My wife and I login on the same browser all the time without closing tabs. In fact, I do this all the time when paying bills.
Win+L, click your wife's name.
Logout on the 3rd tab, login to my wife's card account at the same bank, setup a payment on her card, log it in my spreadsheet.
If your wife authorizes you to pay her bill, then perhaps instead of you impersonating her, she should add you as an authorized manager of her account. Separate authentication (e.g. you are LordKronos) from authorization (e.g. LordKronos may withdraw from checking account 963852741 and make payments on 4345 6789 3210 6543). Ask your bank how to set this up, or find a bank that allows this.
Beside that, there's just the matter of security. I'm not closing my browser because I need to keep pages open, but I want to logout of websites so that I'm no longer using.
What is the attack model associated with staying logged in as yourself?
You're trying very hard to contrive some arrangement that makes basic authentication look like it's not utterly broken, but sorry...it's utterly broken.
The feature exists. I grant that the feature is broken. But it's possible to unbreak the feature. So instead of starting a web site that requires use of cookies, one can instead build browser extensions or contribute browser patches to unbreak the feature.
how would the site know that the viewer's device has a 4" screen in the first place without JavaScript?
CSS media queries are the preferred tool for this
CSS media queries can't change what content loads in the first place. For example, advertiser A may have a mobile ad but no desktop ad, and advertiser B may have a desktop ad but no mobile ad. The site would want to show advertiser A's ad to mobile users and advertiser B's ad to desktop users. And if the user agent is configured not to execute JavaScript, the server has to know what to send before the CSS loads, let alone before the media queries are evaluated.
unless you're in the unfortunate position of supporting IE8.
Internet Explorer 8 is no longer supported. Microsoft has shifted to a policy of supporting only the newest IE on a particular operating system. For Windows 10, 8.1, and 7, this is IE 11. For Windows Vista, this is IE 9. For Windows XP, this is IE 8, but Windows XP itself is no longer supported. And if a browser is no longer supported, it is likely to have security vulnerabilities that its publisher will never fix, such as vulnerabilities that allow the drive-by installation of a keylogger. A reasonable person would never enter personally identifying information into an application, or into any application running on an operating system, that is so likely to be insecure.
And you didn't address the other point I raised:
Good luck getting any advertiser to pay for a fraction of a percent of a page if the viewer's device has a 4" screen, such as a phone.
Let me give a more concrete example: If all advertisers that a site operator has contacted are willing to buy full-mobile-screen ads but unwilling to buy tenth-of-a-mobile-screen ads, should the site operator just add a paywall on mobile?
it's in the category "deregulated regulation", where a private entity, by its position takes the job of a regulator -- sometimes even encouraged by a state entity
Other examples include the Motion Picture Production Code and the MPAA rating system that replaced it, the Nintendo censorship code and the ESRB that largely replaced it, and the console makers' organizational qualifications for development of TV-displayed video games that continue to this day.
That's probably it. Credit cards have swipe fees per transaction. Bitcoin isn't the answer either because the Chinese miners that dominate it have expressed an interest in keeping block sizes small, which increases the fee to get your transaction into a block. This leaves you with having to buy a year's subscription to a site to read one article.
and some method of subscribing and collecting payments that couldn't be trivially gamed
The closest thing I can remember was Adult Check, a subscription network where viewers paid per month and participating site operators got paid per page view. "You're a grown-up; you can pay for things now." It was popular in the late 1990s, but as far as I can tell, what killed Adult Check was a successful lawsuit from the publisher of Perfect 10 magazine, whose photography was plagiarized across many participating sites. I hear Webpass.io is trying to revive this.
Perhaps a general user objection on sites dominated by user-created content (eg, forums)
The WELL and Something Awful are successful subscription forums. But subscriptions scoped to a single site wouldn't work so well for less sticky sites, such as sites offering self-contained news or opinion pieces, because almost nobody wants to subscribe for a year to read one article.
For the record, DogDude means that the line between acceptable advertising and unacceptable advertising coincides with the line between advertising hosted by a publisher and advertising hosted by an ad network. This means that once a site has too much traffic to allow running it as a hobby, its operator ought to start selling ad space direcly to advertisers without the intermediary of an ad network.
So the spenders are subsidizing all the "lookey-loos".
Where that breaks is when lookey-loos come in and visit the showroom and then go out and buy the same thing on Amazon or somewhere else that has no brick and mortar showroom overhead.
Good luck getting Reddit users to pay a fee to post, especially when many of them are intentional throwaway accounts.
It worked for Something Awful, and 4chan has been trying it as well.
