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."
Haha, wouldn't it be a kicker if someone made a subscription account public so everyone could read the articles from the distant future...
[insert witty comment here]
If you go to BugMeNot.com and enter http://slashdot.org, you get:
;-)
CmdrTaco
password
Sheesh, I'd expect better from him!
...but I imagine that 'joe@aol.com' probably doesn't...
Of course, now that BugMeNot has been publicized, how long until all these sites check that site often and just disable all accounts that ever get listed there?
About 15 to 20 percent of the registrations for the Philadelphia Inquirer turned out to be bogus
:)
That percentage has just risen
I live in Austin. I used to read the Statesman online, but now they require registrations, and the damn thing asks for the password every single time.
So, I read www.kxan.com instead. I think that no matter where I turn, I can find an equivalent article from a competitor. Even content such as what salon.com carries can be found elsewhere. Slate.com and theatlantic.com can give me lots to think about when salon.com's advertisements fail to run on Linux.
So, no biggie. If they make it easy for me, I'm content to set myself up as a 99 year old woman from Ahzerbaijahn. But if they bug me twice about it, or if they fail to test their advertizing/authentication scheme with the browser that I choose to use, then I'll never visit their shithole again.
So long, Austin American Statesman. You suck!
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Just a theory, of course, but I bet the newspapers could care less what info. you use to register, as long as you do. And if you register with a new name every time, even better-- that's twice the number of readers they can claim to have to their advertisers.
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.
... because since I've switched to firefox, I need to remember them again at least once to input (Since I'd been using autologin on most sites for months/years) and I use several variants of my name and passwords depending on the site and the requirements and I forget which I use where.
They found that 10-15% of email addresses are bogus. This makes perfect sense, because most users who register probably figure that they need to recieve an e-mail to confirm registration, (even if you don't, as in the case of the Philadelphia Inquirer). If you look at Name/address/phone number/other personal info, then the amount of falsified data is probably at 85%+. Of course, there's no way to run a database queue to find out how much of that is fake, since they can't just count bounced e-mails. But to the companies e-mail is really all that matters anyway, so the fact that the other info is fake is moot.
I know people who give their email username AND password even when trying to use "send/forward to a friend" links in a newspaper.
That said, I don't think lying is an option for many people.
No sane advertiser will pay for a spot based on research data where such an easily checked piece of data is already proven to be false 1 out of 5 times. Income, job, interest are then likely to have a far higher error rate.
I do know that newspapers have to make money and that giving their content away for free does not make too much sense. But this doesn't make sense either.
If they want to get info let them start with basic geographic data. Don't show someone with a european IP ads for america only products. Surely that shouldn't be that hard?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
slashdot
slashdot
Works on quite a few sites.
After all these years of filling out fake information in online forms, I'm not really very sure what my own name, address, or social security information is any more.
:)
Maybe that's why the IRS is less than entertained by my tax returns.
Name: John Smith (note the resemblance)
SS#: 078-05-1120
Addr: 1 Main Street
Anytown, USA
Just kidding, I've been sending notes to the IRS for years reminding them I am from a galaxy far far away, and we don't believe in taxes.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
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.
The internet is a huge resource of information, and if people are uncomfortable or feel that their privacy has been infringed by being asked personal information, there are plenty of other sites that carry the same news.
Demographic information is a very valuable resource, but only if accurate information is submitted. But for now, there's no stopping those who value privacy from posting bogus info.
bout 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.
I thought the same thing, but almost every time i ask a nontech-savvy person, they tell me they put their real info in. Also, many of these people will also put your email in to those 'send this to 5 friends for $1 off!' type deals. I have had to teach everybody in my family that when you do things like this it adds to spam. 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!
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.
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
With great timeliness, the Globe and Mail (Canada) just started asking for a registration today. But it seemed to only ask for the polls. So then they also gain email-verified poll results.
The G&M is pretty well-respected, and it seems likely that their web-polls were getting spammed by political operatives, since they've been running many about the upcoming Federal election.
