Richard Stallman: Online Publishers Should Let Readers Pay Anonymously (theguardian.com) 160
Long-time Slashdot reader mspohr writes:
The Guardian has an opinion piece by Richard Stallman which argues that we should be able to pay for news anonymously. From the article: "Online newspapers and magazines have come to depend, for their income, on a system of advertising and surveillance, which is both annoying and unjust... What they ought to do instead is give us a truly anonymous way to pay."
He also (probably not coincidentally) has developed a method to do just that. "For the GNU operating system, which was created by the free software movement and is typically used with the kernel Linux, we are developing a suitable payment system called GNU Taler that will allow publishers to accept anonymous payments from readers for individual articles."
Publishers "can profit from defending privacy rather than from exposing their readers," argues Stallman, ending his article with a simple plea. "Publishers, please let me pay you -- anonymously!"
He also (probably not coincidentally) has developed a method to do just that. "For the GNU operating system, which was created by the free software movement and is typically used with the kernel Linux, we are developing a suitable payment system called GNU Taler that will allow publishers to accept anonymous payments from readers for individual articles."
Publishers "can profit from defending privacy rather than from exposing their readers," argues Stallman, ending his article with a simple plea. "Publishers, please let me pay you -- anonymously!"
Good, but won't work (Score:2, Insightful)
Because content creators think too highly of themselves. They want to sell and resell their work infinitely many times. And even though it doesn't work, whey think it does and they have the publishers on their side (and they think the same).
Working for a few days or a year to produce an article, a song, a video or whatever, does not automatically guarantee that you should get paid for it. It's the same for someone who works for a few days or a year to produce a chair. If you can get paid for it, great! But
Re:Good, but won't work (Score:5, Insightful)
If the chair maker makes a chair that takes him 48 hours to make. He is going to sell it at a price worthy of the time he put into it. That is partially why you can spend $15.00 on a cheap injection molded plastic one or $1500 on a nice hand carved one. Now for the $1500 chair he may not expect it to sell over night but he will sell it at some point and recoup his time that he put into it.
The problem with digital media is that supply is nearly infinite so whatever the demand is the product it worthless. However there is real demand for the product and creator for the products will need to be rewarded for their work otherwise they will move to do different things. So right now we are finding different ways to make money for digital content. The micropayment method a dacade ago never got anywhere. Advertising is getting too saturated and not so effective. Paywalls stink because they expect you to stick to one form of media.
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I think the problem for news outlets is even more fundamental than that.
No-one owns the news. Things happen and anyone can report on them. There is some value on being there, on finding out the facts. The problem is that once found, anyone can re-report them for free and simply cite you as the source. How often do you read about some scandal that it must have taken a journalist many person-hours, even years to uncover on some other site that is just reporting on what they found? The moment it's published, e
Good, but might work (Score:2)
The obvious use case that might make this viable, and also the BRAVE browser
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2... [theregister.co.uk]
would be porn, which tends to power most great IT advances.
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Most advances, period, apparently.
At least, someone found enough instances of this to write a book about it.
_Sex, bombs, and burgers : how war, pornography, and fast food have shaped modern technology_, by Peter Nowak.
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The only thing this doesn't apply to is photos because a textual description is inferior
Are you kidding? A textual description can describe any photo. But a photo can never describe what the lens cannot see. Text can, and does.
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But a photo can never describe what the lens cannot see.
You've never head of photoshop? Plenty of AP stringers did, when they photoshopped up pictures of the Iraq war (some of them quite blatant - dude, don't copypaste smoke FFS), and yet the AP ran them as actual news. (Or photoshopping all the black people out of pictures of Tea Party rallies, or I'm sure people can come up with similar disgraces against progressive rallies).
Textual description can also lie about the contents of photos, which makes for good propaganda if only a small fraction of the readers
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"He is going to sell it at a price worthy of the time he put into it." Wrong. He is going to sell it at a price that someone is willing to pay for it. Otherwise it will remain unsold.
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If the chair maker makes a chair that takes him 48 hours to make. He is going to sell it at a price worthy of the time he put into it. That is partially why you can spend $15.00 on a cheap injection molded plastic one or $1500 on a nice hand carved one.
