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 got; slashdot2004 / slashdot2004 ... Guess there are more than one then..
...and then they create another new account...
I don't think that anyone will keep up with and pissed off and semi-organized group of users who don't want to be tracked.
Besides, I'm sure that they have fixed their computers so they won't boradcast an IP address...
The day the online LA Times started requiring subscriptions... ...I stopped reading the LA Times online.
...I stopped reading the Washington Post online.
The day the online Washington Post started requiring subscriptions...
Luckily, the NYTimes didn't require a valid email, once upon a time...
There are still enough free sources of news on the Internet-- if some papers want to cut down on their advertising exposure and online circulation, fine. Screw 'em. There is no reason they need my name to send me their news and ads.
Judging from my experiences today, I would say it's already happened. A dozen of their keys for nytimes.com didn't work.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
slashdot
slashdot
Works on quite a few sites.
Someone here, a while back, posted a way to "tag" your email addresses, so they'd still be deliverable, but you could tell who was responsible if you started getting spam.
c om
It was something like
user#nytimes@example.com
user%nytimes@example.
where user@example.com is the real address, and something similar to the above would be what you would enter while signing up for a site.
I can't recall what it is, but it would be very useful if anyone can remember.
103 year old surgeons? Heh. I forget where, but one website I encountered wouldn't let you enter a birthdate that was 100 years ago or more. I guess my 103 year old grandmother wasn't allowed to view the site.
When the latest movie hits the cinemas, you have to pay $10 to $15 (depending on currency) per viewing. If you're prepared to wait six months, you can rent it for $5 and view it a couple of times. If you wait a year, you can get it as a weekly video for less. If you're prepared to wait a couple of years, you can see that same movie for free when it is on TV.
The longer you're prepared to wait, the less it costs.
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. The online edition would then become a free archive service. People who want today's news can buy today's newspaper, or wait a day or two when it's posted online.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
I was a bit disappointed with the bugmenot-feature. I tought it would bring me right onto the site in some form of frame so I could be ready to surf right away. Now I have to type the newspaper URL atleast twice, copy/pate'ing the user/password.
Make it a frame, parse some HTML to allow one-click-login, add a banner to finance the bandwidth, and you should be all set.
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
Google apparently cuts deals with sites so that Google's crawler can read them, while others can't. Those sites show as "(subscription)" in Google News. If Google took the position that "if we can't get in as a normal user, we won't index it", this "registration" thing would stop.
A mozilla/firefox plugin that checked against an autogenerated file from their site could be a fun project sometime too.
Everything will be taken away from you.
http://asdf.com/asdfemail.html
Ow. I'd hate to see their mail inboxes.
Before the cypherpunks list became absurd the in thing to do was set up shared logins on free services with user and password equal to "cypherpunks". It still works some places.
I think it is great that different newspapers try different things. It gives us a chance to see what works and what fails.
It seems to me that newspapers lose more for requiring registration than they get from that little bit of demographic information.
Newspapers that require registration end up losing boat loads of traffic from search engines and they tend to lose the valuable backward links for article citations in blogs and what not.
In the long run, of course, the most successful format for online news would be the hybrid model that gives some features for paying, others for free registration and has a good amount of info available for free to build and maintain casual web traffic.
Absolutely. I used to work on several UK sites that had their stats audited so they could claim "x million users!" figures. It was a serious business: the auditors knew their stuff, and spotted fakes, dupes and miscellaneous other errors that we failed to spot.
I'll never understand the business model of a newspaper that puts its articles on their website. How the heck do they expect to make money from this? Cause its not from people clicking on their 2"x1" Tiffany's ad or from the inevitable spam people get when they like, actually use their real info when registering.
Another easy one to remember -- I always use:
Beverly Hills, CA 90210.
Even though I hated that show and doubt I have never seen a full episode, it has been very handy for online registrations!
Some people are like slinkies--basically useless but they bring a smile to your face when pushed down the stairs.
The nuts were 100% focused on users/month (making buying banners many-million-dollar-AOL-deals based on clicks the idea strategy); and even put one of their own relatives on our exec team as "CFO" to make us follow this really stupid strategy.
Our "partners" loved us, though.
Oh well, it was their money anyway.
