The massive problem here is the judicial ruling that a third, non-government party can tell an ISP to disconnect a user simply based on suspicion of copyright violations and the ISP must comply. I have never seen anything like this, where someone who suspects wrongdoing is allowed to set a punishment outside of the judicial system.
The Bloomberg article mentions that the $5 fee is actually a government mandate in the law that the FAA is using to claim authority over RC aircraft, but to anyone looking at it, it looks like the RC aircraft equivalent of red light cameras: a government cash-grab that does little to nothing to actually improve safety. I'm having trouble seeing how having tagged drones is going to do anything but allow the government to collect more money in fines, both for unauthorized drone use and for drone use without a license.
Valve really bought this problem upon themselves by introducing trading and not having a first-party trade listing service that does not involve real-world money. Right now, most people list their trades on third-party sites over which Valve has little to no control. This is where you'll see the vast majority of people getting phished or scammed out of their items or accounts.
Contrary to what Valve says, a lot of the items I've seen stolen have been stolen through phishing or other social engineering, not through actual hacking. I've seen people go to ludicrous lengths to steal someone's stuff: case in point, a TF2 scammer I busted late last year who was using offers of PayPal money (which is pretty much a guaranteed way to get your stuff stolen as PayPal does not recognize digital items) to lure people into trading their items to him (ie; "Give me your item and then I'll send you the hundreds of dollars I promised you").
The scammer was a 14-year-old kid (at the time) and had scammed at least twenty people out of thousands of dollars of items. He wasn't actually successful in selling most of them, largely due to third-party reputation sites like SteamRep catching onto his game and marking him as a scammer fairly early on, but even after that mark had been placed on him he was still able to continue scamming.
Really, 99% of the problems with trading could have been solved if Valve had just put up a first-party listing service.
What I don't understand is how they plan to heat a gas to 100 million degrees centigrade.. or what materials they're using to contain it. Most metals have a melting point of between 2500 and 3500 degrees centigrade. Even assuming the superheated gas doesn't directly touch the structural components, convection would surely still heat any containing material to its melting point. What are they using to contain it?
This article all but proves that wi-fi or some supposed wi-fi allergy had nothing to do with this. From the article:
"Jenny’s mother, Debra Fry, said her daughter suffered with tiredness, headaches and bladder problems as a direct result of wireless internet connections at Chipping Norton School. "
All three of those symptoms are also well-known symptoms of depression: the tiredness caused by the loss of energy and changes in sleep from the depression itself, and the headaches and bladder problems probably caused by malnutrition due to changes in diet caused by depression. I'm honestly surprised the article didn't interview a psychiatrist about this, because I can guarantee any psychiatrist worth their title would tell them that all of these things are signs of depression and that the mother should have gotten help right away.
What it makes me wonder is if the mother did go to a doctor who told her that the symptoms were caused by a "wi-fi allergy" or if she simply deluded herself into thinking it because she didn't want to admit that her daughter had depression. In either case, someone should probably be charged with murder.
One thing that really strikes me about this story is how many walls the founders of this movement ran into trying to get it set up - they wanted towers, but said putting those up would be prohibitively expensive for such a small organization. Now, imagine that a municipality was able to get behind this, maybe get some state funding to offset the costs (perhaps by providing free broadband to homes with children in public schools that otherwise could not afford it) and was able to put up a better system that didn't rely so much on the homeowners to maintain (the article states that any homeowner who has it installed has to provide power for it for life even if they do not use it). Commercial providers would be forced to cut prices and improve service or go under.
Actually in some cases, there were arcade boards that had planned obsolesence built into them. All of the Capcom Play System boards (CPS1, CPS2, CPS3) had various forms of what was known as a "suicide battery". In some boards this was a battery powering a RAM chip that contained a decryption table for the game. Once the battery died, the RAM would lose the decryption tables and make it impossible for the board to work. Others had a "suicide battery" that powered the game's graphics hardware, and needed a hardware-level fix (beyond just replacing the battery) to get the game working again. Sega also had their own suicide battery system for some of their hardware, but Capcom was the biggest offender.
MAME bypasses all of this suicide hardware, and from what I recall some of the people on the MAME project worked on some of the software-level fixes necessary to get the older boards working again.
The American model of identification number is basically supposed to be a secret between you, your employer, your insurer, your financial institution, and the government. The reason for this is that this is what you use to sign up for things like bank accounts and credit cards - and there's nothing in place to stop someone who has your SSN from getting a bunch of credit cards in your name and maxing them out.