And while a single one of the injection molded chairs would cost many thousands to make in terms of design, engineering, mold production, machine setup and materials the fact that this can be done once and then the cost amortized across the production of many thousands of chairs is what makes it viable.
Obviously people aren't willing to pay for a bunch of journalists to travel the world reporting the news to them exclusively so instead the cost of this is amortized by everybody who receives that news contri
Pay per seat (Score:2)
Now for the $1500 chair he may not expect it to sell over night but he will sell it at some point and recoup his time that he put into it.
Except that the chair is a physical object requiring a transfer of a physical object. There's no way to have "chairness" without having physical chairs moved around.
To keep your metaphor, the current situation is that for historical reasons, they have a different payment model:
they ask to pay each time you sit down on a chair. They'll happily provide you a chair for free, even an expensive one that would be worth 1500$ of a handscrafting. But all their chairs come with a contract stating that you must pay 1
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No mass media would ever work if the first person to read/hear/watch it had to carry all the costs. Nor would donations work because most people would wait and see if they could get it for free anyway without donating or they'd complain about what they did or didn't get like on Kickstarter. We need to split the costs somehow. But it's not good that online news sites track every article you read tied to a subscription, it's another wet dream for totalitarian governments. If reading radical ideas and critical
Anonymous (Score:3, Insightful)
Well publishers could quite easily accept bitcoin payments...
The problem is that the content isn't the product, the users have become the product and the customers are the marketing agencies that pay for the information.
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Sigh, I don't know why we have to keep going over this. Repeat after me: "Bitcoin is not anonymous."
Re: Anonymous (Score:1)
Oh? Really?
Buy a gift credit card.
Create a bc wallet via tor or similar to hide source IP.
Load funds from the gift card to bc wallet.
How is this not anon?
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Re: Anonymous (Score:5, Insightful)
Gift cards don't need to be registered. Buy with cash and there is zero record of who purchased it or used it.
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Besides the camera footage of you buying it.
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serial numbers of each bill given to you
Citation required.
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sigh... if you want to track down the owners of the wallets of all the preceding transactions before the one who paid you, then yeah. Let me know how that goes for you...
Otherwise it's pretty damned obscure. The point of the article was DIRECT identification of payers by name authenticated by credit card details etc.
Re: Anonymous (Score:4, Insightful)
Then why can't they find the people who install ransomware?
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you want me to take the time to somehow find these bitcoin things? i'll just pirate it. faster
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Use tip jars (Score:3)
Adverts are really inefficient, and paywalls just send readers to other sites. What IMO would work better, and fit US culture, is a tip jar that can be easily added to articles, blogs, etc. When you enjoyed someone's work, you leave them a tip. Why is this not a thing already?
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When you enjoyed someone's work, you leave them a tip
But so few articles are worth a dam'. Most aren't even worth the time spent reading them (so the authors should be compensating us for the time wasted by attractive headlines with content that fails to deliver).
However, we already have a system for rewarding authors who consistently produce worthwhile content that is good enough to explicitly seek out: subscriptions. Personally, I am still searching for a publication that produces enough of this high quality content to make the cost of their subs. reasona
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This is an excellent point. Further, the subscription costs are nuts compared to what most people actually consume.
For example, if I had to pay, say, $4.99 a month for each site that I look at some things on from Google News, I'd be spending several hundred a month on news.
Let's take a look at the situation. If I don't block ads, I see about ten ads per page. Let's take a generous $10.00 CPM rate (I'll ignore any CPC because I'll be damned if I'm going to click any of that cruft). That means my viewing the
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You mean like Flattr? It wouldn't work for modern journalism because modern journalism relies mostly on outrage. They try to outrage readers in order to get reader to look at articles and to post in the comments. Readers then come back repeatedly to view the updated comments, and each time get served advertisements. Integrity has disappeared from modern journalism. Journalists care nothing about the truth and are either focused entirely on increasing revenue and pushing their agenda.
You could argue tha
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The problem is, and always has been, the middleman. The user should pay $20 - first off, who's to collect the $20? And who's to disperse it? There has t
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Re:Use tip jars automatically (Score:3)
Even better, let's have a protocol to do this automatically, perhaps built into Firefox or into Adblock.
