Yes, a fair point. I shouldn't have used "all", although I think you could probably get Swing and even AWT working with a shoehorn.
But it's got a JVM and JVMs take byte code...
And while I wouldn't want Derby or some other serverside process gumming up my phone, I do like the ease of using the same packing and unpacking routines on both platforms. They're just more likely to work a bit better together.
The older I get, the more I appreciate the hard work of the editors who fix most of my errors and the sales team that collect the money from the advertisers and subscribers. They create an environment that helps me, the nominal creator and the only one who gets a byline, produce something that's better.
Now it may be that the market will decide that they don't want to pay extra for these layers. That's a decision that all of us will make consciously or unconsciously when we decide what content we want to consume. But there's no doubt that they do something.
Let me first thank everyone who's submitted an article to Slashdot with a link to something I've written. The comments are almost always a great gift and I look forward to reading most of what people write, especially the ones who RTFA.
My only request is for everyone to be open to new ways of paying for the synthesis of information. It is very difficult for humans to compete with the robot link farms and the casual content created on places like Facebook. If we want people to synthesize we have to find some way to come together as a society and fund them.
I realize that it's attractive to look at the almost non-existent distribution costs of digital content and imagine a world where information can be completely free, but this avoids dealing with the costs of creating it in the first place. We need to find a good way for everyone who consumes content to effectively share the costs of creating it. If we don't, the information ecosystem will collapse.
Please be open to the writers and publishers who are going to try out more mechanisms for distributing the costs among the consumers. Try them out and reward the ones that deliver something of value. Ignore the ones that aren't worth your time. But please don't dismiss them out of hand.
Finally, I want to point out a piece I've written about some of the downsides of the free ecosystem for information. Perhaps this might suggest that there are some advantages in embracing a paywall, at least occasionally.
If you can't stand all of those ideas, then focus on providing your information in a way that is better: more convenient, more personalized, faster. Then sell those characteristics that make it better. (Hint: Textbooks and articles aren't better anymore.)
Here's the problem. This isn't just about me and my way of making an income. I stopped relying on textbooks a long time ago. I diversified and I've done all of those things. But as a consumer I like a world where I can buy a textbook written by someone else who is interested in creating a good textbook, not pushing t-shirts. I like a textbook over a speaking gig because I can choose when I read, how much I read, and whether I re-read it. A textbook is a neat, time-shifting device. So I like paying directly for it. I don't want to pay $50k to go to a college to take a course. I don't want to buy t-shirts. I don't want to spend extra for laminated reference sheets. A textbook is already more convenient and more personalized than all of those things. It's pure information created by someone who wants to please an audience.
I like a world where I can come together with other folks to share the cost of creating art or knowledge. It's not about asking damn kids to get off my lawn. It's asking you to quit destroying a marketplace that's perfectly adequate for many people. If you want free information, go create your information for free. If you want you to lock out non-sharing individuals, bind it up with a super GPL. But let those of us who like to support artists, support them.
It's not our job to fix or sustain your business model.
Ah, but if you like the service or want it to continue, you better not undermine the business model. If you're seeing enough ads for them to drive you nuts-- something I can understand given some of the obtrusive ones-- then maybe you're depending upon the content. If the ads don't support the content, it will disappear.
And so you've got to decide how much you like free content. If you do, then you better find a way to help or at least not hurt the business model.
I for one miss the internet being a place where the fringe element hung out. So the BBC puts their content behind a paywall; some Grey Hat steals it, we all share it.
Would bursting the second internet bubble really be that tragic?
A friend of mine who was once a journalist says that people will always pay for journalism. If they don't buy subscriptions, then they'll pay with increased corruption. While the costs of sharing on the Internet are close to zero, the cost of creating content is not. If we treat the information ecology like a big commons, we shouldn't be surprised if it collapses like every other commons before.
It's the same with TV, 5 minutes of commercials every 10 minutes (33%) is just way too much and their real customers fought back... so now they get 0% ads from a growing percentage of people. Yeh, that implies bad things for the future of TV, but then in many ways nothing really is better than what was there before.
I think TV is a good example of how the net will evolve. In the 1970s, everyone predicted that cable would fail. Who's going to pay for something they're used to getting for free? But little by little the free TV lost ground and now Comcast just bought NBC, a once powerful giant that used to be able to create the best content around. Now people who want good content pay once for cable and once again by watching more ads. Some even pay extra for HBO.