I work at the Statesman, and I, too, thought that user registration was a terrible idea. I am of course in no position of authority there, but as soon as they instituted the registration I stopped even trying to get into the AA-S website. I've seen the site statistics, and the most visited page is the userreg page, with all other pages being visited an order of magnitude less that that one.
I finally had to visit the site for business reasons, and when confronted by the registration page, I did what I always do: made that shit up. Why the hell do you have to register even when you're on the company's intranet?
I bet having an email @asdf.com probably gets "cleaned" from most spammer's lists before they even try to spam you
bite my glorious golden ass.
And, to think I haven't ever bothered to register at Slashdot....
A newpaper or a Tv website can track what you read or what you see. This is easily done with cookies or your IP address.
So, if a reader visits a site daily and reads certain types of articles and seemingly always avoids other sections of the paper, you can pretty much figure out what that person is about, in general terms.
Registration is like putting a nose on a face. They can ask for more money to sell that info to advertisers and any likely buyers. Remember: commercials sites on this Internet thingamajig allow for advertisers to know more about you than surveys and Nielson families provide.
This is one question I will avoid a site rather than answer. There is one valid reason for wanting to know this: something that you intend to happen to me is critically dependent upon the presence or absence of certain organs. One example would be sexual intercourse with likelihood of conception -- but I only want to read the news, not have a freaking baby! {Similarly, age and income are not relevant unless you are planning to lend me money and want to be sure that I [a] can afford to pay it back and [b] aren't going to die before the repayment period is up.}
Why do sites ask this anyway? Well, this is a bit of an oversimplification; but if you answer "female", then it puts out adverts for things like shoes, cosmetics and weight loss products; if you answer "male" then it puts out adverts for car accessories, video games, power tools and that sort of thing.
Well, in most countries that is actually illegal since it is a form of sex discrimination. {Anyone know if the Unruh act would apply in California? The one that says any garment that would constitute appropriate dress on a woman must be held also to constitute appropriate dress on a man.} A man has a right to see adverts for shoes, cosmetics and weight loss systems, just as a woman has a right to see adverts for car parts, video games and power tools. It is a matter of personal preference and it depends more upon what lies between the ears, than what lies between the legs.
Now think about this. A cybervillain manages to access an ISP's server logs, and discovers an IP address which is being sent adverts for shoes, make-up and diet pills, from a registration site which asks a person's gender. If he can hack deeper into the system, and discover a physical address associated with that connection, then he has effectively located a potential victim.
Ask any CPO in any nick and they will tell you: if you're a woman living alone then you never reveal the fact to anybody you have a choice not to reveal it to. You use your initials, so they can't see it's a woman's name, without a prefix ("Ms" / "Miss" / "Mrs") -- just "A.J.S318." is less obvious than "Anita Jane S318.". Some even advice against double-locking your front door {i.e. so it can't be opened from the inside} because if anyone sees you do it, it shows the house is obviously empty. {Use a Chubb lock as well if you think a Yale lock isn't enough by itself}.
Although our hypothetical cybervillain is already prying somewhere he should not be, there is no earthly reason why the NYT et al should be {possibly illegally} practising this kind of sex discrimination in the first place -- if they simply displayed the same adverts to everyone, then women might be a little safer.
And by the way, I see nothing wrong with lying if the correct answer is "none of your bloody business" but the person doing the asking has not provided such an option.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
For instance, they might show ridiculously ad-ridden pages (with a 2 minute DHTML/flash/full screen "click to continue to article" ads) for those with bogus registrations (based on a bad email address). They could do anything from showing non-updated (day old) news or, at worst, add "not" after every "was" or "had" and completely throw the reader for a loop. Of course in the last case, they'd probably need to modify their logo/title to show that it was no longer their newspaper to maintain their credibility.
The technology to do this is trivial. If the day comes when a falsely-registered user is worth less to the site (because of advertiser's refusals to pay) than non-readers, I could very well see this happening.
While I have become pretty good at ignoring banners, I'd honestly just prefer the way it is without the eye-sores. I'll take copying/pasting over "punch the monkey" banners any day.
--
Will
Why does online registration offend, but not offline?