Bogus details is like pirating shareware. It isn't hard, it isn't murder, but it isn't right, either.
Of course, it depends somewhat on what kind of privacy protections your country has, and what data they ask for. I don't like giving out salary data. The G&M only asked for a postal code.
-Rob
-Rob Ewaschuk
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).
It's amazing how many websites already have billg@microsoft.com, info@sco.com darl.mcbride@sco.com and other common addresses already registered as an active user. This usually works for the, "enter your email and we'll spam you before you can proceed" registrations like on Quicktime or Pinnacle Patches or thing like that...
"We helped the first group through it. We reassured most all of the second group with a strong privacy policy. The third group still doesn't like it and I presume many of them did not register with us," he said.
It seems like everyone likes to say that they have a strong privacy policy, but it is often the case that the claim of a strong privacy policy is just a bunch of reassuring words with no basis in reality (remember Toysmart? And from what I understand, not much has happened regarding attempts to create legislation.). As long as there are no laws in the US that regulate the use of personal data that are comperable to the laws in Europe, these newspapers could pretty much do whatever they want to with the data.
Now fine, I understand that these newspapers need to get advertisers' money in order to survive. But why not be straightforward about it? For example, if they asked readers to do anonymous surveys in order to help their advertisers, they would probably get far more favorable response than this register-all-your-personal-data-so-we-can-lie-to-y ou-about-not-selling-it-to advertisers bullshit they're doing now.
People say I'm crazy, I got diamonds on the soles of my shoes...
The actual quote was:
The Philadelphia Inquirer started online registration in March, asking readers for e-mail, home address, gender and birth date. About 10 percent to 15 percent of the 300,000 registrations to date have bad e-mail addresses, said Fred Mann, general manager of Philly.com.
Just because an email address will accept mail does not mean the rest of the information is accurate in any way. I have a few junk-dropper email addresses that I'll point these things to in case there is something it might send that I would need (like a password). But the rest of the information can be totally false...
So the real amount of bad data may be closer to the number you were thinking of in the first place (I'd guess 30-40% bogus registrations myself).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
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.
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
ie, my amazon account is registered to amazon@domain.co.uk and my slashdot account is registered to slashdot@domain.co.uk
Anyone who decides to spam me or give out or sell my email address will be found.
Backup not found: (A)bort (R)etry (P)anic
Poll results certainly sound like a good idea. The Sydney Morning Herald (another of the dozens of sites which are locking down soon) hold polls, and in the past they have been less than reliable (as an example, back in 2000 or 1999 they had a "what do you think of browser cookies" poll, which I answered by using their assumption on the existence of browser cookies to post 1000 votes against cookies.)
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
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.
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.
http://asdf.com/asdfemail.html
Ow. I'd hate to see their mail inboxes.
When I was a kid, I was always fascinated by how drivers on highways/interstates could be so mean to each other (cutting each other off, flicking each other off, etc...), and yet still occasionally help a brutha' out by flicking their headlights to warn of a sneaky hidden cop.
:)
I've got a bit of hippy in me thanks to a 70s generation mom, so I love to see any example of people banding together to fight annoying corporate trends like login requirements for free content. I previously had not heard of BugMeNot.com, but now I'm going to stick a link up on my site to spread it around a little more - as well as adding the firefox extension.
Of course, I suppose I should disable logins for my site in order to avoid hypocrisy/irony... although that'll seriously cut into my meager revenue...
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.
The trouble is that most of the spam comes from compromised PCs nowadays. So the person does not need to give your address to anybody -- you will start getting spam once virus finds its way to their system. I even receive spam to an address I gave to employees of very reputable company (where I'm sure they did not give out the info to marketeers).
Web readers get the same content as the paper-and-ink edition without paying for it, it's fair to ask them for personal information in exchange for access.
Either sell the newspaper online or give it away free, but registration sucks. bob@hotmail.com is getting upset with me.