At the moment, about 90% of web bandwidth is advertising. So it imposes a heavy cost of bandwidth/time/annoyance on the reader, yet it gives back a fraction of a cent to the author of the content. I'd much rather pay directly for the content I want, and not get the garbage. It would also improve content quality because nobody would worry about their articles being unpopular with advertisers. And it would
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One more huge advantage of ending paywalls is linkability.
If I want to share an article with a friend, or link something on my webpage, or cite it as the paper of record, then it can't be behind a paywall.
This way, publishers can get paid fairly, without taking themselves out of the internet community.
And we could be talking micropayments here - 1 cent an article or something.
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Internet anonymity is a sham. If we can buy anonymously, we should also be to vote anonymously. But as many scientists have said, anon voting is impossible. Therefore, and similarly, anonymous internet buying is also impossible.
These "solutions" make the problem worse by aggregating all your purchases into a single middle-man (GNU Taler in this case), who may or may not sell that info to some govt or marketing agency.
Yes! wait No! (Score:2, Interesting)
So online publishers who are struggling to scrape money together with journalists being let go from every corner, cutbacks in every department, poorer and poorer quality editing, shit fluff pieces about lost dogs to try and drive readship who couldn't care less about what's happening in the world, all should now further gut what little income they have?
Richard Stallman why not just straight go out and say you think online publishing shouldn't exist?
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A mass reversion to actual newspapers? I like it.
As long as they go back to 50 cents like they were a decade ago instead of like fucking triple that now.
Re:Yes! wait No! (Score:5, Insightful)
Because he doesn't want to gut their income, unless you mean the income they get from spying and tracking. He wants to pay them money so that they can afford to produce quality content. Only condition is: every purchase and personal interest which they reflect isn't logged somewhere.
The only feasible way to achieve this which I can think of is some type of cryptocurrency.
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I hear a lot of "he".
The reality is that "he" is somewhat unique in giving a damn and that his call for the news companies to do this will result in them gutting income of which spying and tracking is a large portion on top of subscriber fees.
There's no scenario that this would result in maintaining income in this already struggling and dying industry.
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Alternative approach to inverted advertising (Score:2)
How about a privacy protection agent (PPA) who sits in the middle? The broker would auction off metered bits of your time based on how much time you want to spend on shopping. Honest companies that offer valuable goods and services would be glad to make their pitches to qualified customers, while the PPA would be strongly motivated to protect your privacy to stay in the loop.
PPAs would compete for your business based on various parameters (such as the percentage of the auction proceeds you get to keep) and
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Someone else that doesn't understand the GPL :(
The GPL is about giving freedom to the USER, not the dev. And ensuring that the USER keeps that freedom.
Not that I agree with everything he says, but the GPL is good.
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The GPL is about giving freedom to the USER, not the dev. And ensuring that the USER keeps that freedom.
As a developer, I'll go with BSD-style licenses, thanks. I look after my own interests, because for sure no one else does.
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And where did egcs come from? There could be a hint in the actual name of the project, "Experimental/Enhanced GNU Compiler System". It was a fork of GCC and the people who created is saw it as GCC:
We expect that the gcc2 and egcs communities will continue to overlap to a great extent, since they're both working on GCC and both working on Free Software. All code will continue to be assigned to the FSF exactly as before and will be passed on to the gcc2 maintainers for ultimate inclusion into the gcc2 tree.
Re: Yes! wait No! (Score:2)
How would you react if Oracle took libreoffice and rebranded it as OpenOffice? Same situation.
Also the same situation with gnu Hurd, except that he can't abandon his failure and substitute Linux. Too many people would laugh at it. Stalman stopped being relevant at the turn of the century, if not before.
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This is the original announcement back when the EGC fork was created. As you can clearly see the fork was not done in anger. If Oracle took all the pathes from LibreOffice and included it back into OpenOffice proper then exactly no one would be upset or angry, in fact since Apache is currently discussing if they should drop OO completely there have been some signs of interest from the LO camp to get hold of the OO trademark.
A bunch of us (including Fortran, Linux, Intel and RTEMS hackers) have
decided to start a more experimental development project, just like
Cygnus and the FSF started the gcc2 project about 6 years ago. Only
this time the net community with which we are working is larger! We
are calling this project 'egcs' (pronounced 'eggs').
