not all change is progress
September 13, 2015
Direct download links:
MP3 &
Ogg
0:02:05 News
0:48:04 Paying for the Web
Although moving to a weekly show has gone down well, we feel that the shorter format hasn’t been too kind to our comprehensive news coverage – a signature feature of the podcast, and something many of you loved. So we’re back on track this week, with over 45 minutes of the latest news from around the FOSS world. And is there any practical alternative to the scourge of advertising for funding on-line content? Let us know your thoughts, after hearing ours.
0:02:05 News
Births & Deaths
Open-source typeface “Hack” brings design to source
code
Trinity Desktop Environment R14.0.1 Released
Raspberry Pi’s official 7″ touchscreen display goes on sale
today for $60
WD PiDrive is a 1TB hard drive kit for the Raspberry
Pi
Mycroft got
funded
Mycroft launch Indiegogo campaign
LILO Boot-Loader Development To Cease At End Of Year
The end of a cycle. The beginning of a new one.
Performance & Security
Snapdragon 820’s custom CPU is twice as fast, efficient as
disappointing 810
Qualcomm Steps Up To Fight Android Malware And App Privacy
Violations
x86 Systems Will See Some Boot Time Optimizations With Linux
4.3
Gaming
Steam gamers already use Windows 10 more than all Linux
distros combined
Supporting Linux wasn’t ‘worthwhile,’ says creator of one of
2015’s best PC games
Google Antitrust
GRIP: Google’s EU antitrust case now dogged by no-win, no-fee
ambulance chasing
Now India probes Google, threatens $1bn fine over ‘biased’
search
CCI charges Google with rigging search results; Flipkart,
Facebook corroborate complaints
Corporate Overlords
Report: Google will comply with censorship laws to get Play
into China
Facebook must obey German law even if free speech curtailed:
minister
Microsoft, Google, Amazon, others, aim for royalty-free video
codecs
Google donates €1 million to help refugees in need
Crypto
Even the Inventor of PGP Doesn’t Use PGP
Now
available from GNU Press, the NeuG True Random Number
Generator
0:48:04 Paying for the Web
Is on-line advertising a necessary evil? We sat down to chew over the topic for a little while, and a few supporting links for our comments are below. There’s so much we didn’t even get into – the rise of malvertising, for instance – but we didn’t want to dedicate an entire show to the topic. The big question is whether there are alternative revenue generating models out there that could replace advertising, or whether most everything else has been tried… and failed. Or maybe, just maybe, a completely unfunded and amateur web wouldn’t be any bad thing? We’re sure there are strong feelings out there, and we’d love to hear your thoughts on the topic.
The 2015
Ad Blocking Report
Less than half of UK adults are aware ads fund free content
online
The Sun now least visited UK newspaper site after
paywall
“only 2% of
Internet users would be willing to pay the cost that is today
covered by advertisement to access information
online”
“PageFair… provided publishers a tool to offer visitors to
pay for an online content instead of enjoying it for free.
The proportion of users who shifted from the free to the
paying option was 0.3%”
All of Germany just signed up to this micropayment app that
people think is the future of news on the web
Who pays for us to browse the web? Be wary of Google’s latest
answer
Now let’s not be so quick to dismiss Jessie’s prediction. I believe it was worded such that the top X games in Steam would have Linux ports, which is not the same thing as comparing the relative sizes of the user bases. Maybe Jessie was a bit optimistic, but with the Steam platform on Linux, and the increase of cross-platform toolkits for game devs, Linux’s share should only go up.
Now, regarding the software freedom issues. I went ahead and installed Steam on Debian Jessie (it’s actually pretty easy as it is in contrib). I downloaded some games, and found that 2D stuff worked well. For non-Intel graphics, you’d have to add proprietary drivers for 3D games to work. Definitely leaves a bad taste in my mouth in addition to the stability issues I’ve had with such drivers. Since I’m already playing a proprietary game, and since I have Windows on another partition, I just boot that up and play it there. That way I can keep my Linux partition free software.
So if Linux becomes a superior platform for gaming, that’ll drive adoption. I don’t see concern for free software making much of an impact.
I looked at “Hack” but still like Adobe’s somewhat freely-licensed SourceCode Pro better.
The laws here in Germany obviously where made shortly
after WW2 when everyone was “OMFG NEVER LET SOMETHING
LIKE THIS HAPPEN AGAIN!!!” – and rightly so! I don’t
think there’s too much good to say about the views of
politicians like the former chancellor Helmut Kohl but
their generation still had vivid memories of losing
fathers and brothers to the war and seeing their homes
lying in ruins. Thus they were way more strongly opposed
in any German participation in armed conflicts and
allowing views leading into those to come up again than
current politicians.