Korea is kind of weird in that they want their numbers to be secret, but have people use them for a lot of things. One of the most wide-scale cases of identity theft in South Korea for a long time (I don't know if it's the case as much today) was in MMORPGs, where they required people to sign up with a Korean identification number to play. There was actually a huge database of so called "KSSNs" (Korean Social Security Number) that were used to do this. The reason for this, oddly enough, had to do with a breach in a game called Lineage 2 that required KSSNs for registration - after the breach, the Korean government mandated that all online games use KSSNs for signups. I've heard they also use them for social media stuff but I've never seen that firsthand.
What I'm wondering is whether this is something like the plaques that build up with Alzheimer's disease - modern medicine still doesn't know whether the plaques are a cause of Alzheimer's or a by-product of something that is the real cause of the disease. It seems plausible to me that this retrovirus could be to ALS what Kaposi's Sarcoma is to HIV/AIDS - a unique symptom of the underlying disease that certainly makes things worse, but isn't really part of the underlying cause.
It's also the opposite - there are plenty of foreign businesses who won't ship to the United States. I have a friend who buys a lot of anime goods off Yahoo Auctions JP, and most of the sellers there will not ship outside of Japan. He pays an exorbitant sum to re-shippers to forward the packages to him.
On the business side, I once worked for a place that made airplane parts. One of their customers is a French firm that routinely shipped parts back to them in order to get them fixed. They also had to use a freight forwarder for it both ways, same for Honeywell's operation in the UK.
Regulating this kind of freight forwarding would probably be borderline impossible to do given the sheer number of different countries and their law sets involved.
“Nuclear power requires obedience. Demand what you really need. Just look at Donald Trump. What can possibly go wrong?”
Not sure what to think of it.
May 2016
(Atlanta) Thousands were horrified today as Donald Trump's newest Trump Tower, built on the outskirts of the Atlanta Metro Area, was subjected to low levels of radiation from a minor ventilation breach at a recently-completed nuclear power plant. The breach, which released levels of radiation normally considered harmless, caused Trump's hair to mutate into a separate organism during a rally at the new high-rise. Experts are baffled at how this could have happened, but one doctor at the event was quoted as saying "It was probably a side effect of all that hairspray."
Trump's hair has stated that it intends to run for president as a separate entity from Trump himself, running on a platform that involves building a wall of barber shops along the US-Mexican border to "stop shipments of cheap and illegal toupees made from the hair of Mexican migrant workers". In a recent CNN/ORC poll, Trump's hair polled at a full 5 percentage points over the rest of Donald Trump.
Democratic candidates have accused the hair of being a hairpiece that was originally made in China, which would make it ineligible to run for the presidency. Trump's hair has vehemently denied this accusation, stating, "I am the real deal, and I'd be glad to let anyone who needs proof see my long firm birth certificate.. and also run their hand through me."
They'd buy it because of their horrible track record on human rights. The Saudi government is about to execute a man for participating in the Arab Spring protests.. that, and because his uncle isn't from the same side of Islam as the current regime. Protests like the ones they're sentencing someone to death for often get organized online over social media - and what better way to quash dissent than to monitor social media and put spyware on the computers of anyone even suspected of planning a protest, then jail and/or murder them to silence them?
Even if the Saudi government did not use it for some reason, there are plenty of regimes in the Middle East (Iran, for one) that would be happy to purchase such software from the Saudi government in order to crack down on their own dissidents, especially considering that the United States and Europe would have qualms about selling to them.
I think in the case of cam-rips, they're usually not uploaded at all. Private trackers won't take them, and no one is going to download them on public trackers unless they're desperate. Most cam-rips, from what I understand anyway, get burned to disc and sold on the street rather than put online.
What I think the article (really more of a short, buzzword-filled list) fails to address is that IT workers aren't leaving major, established corporations for "unicorns" for no reason. Most workers aren't going to give up seniority (and the perks that come with it like better pay and benefits) at a big company for a job at a startup for no reason other than because they can. In reality, it's probably that the startups are offering higher pay and better working conditions, thus giving workers a reason to leave.
This honestly reminds me of where I work right now, where the management is stumped at why they keep having people quit when they have managers going around every night telling people how much they want to fire them and how at risk they are of losing their jobs.