Why so much angst about online newspaper reigstration when we've been providing the same information to the same newspapers for years when we get a paid subsription to the dead-tree version?
The same info gets collected and entered into the paper's databases.
Why is providing a (real) name and address so someone can deliver your subscription not a privacy issue, but everyone gets hysterical about keying the same info into on web form?
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Newspaper revenue comes from the print ads. So long as people aren't unsubscribing from their paper in favor of the online version, they can put (and do) ALL their content online and still be fine. Case in point, I subscribe to the daily Washington Post even though i read almost the entire thing online. I rarely open up the hard copy, but occasionally, if I didn't get the chance or there's something I really want to keep, I'll crack it open. I don't think too many papers are in dire straits because they have an online version.
--trb
Yeah, I was disappointed with that, too. But I was even more disappointed that not one of the several passwords I tried for the Washington Post worked. Maybe they expire quickly because the user name is the email address, but I tried seven or eight different ones and they all failed.
Download my free songs!
I use:
1060 W. Addison
Chicago, IL 60610
(It's a Blues Brothers homage; that's Wrigley Field. I hate registration Nazis.)
What would work better is no annoying logins, just a form on the main page someplace where you can voluntarily click off on what banners and ads get displayed by topic, and/or it is parsed with what story you are looking at. And personally I prefer to look at printer friendly text pages instead of the latest flasheroo. Online news sites are expensive because most of them are just too freaking busy. Earlier webmasters understood that concept, now it appears to have been forgotten, perhaps to keep people employed? I don't know, but there ya go. Simple concept, google does it, these online registration papers are trying to beat the best success story out there, which proves they are WRONG.. You will see the ads anyway, might as well have them be somewhat relevant to your normal interests, and this CAN be done without logins. For instance, google sidebar ads, I have clicked through to a lot of them before after running a search, because they were relevant to my interests, and I don't need the ad company to have some cost increasing studies and extra people to hire to figure this out, to determine what my interests are because I already know that much better than they ever can do, and it doesn't require me logging in to them to know that. Same effect, better in fact, and it's better than logins and surveys from both privacy concerns and from useability and numbers of eyeballs looking at your website concerns. Some people won't ever look at ads, some will, you won't change that with a login or not. I will if they are relevant to my tastes, which can be determined by flicking off a form quickly and just by which articles and stories I am interested in. The insta-form method is superior, and nowadays it's just RUDE to ask a new visitor to your website for their email, right off the bat before you do anything else, because anyone who doesn't realise there's a spam problem is not paying any attention. Slashdot is an example of what I mean, I am not blocked from content immediately, even if I don't "login". I get offered a better expoperience if I *do* login, but I am not hit with a brickwall just to get to the site. It's a better idea. Google doesn't block me from their site, and as a consequence I use them, and their pages ALWAYS look good to me and always load fast and are clean, smooth, and it's never mattered what browser I use, and I don't have to eat their cookie to use the site, or be required to have the latest hardware or be on a broadband connection.
I have two basic criteria when I surf, if you are on the web and want my traffic,for whatever reason, don't make it hard for me to use your site, so your page should render fairly decent in my browser and with my connection-not yours but mine, and it shouldn't be a hassle to get to the content. One or the other of those problems is almost tolerable, *both* is a deal breaker, and if either one is "too bogus for me" that's a deal breaker as well, no visit from me.
The problem of spam and online privacy is real, and online privacy is important because it relates to meatspace privacy down the food chain. We have ENOUGH databases now. I walk into the grocery store I don't want to "login" to use their store. If I go to a newstand and buy a deadtrees magazine or newspaper, I don't want to login to buy it or read it. I'm willing to pay a reasonable fee for it because I know that sort of copy in hand is expensive to manufacture, and they don't give me the option of a cheaper version with just the two sections I am interested in, they are forced to sell the entire paper or mag. And here's where online is better, I don't have to "buy" the entire thing, I can usually get by with a page or two, I am hardly ever going to look at every single page on any online newspaper site.
If the online edition is too expensive for them, from bandwith and having to have a higher amount of employees all the time just to produce it, and they got su
Some of them seem to think that its wrong to give fake information, or that you may be tracked down or something. people need to be educated about this stuff!