Why are we doing this? It's become increasingly clear in the course
of hacking events that the FSF's needs for gcc2 are at odds with the
objectives of many in the community who have done lots of hacking and
improvement over the years. GCC is part of the FSF's publicity for the
GNU project, as well as being the GNU system's compiler, so stability
is paramount for them. On the other hand, Cygnus, the Linux folks,
the pgcc folks, the Fortran folks and many others have done
development work which has not yet gone into the GCC2 tree despite
years of efforts to make it possible.
This situation has resulted in a lot of strong words on the gcc2
mailing list which really is a shame since at the heart we all want
the same thing: the continued success of gcc, the FSF, and Free
Software in general. Apart from ill will, this is leading to great
divergence which is increasingly making it harder for us all to work
together -- It is almost as if we each had a proprietary compiler!
Thus we are merging our efforts, building something that won't damage
the stability of gcc2, so that we can have the best of both worlds.
As you can see from the list below, we represent a diverse collection
of streams of GCC development. These forks are painful and waste
time; we are bringing our efforts together to simplify the development
of new features. We expect that the gcc2 and egcs communities will
continue to overlap to a great extent, since they're both working on
GCC and both working on Free Software. All code will continue to be
assigned to the FSF exactly as before and will be passed on to the
gcc2 maintainers for ultimate inclusion into the gcc2 tree.
Because the two projects have different objectives, there will be
different sets of maintainers. Provisionally we have agreed that Jim
Wilson is to act as the egcs maintainer and Jason Merrill as the
maintainer of the egcs C++ front end. Craig Burley will continue to
maintain the Fortran front end code in both efforts.
What new features will be coming up soon? There is such a backlog of
tested, un-merged-in features that we have been able to pick a useful
initial set:
New alias analysis support from John F. Carr.
g77 (with some performance patches).
A C++ repository for G++.
A new instruction scheduler from IBM Haifa.
A regmove pass (2-address machine optimizations that in future
will help with compilation for the x86 and for now
will help with some RISC machines).
This will use the development snapshot of 3 August 97 as its base --
in other words we're not starting from the 18 month old gcc-2.7
release, but from a recent development snapshot with all the last 18
months' improvements, including major work on G++.
We plan an initial release for the end of August. The second release
will include some subset of the following:
global cse and partial redundancy elimination.
live range splitting.
More features of IBM Haifa's instruction scheduling,
including software pipelining, and branch scheduling.
sibling call opts.
various new embedded targets.
Further work on regmove.
The egcs mailing list at cygnus.com will be used to discuss and
prioritize these features.
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I'd gladly pay for Slashdot if the option existed (subscriptions are broken at the moment). The old ad-free premium version still kinda works because a lot of people don't have ad-blocking on mobile, and even on desktop when the site provides some genuine value.
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I'm sure hundreds of others would too, and that's about the problem. There's a few hundreds of visitors who are typically annoyed enough by online advertising that they would be willing to pay to get rid of it.
I certainly wouldn't part with money for slashdot, and if the ads get too intrusive I'd either attempt to block them or find another site to read. Kind of like how I now just flat out don't click on any links that say forbes.com.
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Indeed. I was willing to pay $40 for a Raspberry Pi kit to run DNS on my home network and spoof many of the common advertising domains, pointing to a webserver on the Pi that simply serves up a 404.
Charity share brokerage RIUHA (Score:2)
Would you be interested in donating to slashdot on a per-project basis? For examples, an ongoing-cost project could pay for some part of slashdot to keep running, while a feature-development project might pay for improving an old feature or creating a new one. If enough members chipped in, then the project would go forward?
Part of a much more complete idea, but here's just one obvious extension: If a feature incurs ongoing costs but its ongoing-cost project runs out of money, then that feature would be temp
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Do a Kickstarter for fixing typing the £ symbol and I'll chip in. Make down mods count for 0.5 and my wallet is open.
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The main problem with Kickstarter is the lack of success criteria. I think that crowd-funding is actually a good idea, but their implementation seems fatally flawed because their business model is a flat percentage off the top, without any accountability. They just want to pump as much money as possible towards projects, and as far as I know, they do nothing to help with the planning or evaluation.