In the end, good content is a big draw. I'm not sure if ad supported content has much of a chance at all on the Internet but it would be a shame if it was destroyed by ad blockers.
those who truly have something of value will have to charge for it. What's wrong with that?
It just reduces the options for everyone and paywalls appear. It may be how everything does evolve because advertising isn't delivering enough revenue for anyone, but it would be sad if it evolved out of anarchy.
I see it a bit differently. If ABC were something that was independent of XYZ, then your equation shows us that we need to consider the tradeoff between doing ABC and XYZ.
If ABC=kissing and XYZ=suffering from swine flu, then we clearly need to choose between the act and the consequences.
But blocking ads has no value in and of itself. It's not like someone says, "I'm going to block some ads" without saying, "I'm going to view some professional content created by someone trying to make a living." In that case, I contend that doing ABC is explicitly deciding to condemn XYZ.
No. It's not an analogy. I'm just saying that there's no reason to give up trying to protect a business model just because there's no perfect solution.
When this wonderful system appears, I'll be more than willing to help write ad blockers myself. But I'm afraid it's a bit like wishing for a flying car. Unfortunately gravity is a law that applies to all of us and even the pirates can't figure out a scheme to evade that one.
If you don't believe me, look at Wikipedia, or take a poll here and figure out how many posters got paid to comment.
I see. Just because there are 50-500 people who are willing to comment without reading TFA, we don't have to worry about the destruction of the business model that produces TFA.
While I'm always amazed by many of the free sources of information on the Internet, I also like professional content. There's no reason why both can't exist and I don't see why some anarchists should be able to dictate the terms for all of us who like professional content. If you don't, just ignore those sites.
Also, I think you're a bit optimistic about the quality of free content. The wikipedia rules explicitly require every fact on it to be based upon some published source. I'm sure this is often ignored often to the benefit of the pieces, but it raises some philosophical questions. Can the wikipedia exist without the published sources? Who will break the ties in the debate?
To each his own. I like glancing at my home town newspaper without committing to a big subscription. If the ads don't work, though I won't have that option.
If you really want to live in the past, here's the Wayback Machine's take on Slashdot:
I'm grateful for this kind of attitude. Believe me. The competent websites watch for this kind of loss and they work hard to ensure that the ads don't damage their long term viability.
Really? It's hard enough to force people in my town not to steal or murder, some do it every day. But that doesn't mean that the police give up.
Okay, perhaps the business model can tolerate a small amount of free riding, but the long term consequence of your point of view seems to be that all ad supported content will either disappear entirely or run to hide behind a paywall.
Is that what you want? If so, go write an ad blocker. I just want to point out that it's a very political act that has consequences for more than just the author. It will erode a very useful business model that's spread knowledge widely with few barriers.
As someone who makes his living selling content through the Internet, I want people to think several times before building a tool like AdBlock. If the content industry can't make money from ads, we'll either go out of business or put our information behind a paywall. That may happen whether or not you create the ad block extension because ads don't generate enough money to pay for the kind of reporting that newspapers used to do, but it will definitely happen if a tool for blocking ads gets adopted by any non-trivial subset of society.
I understand that advertisements can be annoying and often temperamental, but tools like this are rarely as precise as they should be. They usually end up blocking far more unless the user spends more time monkeying with the config files than it would take to actually glance at the ads or wait for them to finish their flash animation.
Also I want to remind people that some open source projects like Firefox depend on advertisements for their support. Google itself depends almost entirely upon ads for their revenue. While I recognize that many of their ads were historically unobtrusive, they are selling more and more display ads.
An ad blocker for Google chrome will not only hurt Google but slice into Google's revenues and undercut their ability to pay for more development. Okay, you say, let's be selfish and ensure that the ad blocker won't block Google ads. That's clever, but it still hurts Google because it hurts the free information ecosystem which is what drives Google. If there's no free information, there's fewer and fewer things for Google to index and thus fewer and fewer reasons to look at Google ads.
Please consider the long term consequences for building such a tool. The information ecology is much more fragile than you can imagine.