What I'm wondering is, how much does it cost to get sole marketing rights to a generic drug? This seems like the kind of thing where a nonprofit or NGO should form to buy the rights to all the generics, and then sell the drugs at or very close to cost - until, that is, the loophole that allowed Turing to do what they did is closed.
There's a reason no one has ever tried to sell true a la carte service, and it's because the content providers force "bundling" with their channels. Disney, for instance, is well known for forcing providers to bundle a bunch of crap in with ESPN - their deal with the cable companies is bundle or don't get it at all. Almost every content provider does this in order to sell their less popular channels.
What I'm wondering is whether this is actually a difficult investigation, or whether it's actually that the Japanese courts are having trouble deciding what to charge Karpeles with. I don't think there's a single government that has decided what Bitcoin actually is - a currency or personal property. If it's a currency, and it turns out that Karpeles was taking money from his business, that's embezzlement. If it's not, it's theft. There could also be fraud charges thrown in if, as some people suggest, the stolen coins never actually existed and were basically a large-scale accounting error. It seems like the courts would have to first define what Bitcoin is in order to actually charge someone for stealing them.
The thing is, there's a strong public policy argument to be made against Lexmark in this case. The government (typically) wants people to recycle because it means less money spent hauling the stuff to a recycling center or landfill and less pollution to deal with later. There are actually several levels of federal recognition for facilities that recycle printer cartridges - the one most of those companies go for is one that guarantees they throw nothing away. Since refilling the cartridges and selling them is the easiest and most economical method of recycling them, it's logical that a lawsuit to stop that recycling would be thrown out on public policy grounds.
I don't have a Surface Pro, but I bought this "ASUS Transformer Book" thing which is basically a tablet with an attached keyboard that I got for around $250 on Newegg. It runs full Win 8.1 and has expandable memory via SD card. Android tablets have a lot of issues right now in that they simply can't do what a Windows tablet can.
Best example I can give of this is watching a Twitch stream.
If I wanted to watch Twitch on my 2013 Nexus 7 without ads, I first had to install the horrible Twitch app, then side-load Adblock Plus (as an app) onto the tablet and set up my internet connection to run through Adblock as a proxy. The problem is that running Adblock as a proxy breaks a bunch of other stuff and so it has to constantly be switched on or off to use different things. Watching it in-browser simply didn't work because the tablet can't handle the desktop version of Twitch.
With this thing, I just installed Firefox and loaded ABP into it, then go right to Twitch and start watching. It still has a little trouble viewing things at "source" quality (video desyncs with audio) but at "high" it works just fine.
They're finding them the same way they find people on normal torrents - Popcorn Time is basically a torrent client with streaming video built in. They have one of those "piracy protection" firms sit on the torrent and gather IPs, then subpoena the ISPs to find out who had the offending IP address at the time they saw it in the swarm for the torrent. From there, all it takes is a few threatening letters and a legal team backed by the deep pockets of Big Media.
It's not plain statutory rape because New Hampshire, like a lot of states, has revised their statutory rape law to prevent people from being charged in cases where both parties involved are minors. There's usually a limit as to how far apart in age the two parties can be, but generally two minors having sex is not statutory rape in states that have revised their laws.
The problem is, that's not something that could be realistically done. Health insurance has to have your SSN to determine identity and for tax purposes - the insurer needs to make sure they are billing the right people, and they need to make sure that their clients can verify their insurance information because of the way health insurance (especially through an employer) interacts with the tax system. Most employer-provided health insurance is paid for pre-tax, and if the IRS comes along with any questions as to whether the insurance is real or not, there has to be a way to prove it. At the same time, the hospitals and other care providers need SSNs to be able to correctly bill the insurance companies for the right person's care.
It's been quite a ride for the clickbait headline writing market this week. In China, headlines cratered; in the U.S., clickbait dove for two days, only to rebound on Wednesday. That made many Slashdot editors nervous, both about the front page of Slashdot (which some of them depend upon) and the continuing flow of money from VCs and investors. While the clickbait jitters don't seem to be affecting some news firms' ability to implode themselves, more than one pundit is wondering whether the clickbait industry will shift into 'fear mode,' which could be bad for the so-called 'ad firms' that need readers to keep clicking like it's 1999. Are we going to see money start drying up for clickbait headlines?
At least Nerval's Lobster is trying harder. A story with two non-Dice sources as opposed to zero is always an improvement.