The entire idea of YouTube was to quickly get videos up and out to the world. Putting that behind a paywall, especially back before it had the clout it does now, would have been suicide at the time.
Then make a paywall for uploading videos, not for watching them. That's how publishing in, for example, an open access scholarly journal works.
I don't know how code signing verification policy works on Windows, but on OS X, Gatekeeper checks only an app's main executable for a signature against an Apple-issued code signing certificate, not other executables in the same folder that it loads.
An LGPL program can be linked statically to a proprietary program so long as the proprietary program's publisher makes available to its licensees a set of working.o files that can be linked to a new version of the LGPL program.
Amazon is funded by the sellers who advertise products through its Selling on Amazon platform, and eBay likewise.
Most video games with AAA production values are paywalled, either just to start (traditional distribution model) or to be able to play longer than five minutes in a stretch (free-to-play with energy mechanic). It's a consequence of needing to pay artists.
Ad-free sites hosting how-to articles would be paywalled. If you want to read five how-to articles, each on one of five different sites, prepare to pay five $20 per year subscriptions. If you think people don't read the featured article on today's Slashdot, just wait until site-scoped paywalls become more popular.
Likewise, ad-free messaging platforms would be paywalled. If one of your contacts is on of LOA, another on NSM, and yet another on QCI, prepare to pay three different annual subscriptions.
Say you use a search engine to navigate to five different pages on five different sites, but each requires a separate subscription in order to read past the first paragraph of an article once it has detected your preference for no advertising. Only a negligible number of people are willing to pay $20 for a year's subscription to one site (or for a block of 1,000 article views on one site) to read one article; the vast majority bounce. The only way I can see around users' preference against site-scoped paywalls is to go back to federated subscription networks. Remember Adult Check?
No Javascript (Impossible, otherwise you will see the ads burned into the content of the website, which is actually worse, because it's hard to be context-aware this way, do you really want to see ads for condoms on childrens comics?)
Then be aware of the context of the page on which the advertisement appears, and be unaware of the viewer's context.
Nobody buys directly from content publishers because campaigns have set dates to run
Then publishers ought to introduce tools to let an advertiser choose the start and end of each campaign, so that an advertiser can buy a particular share of a particular ad unit on a "set it and forget it" basis.
No interstitials (These are really only meant for linear content, eg you visit a site, and on the third page or so, you see this ad. It's not meant to be the first thing you see because it sends the user away from the publisher.)
Ought all sites targeted at children to be instead paywalled?
no more than 10% of the browser view area, per page.
Good luck getting any advertiser to pay for a fraction of a percent of a page if the viewer's device has a 4" screen, such as a phone. And how would the site know that the viewer's device has a 4" screen in the first place without JavaScript?
Unfortunately there is nothing stopping the website owner from tracking this information and reporting it back to the ad provider, acting mainly as a proxy
But there is something stopping the advertisers from believing the website owner. The website owner has an incentive to inflate view and click counts.
Depends on whether it includes offline use, whether that's $0.99 period or $0.99 plus the cost of broadband where you want to watch. And if that's as a passenger in a vehicle, prepare to pay a cell carrier $10 to $15 per GB.
The best way for the industry to deter that level of well-funded piracy is to make everything available for home viewing worldwide at the same time, and in all formats that consumers want at the same time
Except not every studio is big enough to hire voice actors for dubbing into all languages at the same time and to seek classification for potentially objectionable content in all countries at the same time. And it'd have to be industry-wide and phased in over a long time, as upstream licensors (such as music publishers and record labels for music used in a movie) still price-discriminate based on region, and there exist decades-long exclusive territorial distribution agreements for existing works.
Then what should residents of the country where SlashdotMedia is headquartered do to change it?
Considering I only use physical ethernet connections
Very few public places nowadays provide "physical ethernet connections" to guests. It's all Wi-Fi nowadays. In a hotel, for example, do you prefer to just do without Internet access for the duration?
Slashdot Mirror
My wife and I login on the same browser all the time without closing tabs. In fact, I do this all the time when paying bills.
Win+L, click your wife's name.
Logout on the 3rd tab, login to my wife's card account at the same bank, setup a payment on her card, log it in my spreadsheet.
If your wife authorizes you to pay her bill, then perhaps instead of you impersonating her, she should add you as an authorized manager of her account. Separate authentication (e.g. you are LordKronos) from authorization (e.g. LordKronos may withdraw from checking account 963852741 and make payments on 4345 6789 3210 6543). Ask your bank how to set this up, or find a bank that allows this.
Beside that, there's just the matter of security. I'm not closing my browser because I need to keep pages open, but I want to logout of websites so that I'm no longer using.