I haven't bothered to read the patent application, but there's a brief description of this in my books Disappearing Cryptography and Digital Copyright Protection . In addition, Mikhail Atallah's group at Purdue has explored many similar ideas:
This is much too extreme. There are many good examples of useful data that is for almost all intents and purposes anonymous. Consider the example of anonymous lending libraries from my book, Translucent Databases.
The simplest version just pushes the book title through a one-way function. The more complex version also hides the name in a similar way.
Can the anonymity be stripped away? There are coincidences and connections as Sweeney's examples and the Netflix examples show, but they can be fought by adding some salt/nonce to the one-way function. We can also add passwords.
There are so many different ways to add bits of complexity to the results that there are many tradeoffs we can make between effective privacy and the complexity of using the systems. I think it's good to keep the weaknesses in mind, but I think it's more of a feasible engineering problem than something that should be dismissed out of hand. (The law review piece is also worth reading in its entirety because it's more concerned with the legal issues created by the existence of privacy-enhanced databases. It would be simpler for some issues if they didn't exist and so it helps to argue seriously.)
Actually we don't know what a majority thinks. There have been about 300+ downloads. Only 15 chose to rank the app and they've given it an average of 2 stars. Sure, some couldn't grok the terribly complicated scrolling system, but I think it's still far from a majority.
I would take a more detailed survey but I can't. Apple owns the customers.
Now, on to the best way to page. The swipe is much too random and jarring. I downloaded other packages and read reviews like this one:
After some field tests, I adopted the one I did. It's still the most favorite. Many of my testers grew to hate the animation and the swiping. They wanted a tap. To this date, I still prefer my Palm TX which pages with a rocker switch.
So there you have it.
I've got to move on to other work now. You're welcome to have the last word.
Actually, I don't think it does. All of the about.html stuff is bundled with the app. It would only make sense. The GOLD app might have a URL to some of my other books.
I can tell you that there are a number of projects based on PhoneGap in the AppStore. So I'm sure that Apple isn't testing for these combinations of Cocoa calls although perhaps they should.
While I see your point about how this might be abused in narrow circumstances with techniques that I never included in my code, I'm still wondering whether this is a more general problem for any native App.
The more I contemplate issues like this about PhoneGap, it seems to me that any native app that makes a network call could do much the same thing. And so given that, wouldn't this technique be a danger for any native app?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, a fair point. I shouldn't have used "all", although I think you could probably get Swing and even AWT working with a shoehorn.
But it's got a JVM and JVMs take byte code...
And while I wouldn't want Derby or some other serverside process gumming up my phone, I do like the ease of using the same packing and unpacking routines on both platforms. They're just more likely to work a bit better together.
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2010/01/13/surveillance-secruity-and-the-google-breach/
Publishers don't create....
The older I get, the more I appreciate the hard work of the editors who fix most of my errors and the sales team that collect the money from the advertisers and subscribers. They create an environment that helps me, the nominal creator and the only one who gets a byline, produce something that's better.
Now it may be that the market will decide that they don't want to pay extra for these layers. That's a decision that all of us will make consciously or unconsciously when we decide what content we want to consume. But there's no doubt that they do something.
Let me first thank everyone who's submitted an article to Slashdot with a link to something I've written. The comments are almost always a great gift and I look forward to reading most of what people write, especially the ones who RTFA.
My only request is for everyone to be open to new ways of paying for the synthesis of information. It is very difficult for humans to compete with the robot link farms and the casual content created on places like Facebook. If we want people to synthesize we have to find some way to come together as a society and fund them.
I realize that it's attractive to look at the almost non-existent distribution costs of digital content and imagine a world where information can be completely free, but this avoids dealing with the costs of creating it in the first place. We need to find a good way for everyone who consumes content to effectively share the costs of creating it. If we don't, the information ecosystem will collapse.
Please be open to the writers and publishers who are going to try out more mechanisms for distributing the costs among the consumers. Try them out and reward the ones that deliver something of value. Ignore the ones that aren't worth your time. But please don't dismiss them out of hand.
Finally, I want to point out a piece I've written about some of the downsides of the free ecosystem for information. Perhaps this might suggest that there are some advantages in embracing a paywall, at least occasionally.
http://www.wayner.org/node/67
I took up Cory's offer and created an iPhone version of _Makers_:
http://www.wayner.org/node/66
Please send along any comments about the interface.