Slashdot Mirror
The massive problem here is the judicial ruling that a third, non-government party can tell an ISP to disconnect a user simply based on suspicion of copyright violations and the ISP must comply. I have never seen anything like this, where someone who suspects wrongdoing is allowed to set a punishment outside of the judicial system.
The Bloomberg article mentions that the $5 fee is actually a government mandate in the law that the FAA is using to claim authority over RC aircraft, but to anyone looking at it, it looks like the RC aircraft equivalent of red light cameras: a government cash-grab that does little to nothing to actually improve safety. I'm having trouble seeing how having tagged drones is going to do anything but allow the government to collect more money in fines, both for unauthorized drone use and for drone use without a license.
Valve really bought this problem upon themselves by introducing trading and not having a first-party trade listing service that does not involve real-world money. Right now, most people list their trades on third-party sites over which Valve has little to no control. This is where you'll see the vast majority of people getting phished or scammed out of their items or accounts.
Contrary to what Valve says, a lot of the items I've seen stolen have been stolen through phishing or other social engineering, not through actual hacking. I've seen people go to ludicrous lengths to steal someone's stuff: case in point, a TF2 scammer I busted late last year who was using offers of PayPal money (which is pretty much a guaranteed way to get your stuff stolen as PayPal does not recognize digital items) to lure people into trading their items to him (ie; "Give me your item and then I'll send you the hundreds of dollars I promised you").
The scammer was a 14-year-old kid (at the time) and had scammed at least twenty people out of thousands of dollars of items. He wasn't actually successful in selling most of them, largely due to third-party reputation sites like SteamRep catching onto his game and marking him as a scammer fairly early on, but even after that mark had been placed on him he was still able to continue scamming.
Really, 99% of the problems with trading could have been solved if Valve had just put up a first-party listing service.
What I don't understand is how they plan to heat a gas to 100 million degrees centigrade.. or what materials they're using to contain it. Most metals have a melting point of between 2500 and 3500 degrees centigrade. Even assuming the superheated gas doesn't directly touch the structural components, convection would surely still heat any containing material to its melting point. What are they using to contain it?
This article all but proves that wi-fi or some supposed wi-fi allergy had nothing to do with this. From the article:
"Jenny’s mother, Debra Fry, said her daughter suffered with tiredness, headaches and bladder problems as a direct result of wireless internet connections at Chipping Norton School. "
All three of those symptoms are also well-known symptoms of depression: the tiredness caused by the loss of energy and changes in sleep from the depression itself, and the headaches and bladder problems probably caused by malnutrition due to changes in diet caused by depression. I'm honestly surprised the article didn't interview a psychiatrist about this, because I can guarantee any psychiatrist worth their title would tell them that all of these things are signs of depression and that the mother should have gotten help right away.
What it makes me wonder is if the mother did go to a doctor who told her that the symptoms were caused by a "wi-fi allergy" or if she simply deluded herself into thinking it because she didn't want to admit that her daughter had depression. In either case, someone should probably be charged with murder.
Ex-CIA director attempts to prove relevance by making outrageous statements on current events, fails.
One thing that really strikes me about this story is how many walls the founders of this movement ran into trying to get it set up - they wanted towers, but said putting those up would be prohibitively expensive for such a small organization. Now, imagine that a municipality was able to get behind this, maybe get some state funding to offset the costs (perhaps by providing free broadband to homes with children in public schools that otherwise could not afford it) and was able to put up a better system that didn't rely so much on the homeowners to maintain (the article states that any homeowner who has it installed has to provide power for it for life even if they do not use it). Commercial providers would be forced to cut prices and improve service or go under.
Actually in some cases, there were arcade boards that had planned obsolesence built into them. All of the Capcom Play System boards (CPS1, CPS2, CPS3) had various forms of what was known as a "suicide battery". In some boards this was a battery powering a RAM chip that contained a decryption table for the game. Once the battery died, the RAM would lose the decryption tables and make it impossible for the board to work. Others had a "suicide battery" that powered the game's graphics hardware, and needed a hardware-level fix (beyond just replacing the battery) to get the game working again. Sega also had their own suicide battery system for some of their hardware, but Capcom was the biggest offender.
MAME bypasses all of this suicide hardware, and from what I recall some of the people on the MAME project worked on some of the software-level fixes necessary to get the older boards working again.
The American model of identification number is basically supposed to be a secret between you, your employer, your insurer, your financial institution, and the government. The reason for this is that this is what you use to sign up for things like bank accounts and credit cards - and there's nothing in place to stop someone who has your SSN from getting a bunch of credit cards in your name and maxing them out.