Are you familiar with the sad story of Diaspora as funded via Kickstarter?
By the way, RACS predates my hearing
Re: Yes! wait No! (Score:2)
I think he is proposing a solution to the problems you outlined.
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Spending many thousands of dollars so a handful of customers can pay a really low fee to protect their identities?
There's literally no scenario where this makes any kind of financial sense.
Who uses GNU Taler? (Score:2, Redundant)
So online publishers who are struggling to scrape money together with journalists being let go from every corner, cutbacks in every department, poorer and poorer quality editing, shit fluff pieces about lost dogs to try and drive readership who couldn't care less about what's happening in the world, all should now further gut what little income they have?
Richard Stallman why not just straight go out and say you think online publishing shouldn't exist?
That sounds pretty much like his jihad against software writers. Initially, he used to say that they should make money selling documentation, then he demanded that the documentation be free, er libre, while he continued to rail against companies that made money w/ FOSS like Tivo and Google.
Right now, the choice he's talking about exists. There are 4 types of people:
1. People opposed to both advertizing/surveillance as well as paying for it
2. People opposed to advertizing/surveillance but okay w/ payin
"For the GNU operating system..." (Score:2)
Unsurprisingly, RMS seemingly has a different definition of "operating system" than most everyone else.
What happens when I use GNU tools on OS X - am I suddenly using that "GNU operating system"?
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There is a GNU operating system in theory, its just not finished enough to use. The existence of linux made it kinda irrelevant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Re: "For the GNU operating system..." (Score:2)
What you call something describes your values (Score:2)
Fine, call it GNU. It's a shame not to give the major components fair credit as the GNU Project asks, so Linux does deserve a mention too. But by calling the OS only GNU you'll also miss out on an opportunity to clearly distinguish between GNU on various kernels (due to GNU's portability): GNU runs on kWindows, kFreeBSD, HURD, and Linux and the choice of kernel means different features. For example, systemd is highly dependent on Linux kernel features so I wouldn't expect to find systemd features on GNU run
Coreutils plus two (Score:2)
If you use GNU Coreutils plus two other major components (such as Bash, Emacs, GCC, glibc), I'd say you're running GNU. Cygwin, for instance, stands for Cygnus GNU/Windows.
HURD RMS (Score:2)
No conception of money (Score:2, Redundant)
I actually admire rms and regard him as a great man, but probably for smaller values of "great". In particular, he has little conception of money and his financial models have never demonstrated anything approaching viability or critical mass.
In years past I actually ran a few alternative financial models past him. He did ask an extremely perceptive question in one exchange. The question led me to a significant improvement in a financial model, but mostly he convinced me that he never has understood money,
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If someone is motivated to donate, why would that motivation be affected by anonymity?
Benefactors wanting or even needing to remain anonymous? That's hardly a new or unjust concept.
I know personally of many people who do this, and rather enjoy and relish in the fact that their donations keep the spotlight on the recipients rather than the benefactors.
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I think you are exaggerating. You really know "many people" who want their charitable donations to be anonymous? I know a lot of people, but I can't think of any of them who make a big issue of anonymity when they donate to charity.
The primary situation where "many people" want their donations to be anonymous are political, and their motivations are usually quite nefarious. Some mix of astroturfing and tax evasion. For such reasons I think it is usually better if the charity know and keep track of where the
Re: No conception of money (Score:2, Insightful)
If the media focused on solutions then it would also have to spend time identifying the cause of the problems better.
You know, sociopath CEOs, corrupt politicians, law enforcement behaving illegally, companies that violate labor laws, etc. People who advertise with them or control their access to exclusives in other words.
Before Reagan was elected, media outlets kept their news and marketing organizations separate. The laws of the time didnt specifically require this but it was the easiest way to comply
Re: No conception of money (Score:2)
I believe RMS is proposing a solution here to a problem with privacy. It uses money so it appears RMS does have some understanding of money.
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Your reply is not very clear, and the issue of his lack of understanding of money isn't that important to me, but I'll try to clarify things a bit. Then I hope you can understand why this once again illustrates that secondary problem.