If you can't stand all of those ideas, then focus on providing your information in a way that is better: more convenient, more personalized, faster. Then sell those characteristics that make it better. (Hint: Textbooks and articles aren't better anymore.)
Here's the problem. This isn't just about me and my way of making an income. I stopped relying on textbooks a long time ago. I diversified and I've done all of those things. But as a consumer I like a world where I can buy a textbook written by someone else who is interested in creating a good textbook, not pushing t-shirts. I like a textbook over a speaking gig because I can choose when I read, how much I read, and whether I re-read it. A textbook is a neat, time-shifting device. So I like paying directly for it. I don't want to pay $50k to go to a college to take a course. I don't want to buy t-shirts. I don't want to spend extra for laminated reference sheets. A textbook is already more convenient and more personalized than all of those things. It's pure information created by someone who wants to please an audience.
I like a world where I can come together with other folks to share the cost of creating art or knowledge. It's not about asking damn kids to get off my lawn. It's asking you to quit destroying a marketplace that's perfectly adequate for many people. If you want free information, go create your information for free. If you want you to lock out non-sharing individuals, bind it up with a super GPL. But let those of us who like to support artists, support them.
It's not our job to fix or sustain your business model.
Ah, but if you like the service or want it to continue, you better not undermine the business model. If you're seeing enough ads for them to drive you nuts-- something I can understand given some of the obtrusive ones-- then maybe you're depending upon the content. If the ads don't support the content, it will disappear.
And so you've got to decide how much you like free content. If you do, then you better find a way to help or at least not hurt the business model.
I for one miss the internet being a place where the fringe element hung out. So the BBC puts their content behind a paywall; some Grey Hat steals it, we all share it.
Would bursting the second internet bubble really be that tragic?
A friend of mine who was once a journalist says that people will always pay for journalism. If they don't buy subscriptions, then they'll pay with increased corruption. While the costs of sharing on the Internet are close to zero, the cost of creating content is not. If we treat the information ecology like a big commons, we shouldn't be surprised if it collapses like every other commons before.
those who truly have something of value will have to charge for it. What's wrong with that?
It just reduces the options for everyone and paywalls appear. It may be how everything does evolve because advertising isn't delivering enough revenue for anyone, but it would be sad if it evolved out of anarchy.
I see it a bit differently. If ABC were something that was independent of XYZ, then your equation shows us that we need to consider the tradeoff between doing ABC and XYZ.
If ABC=kissing and XYZ=suffering from swine flu, then we clearly need to choose between the act and the consequences.
But blocking ads has no value in and of itself. It's not like someone says, "I'm going to block some ads" without saying, "I'm going to view some professional content created by someone trying to make a living." In that case, I contend that doing ABC is explicitly deciding to condemn XYZ.
No. It's not an analogy. I'm just saying that there's no reason to give up trying to protect a business model just because there's no perfect solution.
When this wonderful system appears, I'll be more than willing to help write ad blockers myself. But I'm afraid it's a bit like wishing for a flying car. Unfortunately gravity is a law that applies to all of us and even the pirates can't figure out a scheme to evade that one.
If you don't believe me, look at Wikipedia, or take a poll here and figure out how many posters got paid to comment.
I see. Just because there are 50-500 people who are willing to comment without reading TFA, we don't have to worry about the destruction of the business model that produces TFA.
While I'm always amazed by many of the free sources of information on the Internet, I also like professional content. There's no reason why both can't exist and I don't see why some anarchists should be able to dictate the terms for all of us who like professional content. If you don't, just ignore those sites.
Also, I think you're a bit optimistic about the quality of free content. The wikipedia rules explicitly require every fact on it to be based upon some published source. I'm sure this is often ignored often to the benefit of the pieces, but it raises some philosophical questions. Can the wikipedia exist without the published sources? Who will break the ties in the debate?
This is a good point. Ad blocking may not send any feedback to the site.
To each his own. I like glancing at my home town newspaper without committing to a big subscription. If the ads don't work, though I won't have that option.
If you really want to live in the past, here's the Wayback Machine's take on Slashdot:
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.slashdot.org
Note, it didn't exist before ads and it won't exist without them.
I'm grateful for this kind of attitude. Believe me. The competent websites watch for this kind of loss and they work hard to ensure that the ads don't damage their long term viability.
Really? It's hard enough to force people in my town not to steal or murder, some do it every day. But that doesn't mean that the police give up.