Korea is kind of weird in that they want their numbers to be secret, but have people use them for a lot of things. One of the most wide-scale cases of identity theft in South Korea for a long time (I don't know if it's the case as much today) was in MMORPGs, where they required people to sign up with a Korean identification number to play. There was actually a huge database of so called "KSSNs" (Korean Social Security Number) that were used to do this. The reason for this, oddly enough, had to do with a breach in a game called Lineage 2 that required KSSNs for registration - after the breach, the Korean government mandated that all online games use KSSNs for signups. I've heard they also use them for social media stuff but I've never seen that firsthand.
What I'm wondering is whether this is something like the plaques that build up with Alzheimer's disease - modern medicine still doesn't know whether the plaques are a cause of Alzheimer's or a by-product of something that is the real cause of the disease. It seems plausible to me that this retrovirus could be to ALS what Kaposi's Sarcoma is to HIV/AIDS - a unique symptom of the underlying disease that certainly makes things worse, but isn't really part of the underlying cause.
It's also the opposite - there are plenty of foreign businesses who won't ship to the United States. I have a friend who buys a lot of anime goods off Yahoo Auctions JP, and most of the sellers there will not ship outside of Japan. He pays an exorbitant sum to re-shippers to forward the packages to him.
On the business side, I once worked for a place that made airplane parts. One of their customers is a French firm that routinely shipped parts back to them in order to get them fixed. They also had to use a freight forwarder for it both ways, same for Honeywell's operation in the UK.
Regulating this kind of freight forwarding would probably be borderline impossible to do given the sheer number of different countries and their law sets involved.
“Nuclear power requires obedience. Demand what you really need. Just look at Donald Trump. What can possibly go wrong?”
Not sure what to think of it.
May 2016
(Atlanta) Thousands were horrified today as Donald Trump's newest Trump Tower, built on the outskirts of the Atlanta Metro Area, was subjected to low levels of radiation from a minor ventilation breach at a recently-completed nuclear power plant. The breach, which released levels of radiation normally considered harmless, caused Trump's hair to mutate into a separate organism during a rally at the new high-rise. Experts are baffled at how this could have happened, but one doctor at the event was quoted as saying "It was probably a side effect of all that hairspray."
Trump's hair has stated that it intends to run for president as a separate entity from Trump himself, running on a platform that involves building a wall of barber shops along the US-Mexican border to "stop shipments of cheap and illegal toupees made from the hair of Mexican migrant workers". In a recent CNN/ORC poll, Trump's hair polled at a full 5 percentage points over the rest of Donald Trump.
Democratic candidates have accused the hair of being a hairpiece that was originally made in China, which would make it ineligible to run for the presidency. Trump's hair has vehemently denied this accusation, stating, "I am the real deal, and I'd be glad to let anyone who needs proof see my long firm birth certificate.. and also run their hand through me."
They'd buy it because of their horrible track record on human rights. The Saudi government is about to execute a man for participating in the Arab Spring protests.. that, and because his uncle isn't from the same side of Islam as the current regime. Protests like the ones they're sentencing someone to death for often get organized online over social media - and what better way to quash dissent than to monitor social media and put spyware on the computers of anyone even suspected of planning a protest, then jail and/or murder them to silence them?
Even if the Saudi government did not use it for some reason, there are plenty of regimes in the Middle East (Iran, for one) that would be happy to purchase such software from the Saudi government in order to crack down on their own dissidents, especially considering that the United States and Europe would have qualms about selling to them.
I think in the case of cam-rips, they're usually not uploaded at all. Private trackers won't take them, and no one is going to download them on public trackers unless they're desperate. Most cam-rips, from what I understand anyway, get burned to disc and sold on the street rather than put online.
What I think the article (really more of a short, buzzword-filled list) fails to address is that IT workers aren't leaving major, established corporations for "unicorns" for no reason. Most workers aren't going to give up seniority (and the perks that come with it like better pay and benefits) at a big company for a job at a startup for no reason other than because they can. In reality, it's probably that the startups are offering higher pay and better working conditions, thus giving workers a reason to leave.
This honestly reminds me of where I work right now, where the management is stumped at why they keep having people quit when they have managers going around every night telling people how much they want to fire them and how at risk they are of losing their jobs.