There is a real problem with the mass media depending on advertising. It creates a desperation for eyeballs that can be sold to advertisers. The abuse of privacy part is actually secondary, but they are trying to increase the value of the eyeballs. The primary problem with that
Re: No conception of money (Score:2)
You kind of lost me at the money part.
Do you expect journalists to work for free like GNU programmers?
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Absolutely not, but actually the GNU programmers should not be working for free, either. However, I do think there should probably be a discount from market wages in exchange for the freedom and control over the work you are doing, whether it is writing articles or code.
My focus is on how small donors can get some of the respect and accountability that large donors have. It seems I'm failing to get that point across. Will it help to say that I think that donor anonymity (or redirection as in "on behalf of"
Re: No conception of money (Score:2)
At least each party is then getting something in return. Tgrow in an opt-out, so you don't see ads, and everyone would be happy.
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Whether or not he lives in a "money-free fantasy land", it's quite clear that you don't understand the main issue here, which is really about privacy.
Newspaper reading never was about privacy ever. The paper you buy at the front of the train station is anonymous, true. But the subscription for your local paper most certainly isn't. The business model of all newspapers with ads precludes any form of privacy whatsoever. Just cannot exist in this world simply cause no one would pay the price of a paper without ads: about triple the current price, and online ads must be targetable and be able to build a profile of a single reader or they are worthless.
RMS doesn't understand how newspapers work (Score:1)
What RMS wants is logical, good for society, etc. but totally nonpractical and hasn't got a snowballs chance of working since he doesn't understand or ignore how newspapers, print and online both, make their money.
A newspaper hasn't been financed by the price of the paper in your local 7-11 for decades now. that nickel and dime is paying for distribution and maybe the cost of printing at most. The actual money, the biggest part of the cost producing a newspaper has been financed for ages with advertising. A
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In the debate about 'acceptable' online ads, there are plenty of people who don't mind subscribing or seeing static ads as long they don't get tracked and spied on. But your position is the opposite extreme from the block everything, never pay for anything, living in mom's basement crowd.
The newspaper in my local 7/11 has ads in it, but will never know thing about me. I am quite happy with that arrangement.
Re: RMS doesn't understand how newspapers work (Score:2)
Then why do online newspapers still sell subscriptions?
They can't make enough from advertising.
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This is true. Newspapers make their money from advertising. But the old 'printed on dead trees' newspapers didn't know who was reading their ads. Until the customer called or came in to the business and bought a product.
Web-based publication has given advertisers far more power in transactions than they ever had with printed publications. Not the businesses buying the ads, the advertisers. They have the power to dynamically direct to potential customers in order to maximize their profits, not those of the
"Anonymous payments" (Score:2)
Your transactions are private, neither the exchange nor merchant needs to learn your identity. There is no need to give our credit card numbers or other sensitive information, and the merchant will only be able to do exactly the transaction you confirmed using your digital wallet
That looks good, and will not be restricted to publishers... this will become a more general payment method [taler.net].
Systemic annoyance. (Score:2)
"...Online newspapers and magazines have come to depend, for their income, on a system of advertising and surveillance, which is both annoying and unjust..."
I get he's trying to highlight a new solution for a known problem here, but RMS should really get out more to better understand just how systemic this bullshit truly is across almost every aspect of our lives.
Re: Systemic annoyance. (Score:2)
I think he does understand the problem of privacy and is proposing a solution.
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I think he does understand the problem of privacy and is proposing a solution.
Yes he does understand a problem of privacy.
My point here is this is hardly the problem of privacy today.
In the big picture, I foresee someone expecting a tidal wave from a grain of sand being dropped in the ocean.
Just don't try paying if you use iOS (Score:2)
Funny, this coming just after this story;
https://apple.slashdot.org/sto... [slashdot.org]
What we clearly need is GNUcoin!
Completely correct but too expensive (Score:2, Interesting)
"rms" as he's preferred to be called for decades, has repeatedly proven quite correct about technology freedoms. This seems to be another case where he is correct, but will mostly be tuned out becuase publishers think that they, individually, will benefit from reducing their client's freedom and protection.
The individual data of purchases and of personal interests and subscriptions, and even data on interest in particular articles, is being collected and analyzed to tune advertising and to provide links to
Re: Completely correct but too expensive (Score:2)
I'm sure there are lots of studies showing targeted ads work.