Okay, perhaps the business model can tolerate a small amount of free riding, but the long term consequence of your point of view seems to be that all ad supported content will either disappear entirely or run to hide behind a paywall.
Is that what you want? If so, go write an ad blocker. I just want to point out that it's a very political act that has consequences for more than just the author. It will erode a very useful business model that's spread knowledge widely with few barriers.
As someone who makes his living selling content through the Internet, I want people to think several times before building a tool like AdBlock. If the content industry can't make money from ads, we'll either go out of business or put our information behind a paywall. That may happen whether or not you create the ad block extension because ads don't generate enough money to pay for the kind of reporting that newspapers used to do, but it will definitely happen if a tool for blocking ads gets adopted by any non-trivial subset of society.
I understand that advertisements can be annoying and often temperamental, but tools like this are rarely as precise as they should be. They usually end up blocking far more unless the user spends more time monkeying with the config files than it would take to actually glance at the ads or wait for them to finish their flash animation.
Also I want to remind people that some open source projects like Firefox depend on advertisements for their support. Google itself depends almost entirely upon ads for their revenue. While I recognize that many of their ads were historically unobtrusive, they are selling more and more display ads.
An ad blocker for Google chrome will not only hurt Google but slice into Google's revenues and undercut their ability to pay for more development. Okay, you say, let's be selfish and ensure that the ad blocker won't block Google ads. That's clever, but it still hurts Google because it hurts the free information ecosystem which is what drives Google. If there's no free information, there's fewer and fewer things for Google to index and thus fewer and fewer reasons to look at Google ads.
Please consider the long term consequences for building such a tool. The information ecology is much more fragile than you can imagine.
I haven't bothered to read the patent application, but there's a brief description of this in my books Disappearing Cryptography and Digital Copyright Protection . In addition, Mikhail Atallah's group at Purdue has explored many similar ideas:
http://www.cs.purdue.edu/people/faculty/mja/
This is much too extreme. There are many good examples of useful data that is for almost all intents and purposes anonymous. Consider the example of anonymous lending libraries from my book, Translucent Databases.
The simplest version just pushes the book title through a one-way function. The more complex version also hides the name in a similar way.
Can the anonymity be stripped away? There are coincidences and connections as Sweeney's examples and the Netflix examples show, but they can be fought by adding some salt/nonce to the one-way function. We can also add passwords.
There are so many different ways to add bits of complexity to the results that there are many tradeoffs we can make between effective privacy and the complexity of using the systems. I think it's good to keep the weaknesses in mind, but I think it's more of a feasible engineering problem than something that should be dismissed out of hand. (The law review piece is also worth reading in its entirety because it's more concerned with the legal issues created by the existence of privacy-enhanced databases. It would be simpler for some issues if they didn't exist and so it helps to argue seriously.)
Actually we don't know what a majority thinks. There have been about 300+ downloads. Only 15 chose to rank the app and they've given it an average of 2 stars. Sure, some couldn't grok the terribly complicated scrolling system, but I think it's still far from a majority.
I would take a more detailed survey but I can't. Apple owns the customers.
Now, on to the best way to page. The swipe is much too random and jarring. I downloaded other packages and read reviews like this one:
http://www.teleread.org/2008/08/23/iphone-e-book-review/
After some field tests, I adopted the one I did. It's still the most favorite. Many of my testers grew to hate the animation and the swiping. They wanted a tap. To this date, I still prefer my Palm TX which pages with a rocker switch.
So there you have it.
I've got to move on to other work now. You're welcome to have the last word.
Actually, I don't think it does. All of the about.html stuff is bundled with the app. It would only make sense. The GOLD app might have a URL to some of my other books.
I can tell you that there are a number of projects based on PhoneGap in the AppStore. So I'm sure that Apple isn't testing for these combinations of Cocoa calls although perhaps they should.
Thanks again for the pointer.
I think the URL should work on Android because it's also a webkit phone.
http://www.wayner.org/books/ffa/webkit/
While I see your point about how this might be abused in narrow circumstances with techniques that I never included in my code, I'm still wondering whether this is a more general problem for any native App.
The more I contemplate issues like this about PhoneGap, it seems to me that any native app that makes a network call could do much the same thing. And so given that, wouldn't this technique be a danger for any native app?