. Every news company carefully controls the use of those email addresses -- even the Tribune Company, which requires that you consent to receive ad mail as a condition of site access, severely limits both the number and the nature of the emails. It would be bad business to do otherwise.
Three revenue drivers traditionally have been coequal for printed newspapers: Classified advertising, display advertising (the big ads on news pages), and circulation.
However, circulation revenues are rapidly declining due to market pressures, and circulation costs (a problem of print distribution, but not of Internet distribution) consume more than circulation sales brings in.
Display advertising has declined about 15 percentage points over the last couple of decades, largely due to retail sector consolidations and Wal-Mart (which does not advertise very much in newspapers). So newspapers are increasingly dependent on classified advertising
The audience is moving from print to the Internet, so it is imperative that newspapers find ways to serve that audience online (and deliver advertising to it).
On the Internet, the only business model that has been demonstrated to work for newspapers is the open, ad-supported model. The typical paid site gets something like 1.5 percent of the audience of the printed newspaper, while an open site may actually exceed the audience of the print product. So successful newspapers have open Web sites and rely on advertising for support.
Successful newspapers have implemented classified advertising pricing strategies that harvest that Internet-generated value. The single most effective advertising program implemented by newspapers is the "Top Jobs" program originated at sfgate,, which lets key classified advertisers pay extra for exposure on regular site content pages.
Regardless of what slashdot groupthink might dictate, the reality is that local retail banner and tile advertising also works. However, the Internet -- because of its potential global reach -- creates unique problems for local advertisers.
Consider the Washington Post. Its advertising base is local. Its Web reach is global. If you think about that for maybe five seconds, you can see why they have implemented registration. They have to develop two completely independent ad sales strategies -- one based on a global audience (which is why they ask business questions of nonlocal registrants) and another based on a local audience. And they need to be able to target local advertising based on geographic information from registration and also national advertising based on the B2B questions from registration.
It is an article of faith on slashdot that "everybody" lies on registrations. My own data shows under one percent falsification. Perhaps most people are not as dishonest as slashdotters.
As for the whine about "inevitable spam"
Disclaimer: I Work at a Newspaper in the advertising department...
the thing about online, is now most papers are selling online/print package deals. So you buy your paper ad, add an extra fee, and your ad goes online as well. It works great for the local retailers, even ef people don't actually click through, because the exposure online is longer than in print. (ex. in print, an ad runs for one day, and unless you buy multiple days, or weeks, the effectiveness goes down. On-Line, the ad stays in rotation for a week, which is a better deal for the small local retailers, since they get more exposure locally). They also usually tie-in listings and info pages to advertising, so as long as the retailer signs a contract for "X" number of days, then their listing stay on-line for say, 6 months in the local retailer info or whatever... This days, having an on-line version actually does bring in a decent ammount of revenue, especially with the cost of operating a website vs newsprint and press costs.
They were probably being used. Many sites seem to only allow one login at a time. It's a simple way to sidestep bugmenot-type sites.
A better approach would be a plug-in that auto generates some randomized semi-realistic data at each login. That would be pretty hard to detect or stop.
I have!
It's not horrible (thouogh I'd rather not recieve it). It comes in spurts, but averages 1-2 a month.
It may be because I was once a print subscriber.