The real proof is the millions of dollars being spent.
No, Richard. BAD idea. (Score:2)
It's not a matter of anonymizing supporters who want to pay a few dollars to a non-mainstream news source who do a good job and report on unpopular subjects. It's a matter of hiding the identity of a 1%er who decides to pour megabucks into a news source deliberately misleading the readers.
I will cheerfully admit to sending a few bucks to a cause which is controversial as long as I get to find out when some rich creep tries to buy a "big lie" in one of these corrupt "news" organizations.
GNU Anonymous (Score:2)
Richard could start a profitable financial company that would play the intermediate role for ensuring the micro-bills and for hiding the customer names from media companies.
Glad to see more ideas entering the arena (Score:3, Interesting)
Regarding the post summary, let's evaluate the current situation. We have a world where media is beholden to advertisers and the public is the product. Injected with "flavor additive content" as tastes dictate, monitored, recorded and demographically categorized for convenient sale to 3rd party interests. I may sound overly dramatic but I don't think I'm exaggerating. The true customers for all ad based media are advertisers. Data aggregators then sell it all onward to corporate and nation state interests. I doubt any right thinking person would say this is a good state of affairs unless they've got vested interests in this particular food chain.
So a solution is necessary. Reading the FAQ blurbs about GNU Taller from the link given though, and as a self proclaimed monetary history and economics buff, I'm not convinced this is the best way forward.
I kind of like how they describe the difference between "sharing" which is anonymous and free as in speech and "transactions" where the income side is somehow not anonymous for businesses. This could be conducive for abolishing income taxation (an immoral action easily evaded by rich people) and moving to a pure consumption tax. Such as:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FairTax
Which I would support wholeheartedly. I don't see anything though which would stop GNU Taller from only perpetuating the income tax, which I am morally opposed to.
Lastly I see no mention of micro-payments. We need an anonymous way to issue fractional payments to content creators which doesn't require private details to set up, and which doesn't have service fees that would make arrangements like "a few cents per article" impractical. Bitcoin's upcoming micro-payment channel and side chain ideas are promising, but GNU Taller doesn't seem to touch on this. On this front GNU Taller looks like just more of the same whereby anonymity isn't a real thing: make an account at their site, accept cookies, sign in and be tracked as you use up your deposit.
To get back to the summary of this post, consider this question: Would you give a street musician money if they wanted your name, address and credit card details? No, but you'd toss a little cash in his hat gladly. Some of the improvements planned for bitcoin do have this future in mind, so I'll keep my bets on that square for the moment.
One small problem (Score:2)
How will potential paying readers discover those websites? Could it be through... advertisement to likely audiences? You don't say!
Nope (Score:2)
Accountability for view and click counts (Score:2)
If publishers (operators of ad-supported websites) sell their own ad space directly to advertisers and serve ads from the publisher's own server, how can the advertiser know that the view and click counts are accurate and not fraudulently padded? Paper newspapers had circulation numbers that were hard to pad because each copy had a more substantial cost to manufacture than a web hit. And advertisers are willing to spend more on online ad space precisely because of richer reach statistics.
Re: (Score:2)
Trust from scale; Nielsen ratings (Score:2)
There's no guarantee that Doubleclick or any of the other ad networks numbers are accurate, either.
Trust can come from scale. If a major ad network such as DoubleClick is screwing its advertisers, then everyone's getting screwed the same. At least DoubleClick is more widely deployed than any particular publisher's self-hosted ad inventory, and people are more likely to notice faults in it.
Besides, people still advertise on the TV and the radio, and there are no numbers at all from those mediums.
For one thing, TV and radio have third parties in the business of calculating ratings [wikipedia.org], or estimated audience size for a program. These are the old-media counterpart to web analytics. For another, an advertiser might be
Could work for charitable giving (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
I am not compelled to listen to a man who picks stuff off his foot and eats it.
Sorry, but it's not funny. Not if you are in the same room. Or at lunch time.
Re: Old news (Score:2)
He is proposing an anonymous solution similar to cash which will work on the internet.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: you lose (Score:2)
Yes, a lot of media is shit.
However, do you want to live in a cave?
The solution is to use your brain to filter out the shit.
You still need to think.