What I'm wondering is, how much does it cost to get sole marketing rights to a generic drug? This seems like the kind of thing where a nonprofit or NGO should form to buy the rights to all the generics, and then sell the drugs at or very close to cost - until, that is, the loophole that allowed Turing to do what they did is closed.
So, you'd turn Congress from a bunch of bodies that lack brains to a bunch of brains that lack bodies?
There's a reason no one has ever tried to sell true a la carte service, and it's because the content providers force "bundling" with their channels. Disney, for instance, is well known for forcing providers to bundle a bunch of crap in with ESPN - their deal with the cable companies is bundle or don't get it at all. Almost every content provider does this in order to sell their less popular channels.
What I'm wondering is whether this is actually a difficult investigation, or whether it's actually that the Japanese courts are having trouble deciding what to charge Karpeles with. I don't think there's a single government that has decided what Bitcoin actually is - a currency or personal property. If it's a currency, and it turns out that Karpeles was taking money from his business, that's embezzlement. If it's not, it's theft. There could also be fraud charges thrown in if, as some people suggest, the stolen coins never actually existed and were basically a large-scale accounting error. It seems like the courts would have to first define what Bitcoin is in order to actually charge someone for stealing them.
The thing is, there's a strong public policy argument to be made against Lexmark in this case. The government (typically) wants people to recycle because it means less money spent hauling the stuff to a recycling center or landfill and less pollution to deal with later. There are actually several levels of federal recognition for facilities that recycle printer cartridges - the one most of those companies go for is one that guarantees they throw nothing away. Since refilling the cartridges and selling them is the easiest and most economical method of recycling them, it's logical that a lawsuit to stop that recycling would be thrown out on public policy grounds.
I don't have a Surface Pro, but I bought this "ASUS Transformer Book" thing which is basically a tablet with an attached keyboard that I got for around $250 on Newegg. It runs full Win 8.1 and has expandable memory via SD card. Android tablets have a lot of issues right now in that they simply can't do what a Windows tablet can.
Best example I can give of this is watching a Twitch stream.
If I wanted to watch Twitch on my 2013 Nexus 7 without ads, I first had to install the horrible Twitch app, then side-load Adblock Plus (as an app) onto the tablet and set up my internet connection to run through Adblock as a proxy. The problem is that running Adblock as a proxy breaks a bunch of other stuff and so it has to constantly be switched on or off to use different things. Watching it in-browser simply didn't work because the tablet can't handle the desktop version of Twitch.
With this thing, I just installed Firefox and loaded ABP into it, then go right to Twitch and start watching. It still has a little trouble viewing things at "source" quality (video desyncs with audio) but at "high" it works just fine.
They're finding them the same way they find people on normal torrents - Popcorn Time is basically a torrent client with streaming video built in. They have one of those "piracy protection" firms sit on the torrent and gather IPs, then subpoena the ISPs to find out who had the offending IP address at the time they saw it in the swarm for the torrent. From there, all it takes is a few threatening letters and a legal team backed by the deep pockets of Big Media.
It's not plain statutory rape because New Hampshire, like a lot of states, has revised their statutory rape law to prevent people from being charged in cases where both parties involved are minors. There's usually a limit as to how far apart in age the two parties can be, but generally two minors having sex is not statutory rape in states that have revised their laws.
The problem is, that's not something that could be realistically done. Health insurance has to have your SSN to determine identity and for tax purposes - the insurer needs to make sure they are billing the right people, and they need to make sure that their clients can verify their insurance information because of the way health insurance (especially through an employer) interacts with the tax system. Most employer-provided health insurance is paid for pre-tax, and if the IRS comes along with any questions as to whether the insurance is real or not, there has to be a way to prove it. At the same time, the hospitals and other care providers need SSNs to be able to correctly bill the insurance companies for the right person's care.
It's been quite a ride for the clickbait headline writing market this week. In China, headlines cratered; in the U.S., clickbait dove for two days, only to rebound on Wednesday. That made many Slashdot editors nervous, both about the front page of Slashdot (which some of them depend upon) and the continuing flow of money from VCs and investors. While the clickbait jitters don't seem to be affecting some news firms' ability to implode themselves, more than one pundit is wondering whether the clickbait industry will shift into 'fear mode,' which could be bad for the so-called 'ad firms' that need readers to keep clicking like it's 1999. Are we going to see money start drying up for clickbait headlines?
At least Nerval's Lobster is trying harder. A story with two non-Dice sources as opposed to zero is always an improvement.