Also, Apple has already demonstrated that if you have something worth paying for, then transactions can be handled at sub dollar amounts. Sell subscriptions online for a buck a month, problem solved.
Advertisers cover the production and distribution costs, $0.25 for the paper is probably about the worth of that much paper, plus the news after it's been sanitized from anything that might alienate the cash cow. So if the e-paper doesn't have the value of the actual paper, that leaves just the value of the news. About $0.03/day sounds about right to me.
Don't laugh, $0.03 is worth a lot more than the information with which I pollute their datasets.
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.
No, how much information they want is not your call to make , it's definitely theirs.
But it is entirely your call whether or not to give that information, or forego the use of their service.
They all know damned well that just becase they ask for information doesn't mean they'll get it. They're also probably aware that their readership will go down proportional to how much information they want, so they make a judgement as to how valuable that information is to them.
You make that same judgement....
Also, the parent was not equating incorrect information with piracy, he was comparing...there is a big difference. His comparison was not entirely without merit. You can choose to ignore the nag screens on Shareware, and continue using it for free, just as you can enter false data in the registration pages of a service, therefore getting it for free. In both cases the providers of the software or the service are aware that this will happen, and are counting on enough people to be honest to make it worthwhile. But being one of the expected dishonest people does not make you any less dishonest....
Advanced users are users too!
I care about it, that's who. Their one article, which will be old in 24 hours, is not adequate compensation for providing them and their advertisers with my personal information, which does not become old. The trade is not a good value, especially since news.google.com can find that exact article or a similar article elsewhere.
Only on
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.
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.
Hm, I don't know. Look at the whole picture: what safeguards are there that all of these businesses actually follow their privacy statements? I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't at least uncomfortably common for companies to sell these lists, thinking "Oh, how will they ever know it was us?" And unless you give a different e-mail address to each registration place and then keep track of where spam is sent to, they're right: you can't know who did it. And besides, everyone on the internet has probably been subjected to abusive and intrusive marketing in some form, such as spam, spyware, pop-ups...
It seems to me that if you expect people to be held to a strict standard of honesty in their relationship with companies involved in marketing, you have to demand that same standard of honesty from the companies. That is a responsibility marketing companies have, imho, not lived up to, and you can't be surprised when people grow suspicious of them.
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.
I'm sure that i'm not the only one to find that the Miami Herald decided to keep up with the Joneses and required me to register to read Dave Berry articles (and presumably any other content, as if anyone goes to herald.com for anything other than berry).
How long until the national outlets follow queue? CNN, FoxNews, MSNBC, hell even ESPN, this is a ridiculous trend, and not for tin-foil hat reasons like most of the morons here spout, this is a matter of convenience and usability. This is a matter of being able to click a link and not be greeted with a page asking for information. How many logins is a user required to maintain? Sure browsers may attempt to manage them, if the username field is called username and the password field is called password (which they arent always labeled), so you can't ever clear your cookies, or change browsers, or computers, or whatever. It's ridiculous.
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
...people generating the audience know all too well about falsified sales figures. "Oh sorry your 100,000 clicks barely produced sales, here's a nickle for your trouble".
That's why they've mostly agreed on clicks as the "currency" of choice, since both can verify the number of clicks. Then the advertiser can look at his click-to-sales ratio and decide if it's worth it. Of course, this leads to the nefarious practice of redirecting innocents because they generate clicks.
Going by sales is better all around, particularly for the consumer, but it also requires a considerable higher level of trust between the companies involved.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
That is because quite a few sites require you to actually enter a valid, working email-adress to be able to register, typically they'll send out a validation-email with a link for you to click on or something.
On the other hand, there's no reasonable way for a website to check any of the other info you put in, I am certain that more thouorugh research would show that though only 20% of the email-adresses where outrigth false (as in bounces), another significant part are "spam-only" or "throwaway" accounts, and even *more* of the info collected in all other fields is incorrect.
It'd not surprise me in the least if 75% lie when asked privacy-invading questions with no easy method of verification such as "household income", I know I do. This is more than enough to make the collected data complete junk, and negate any imagined positive effect of collecting it in the first place.