What is the attack model associated with staying logged in as yourself?
You're trying very hard to contrive some arrangement that makes basic authentication look like it's not utterly broken, but sorry...it's utterly broken.
The feature exists. I grant that the feature is broken. But it's possible to unbreak the feature. So instead of starting a web site that requires use of cookies, one can instead build browser extensions or contribute browser patches to unbreak the feature.
how would the site know that the viewer's device has a 4" screen in the first place without JavaScript?
CSS media queries are the preferred tool for this
CSS media queries can't change what content loads in the first place. For example, advertiser A may have a mobile ad but no desktop ad, and advertiser B may have a desktop ad but no mobile ad. The site would want to show advertiser A's ad to mobile users and advertiser B's ad to desktop users. And if the user agent is configured not to execute JavaScript, the server has to know what to send before the CSS loads, let alone before the media queries are evaluated.
unless you're in the unfortunate position of supporting IE8.
Internet Explorer 8 is no longer supported. Microsoft has shifted to a policy of supporting only the newest IE on a particular operating system. For Windows 10, 8.1, and 7, this is IE 11. For Windows Vista, this is IE 9. For Windows XP, this is IE 8, but Windows XP itself is no longer supported. And if a browser is no longer supported, it is likely to have security vulnerabilities that its publisher will never fix, such as vulnerabilities that allow the drive-by installation of a keylogger. A reasonable person would never enter personally identifying information into an application, or into any application running on an operating system, that is so likely to be insecure.
And you didn't address the other point I raised:
Good luck getting any advertiser to pay for a fraction of a percent of a page if the viewer's device has a 4" screen, such as a phone.
Let me give a more concrete example: If all advertisers that a site operator has contacted are willing to buy full-mobile-screen ads but unwilling to buy tenth-of-a-mobile-screen ads, should the site operator just add a paywall on mobile?
it's in the category "deregulated regulation", where a private entity, by its position takes the job of a regulator -- sometimes even encouraged by a state entity
Other examples include the Motion Picture Production Code and the MPAA rating system that replaced it, the Nintendo censorship code and the ESRB that largely replaced it, and the console makers' organizational qualifications for development of TV-displayed video games that continue to this day.
Lack of a centralized micropayment infrastructure
That's probably it. Credit cards have swipe fees per transaction. Bitcoin isn't the answer either because the Chinese miners that dominate it have expressed an interest in keeping block sizes small, which increases the fee to get your transaction into a block. This leaves you with having to buy a year's subscription to a site to read one article.
and some method of subscribing and collecting payments that couldn't be trivially gamed
The closest thing I can remember was Adult Check, a subscription network where viewers paid per month and participating site operators got paid per page view. "You're a grown-up; you can pay for things now." It was popular in the late 1990s, but as far as I can tell, what killed Adult Check was a successful lawsuit from the publisher of Perfect 10 magazine, whose photography was plagiarized across many participating sites. I hear Webpass.io is trying to revive this.
Perhaps a general user objection on sites dominated by user-created content (eg, forums)
The WELL and Something Awful are successful subscription forums. But subscriptions scoped to a single site wouldn't work so well for less sticky sites, such as sites offering self-contained news or opinion pieces, because almost nobody wants to subscribe for a year to read one article.
whenever I encounter a page that doesn't work with adblock enabled I close the tab and move on.
And then get hassled in Slashdot's comment section for not having read the featured article.
Web sites that are that large/popular need to call advertisers, ask them to advertise, create ads, and put them on their web sites.
Let's say a site operator wants to start selling ad space. Can you recommend a guide to finding relevant and willing advertisers and approaching them?
For the record, DogDude means that the line between acceptable advertising and unacceptable advertising coincides with the line between advertising hosted by a publisher and advertising hosted by an ad network. This means that once a site has too much traffic to allow running it as a hobby, its operator ought to start selling ad space direcly to advertisers without the intermediary of an ad network.
You mention pay sites. Almost nobody will buy a year's subscription to a site just to read one article on that site.
So the spenders are subsidizing all the "lookey-loos".
Where that breaks is when lookey-loos come in and visit the showroom and then go out and buy the same thing on Amazon or somewhere else that has no brick and mortar showroom overhead.
Good luck getting Reddit users to pay a fee to post, especially when many of them are intentional throwaway accounts.
It worked for Something Awful, and 4chan has been trying it as well.
The entire idea of YouTube was to quickly get videos up and out to the world. Putting that behind a paywall, especially back before it had the clout it does now, would have been suicide at the time.
Then make a paywall for uploading videos, not for watching them. That's how publishing in, for example, an open access scholarly journal works.