If they could track you down that easily, why would they be asking for your information in the first place?
You're right, really, people just don't think much, do they? I agree... people need to be told about this sort of thing. I was doing some searching with my dad a few weeks ago for something fairly esoteric, and ran into a registration using his machine. Since I was searching for him, he immediately started giving answers to me for the questions on the screen. I had to stop a moment and ask him why he was answering these questions. He didn't have any ready answer for me.
So that got me into the whole "how much junk mail do you get" and "there's a reason you get 100 spam emails a day, you know" speech. Then I proceeded to fill in fake info to the registration screen, and you could see the lightbulb turn on in his head. It simply had never occurred to him to use fake data or how/where companies get information for junk mail and spam and such.
I admit that it took a bit of time to explain how companies (some, not all) sold this data in bulk to other people, who sold it to other people, and so on and so forth, until some scumbag who emails you ads for viagra or cicalis from mexico gets a hold of it. He couldn't believe that a company would sell data like that. Most people never think about this sort of thing. Frankly, I think that a lot of people aren't comfortable with the idea that information has value. It's like the fact that you can actually SELL INFORMATION simply doesn't register in their minds. Maybe, being computer geeks, we're more used to this concept or something. I don't know for sure.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
"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."
:)
But, but, we're geeks. We don't understand business. How dare you enlighten our self-imposed ignorance?
Seriously, I hear a lot of stuff on "/." that indicates that most Slashdotters only have the most superficial understanding of business. e.g. makes money.
Funny thing is I had a conversation a couple days ago with someone like the original poster, whom we gave your answer, and STILL he didn't want to register AND wanted the newspaper (yes he's a Linux advocate who reads this forum).
Some people simply don't understand that they can't have everything their way.
Interesting response. The central fault in both your post and the strategy of newspapers is that registration provides the geolocation data required to effectively target advertising. It does not. User submitted data is notoriously 'dirty' from a programmers pov. It's either deliberately fabricated, or contains genuine errors, or is out of date. You are much better relying on IP mapping
to deliver broadly well targeted material than registration to provide aparrently accurately targeted advertising very badly. Just my 0.2c
Privacy.net was made for this very purpose. Using the me@privacy.net address on registrations guarantees no human will ever see an email sent to the address. Upon sending an email to the address, they'll receive an autoresponse back saying, among other things, that "The person who provided you with this e-mail address did not perceive value in receiving your e-mail and/or did not want to provide you with their identity."
The truth about Scientology, Xenu, and you: Operation Clambake
IANAL, but it seems to me that this practice is illegal in Canada under the new (2001?) PIPEDA Privacy Legislation.
/need/ your name and contact information to send you the latest headlines, something they would undoubtedly be unable to do.
This legislation makes it illegal for any company offering commercial services to ask for personally identifiable information unless that information is specifically required to provide that service. In other words, the online papers would have to prove that they
Currently the process of challenging the practice of companies is complaints driven. You have to file a complaint to the Privacy Commission, and they are required to investigate and publish a decision within 1 year. So far they've published over 300 such decisions, including some against major banks and credit checks, major websites and cookies, and other significant change in information gathering practices.
Perhaps someone should file a complaint with them?
Orion Blastar, my handle, my alias, and many organiztions think that name is real. I have a Yahoo address all mail for Orion goes to, and I check it every day. I always ask not to be put on third party list and not to add my name or email to lists, but it gets added anyway.
;)
:)
Apparently Orion gets credit card, insurance, bank account, loan, etc applications with rates better than I can get with my real name! I am not sure how, but somehow Orion got a credit history better than mine, with no income reported or recorded at all and no record of ever existing besides online web site registrations. If I did not use my real address on the registrations, I would have never known these things. He does not even have a SSN or any record of existing anywhere on the planet.
Orion Blastar is the ghost in the machine, the man who never existed, but gets treated better than the man who does indeed exist and is behind the ghost.
In a way, Orion Blastar is an Internet experiment of mine that went way out of my control. Based on a fictional character I used to play in a role playing game, and with fictatious posts in various forums, and pretending to be a space pirate, and various other nutty things. Plus a way I can register with an online web site and still stay anoymous. Woot! Who knew it would go this far?
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.