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
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.
Sorry, this is just too much. Not everything is a right or discrimination.
Yes men should be allowed to view female targetted ads.
Realistically companies target their advertising to the intended customer. This isn't a violation of your rights. They just wanted to target a different group.
You would be wasting time selling Maybachs in trailer parks, so don't bother trying.
Got this username/password from bugmenot.com. Too bad I won't actually get any Karma if this comment should be modded up.
This account has been seized by the GNAA. That is all.
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"
Mailinator is: http://www.mailinator.net/mailinator/Welcome.do
Isn't there a web standard data format for this subscription info? Like an incremental set of groups of info, starting with username/password, then adding real name, then contact (email), then phone/postal, then credit card, then demographic (age, occupation, etc), etc? A form would ask for , and you'd see a button marked "Send personal info". Click it, get a dialog box with the requested info items already entered, retrieved from the browser's local Preferences database. Each item would have a yes/no checkbox. Close the dialog with a button for "SEND" or "CANCEL"; "UPDATE" would open another dialog for editing the locally stored data.
The days of remembering personal data, spending time retyping it, and making mistakes would be gone. Multiple profiles, with different data selectable in the dialog, would manage different personality scenarios. Submission transactions would be logged. Resubscriptions, including revisions after identity theft, could be automated. And the submission could be digitally signed, with the hash kept as a receipt by both parties. The copyright on one's personal info could be enforced. Possibly a standard default license, requiring the recipient to supply a copy (minus private data) of every list to which one's identity has been added, with selectable optional stronger license requirements (payment, non-distribution, etc).
I recall some kind of "Privacy Platform" standard, but it never arrived, either stillborn or orphaned. Now we need it more than ever. Where is it?
--
make install -not war
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.
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
People here are always complaining about registering to read news. All those jokes about giving your first born child to the New York Times. Yeah, they're funny, but let's be serious for a moment.
First of all, the New York Times is a FOR PROFIT company. Second of all, they have employees to pay so that their employees can then eat and feed their families. They offer their service for free. All they ask in return is that you provide some information so that they can target ads. Is that so much to ask for? Would you rather just lay out cash?
Frankly, I was more than happy to provide the NYT with real registration information. I use their service and I'm very happy that they provide it for free. I'd be pretty upset if they had to start charging for it because everyone was sharing registrations or providing false information.
Complain about it all you want, but I think it's a very small price to pay. I registered years ago with correct information and to date, they have not sucked my checking account dry, trashed my computer, or done anything else sinister with the information that I'm aware of.
Too many people in the online community feel they're entitled to get stuff for free, but you have to remember that there are people behind the scenes, real people, with jobs that need to feed their families.
I'm personally very thankful that so many news sites do offer their stories for free.
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.
Registration is a slight pain in the ass, but I don't mind filling their spam database with garbage like this.
:) )
First Name: First
Last Name: Last
DOB: 1/1/1900
Email: nottelling@almostspamless.com
Password: 12345 (same as my luggage
Would you like to receive our newsletter: Sure!
"Don't you just love it when you watch your country slide into authoritarianism little by little each day."
And I'm still amazed at the numbers of europaens who can see what is going down in their own nations, and what is going down in the US, who just don't get it why a lot of us in the USA really want to hang on to our firearms. It's scary to think about it, but you have to look to history to see the actual *fact* that people who willingly disarm, to accept the notion that they are both incompetent to handle a tool and that their rulers are always going to be "nice guys", by either getting faked out into it or by force, are usually always eventually heinously persecuted by their own governments. It has happened so many times in the past....
Learn from history and do it better, or repeat the mistakes and suffer. The planetary amount of "crime" and violence is and never has been as high as the amount of "official crime" and violence perpetrated by out of control governments and their hired mercenaries, taken as an overall total. The timing changes some here and there, but eventually all governments become despotic, and becoming a willing victim in advance is a non smooth move.
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?
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