In what direction would you prefer that the ecosystem move? Incorporate local copies of said plug-ins into each application's repository?
I don't know how code signing verification policy works on Windows, but on OS X, Gatekeeper checks only an app's main executable for a signature against an Apple-issued code signing certificate, not other executables in the same folder that it loads.
An LGPL program can be linked statically to a proprietary program so long as the proprietary program's publisher makes available to its licensees a set of working .o files that can be linked to a new version of the LGPL program.
Who pays SlashdotMedia's ISP?
Amazon is funded by the sellers who advertise products through its Selling on Amazon platform, and eBay likewise.
Most video games with AAA production values are paywalled, either just to start (traditional distribution model) or to be able to play longer than five minutes in a stretch (free-to-play with energy mechanic). It's a consequence of needing to pay artists.
Ad-free sites hosting how-to articles would be paywalled. If you want to read five how-to articles, each on one of five different sites, prepare to pay five $20 per year subscriptions. If you think people don't read the featured article on today's Slashdot, just wait until site-scoped paywalls become more popular.
Likewise, ad-free messaging platforms would be paywalled. If one of your contacts is on of LOA, another on NSM, and yet another on QCI, prepare to pay three different annual subscriptions.
Yes, lots of stuff was on university-hosted websites
And what happened to it once the students producing the stuff graduated?
With today's cheap hosting
Would hosting have become so cheap without the economies of scale that come with demand for hosting by ad-supported publishers?
And of course there's the search engines; Google used to support itself just fine with small, text-based ads next to the search results
The web was also much smaller back then; I remember the "Giga Google" doodle for the milestone of one billion pages in its index.
subscriptions
Say you use a search engine to navigate to five different pages on five different sites, but each requires a separate subscription in order to read past the first paragraph of an article once it has detected your preference for no advertising. Only a negligible number of people are willing to pay $20 for a year's subscription to one site (or for a block of 1,000 article views on one site) to read one article; the vast majority bounce. The only way I can see around users' preference against site-scoped paywalls is to go back to federated subscription networks. Remember Adult Check?
It's an interstitial between a document A containing a hyperlink and the document B to which the hyperlink refers.
No Javascript (Impossible, otherwise you will see the ads burned into the content of the website, which is actually worse, because it's hard to be context-aware this way, do you really want to see ads for condoms on childrens comics?)
Then be aware of the context of the page on which the advertisement appears, and be unaware of the viewer's context.
Nobody buys directly from content publishers because campaigns have set dates to run
Then publishers ought to introduce tools to let an advertiser choose the start and end of each campaign, so that an advertiser can buy a particular share of a particular ad unit on a "set it and forget it" basis.
No interstitials (These are really only meant for linear content, eg you visit a site, and on the third page or so, you see this ad. It's not meant to be the first thing you see because it sends the user away from the publisher.)
The interstitial is alive and well.
No Sound
What, even for auto-playing videos?
No auto-playing videos.
It is never appropriate to advertise to children.
Ought all sites targeted at children to be instead paywalled?
no more than 10% of the browser view area, per page.
Good luck getting any advertiser to pay for a fraction of a percent of a page if the viewer's device has a 4" screen, such as a phone. And how would the site know that the viewer's device has a 4" screen in the first place without JavaScript?
Unfortunately there is nothing stopping the website owner from tracking this information and reporting it back to the ad provider, acting mainly as a proxy
But there is something stopping the advertisers from believing the website owner. The website owner has an incentive to inflate view and click counts.
Why would I pirate something that costs $0.99?
Depends on whether it includes offline use, whether that's $0.99 period or $0.99 plus the cost of broadband where you want to watch. And if that's as a passenger in a vehicle, prepare to pay a cell carrier $10 to $15 per GB.
The best way for the industry to deter that level of well-funded piracy is to make everything available for home viewing worldwide at the same time, and in all formats that consumers want at the same time
Except not every studio is big enough to hire voice actors for dubbing into all languages at the same time and to seek classification for potentially objectionable content in all countries at the same time. And it'd have to be industry-wide and phased in over a long time, as upstream licensors (such as music publishers and record labels for music used in a movie) still price-discriminate based on region, and there exist decades-long exclusive territorial distribution agreements for existing works.
A user who is ending his or her browser session so that another user can begin a session will be closing all tabs anyway.
Correction: *YOUR* federal law requires it.
Then what should residents of the country where SlashdotMedia is headquartered do to change it?
Considering I only use physical ethernet connections
Very few public places nowadays provide "physical ethernet connections" to guests. It's all Wi-Fi nowadays. In a hotel, for example, do you prefer to just do without Internet access for the duration?