One learns about WW2 and the Holocaust in what feels like
half of all the history lessons one gets in a german
school. Still less empathic people go with the basic
human behavior of “us against them” and “beware of
foreigners, they’ll take away your wealth!”. And that’s
when racism and the likes raise their ugly heads again.
As a german I have to chime in here. In fact, here is an english translation of Section 130 of the German Criminal Code available online that may put things into perspective for you Englishmen. Yes, it is anti free speech – but with relatively good reasoning.
you might find/perhaps should have mentioned that “this guy called Heiko Maas” is the German Secretary of Judiciary Affairs.
Also, your treatment of the free speech issue is
undercomplex. First of all, what is at the centre
of discussion is not that people deny the
holocaust, but that they threaten particular
persons or groups of people with murder and
violence. that is a different matter than
expressing a negatively sanctioned opinion or
spreading of lies [i have ‘looked into’ the
holocaust sufficiently to say confidently that it
has happened and that no one can deny it has not
in bad faith].
also, denying the holocaust is not illegal
because it is not true or not an acceptable thing
to say, but because it is a wilful insult and
aggressive act towards especially the victims of
the Nazis and humanity in general. Also, you’ll
find that it is usually surfacing in the shape of
utterances like: “murdering millions of people
was/would have been the right thing to do, but it
never happened anyway.” Which goes back to the
first point.
further, freedom is not so simple a concept as you take it to be both in this instance and on other occasions. there are conditii sine qua non for the possibility of freedom. being a nazi, and expressing this in the public sphere, is in conflict with these. it is not just wrong, but impossible, to give freedom of speech to Nazis, since their views and expressions are inherently opressive and are always doing greater damage to others’ rights than restrictions on them can.
and lastly, if you chose they place you live in based on freedom of speech, then the UK is a very curious choice.
{orig. posted on G+, but also here to connect to the ongoing discussion}
Personally, I’ve been using ProggyFonts for years now
(the slashed-zero variant):
http://www.proggyfonts.net/
(stay away from the .com – ads and malware)
But it’s good to have new things to try [and reject, maybe?] :-)
Re: Paying for the web News.
I’m not sure what mechanism could be used to generate a
return income from websites for genuine content but
before we get that far perhaps News outlets should take a
good look at themselves and what they consider news and
what they think it’s worth. Here in Australia it has
literally reached the stage where rumour immediately goes
to print and is reported as fact without checking
sources. Subsequent outlets whether they’re affiliated or
not jump on the story and simply re-hash the content
making all sorts of fraudulent exclusivity claims. The
practise is so rampant that often the outlet first to
print is 24hrs later releasing a retraction/correction
while the smaller outlets are still out there re-hashing
the original re-hash! I have read the same story almost
word for word across all our national papers each
claiming exclusivity, and even the same story under 3 or
4 drastically different headlines from the one outlet.
Please…
another good ‘over the pint’ segment. The idea of having one company to rule all the news outlets isn’t so far fetched of an idea. It is already used in the journal publishing sector. Many different academic journals are managed by a single parent company which deals with administrating the content to universities, libraries, and others; managing licenses, etc., etc.
I think the concern from paddy that one large company is controlling news is quite valid and I share that concern too. I think a solution could be some sort of “double blind” administration. In this scenario, one company (say the news outlet) would figure out how much content you read/view on their site. They could then send the appropriate numbered unit (megabytes, number of articles, whatever) to the subscription company, who would then charge you a monthly or annual fee.
With this setup, the news outlet (say BBC) knows what you’re reading on their site perhaps, but at least the subscription company (Google, Amazon, whoever) doesn’t know all of what you’re reading. They only know how much, which is the only data they need to determine what fee you should pay for their “service”. It also may eliminate the large company from being a target for cybersecurity threats because they wouldn’t have identifying large amounts of identifying information about you. This sort of model may even make the need for adblockers obsolete if enough people bought into the service.
Joe, just because the evidence for The Holocaust is false witness and tortured confessions doesn’t mean that The Holocaust didn’t happen – does it? After you’ve processed that question, do yourself a favour and download a free copy of Dissecting the Holocaust edited by Germar Rudolf – http://vho.org/dl/ENG/dth.pdf – and read it. That provides a comprehensive introduction in one book.
I haven’t used AdBlock Plus in a while, but I believe that if you go into its preferences and change the filter list to one of the ones other than the default (like changing to EasyList) that you would pretty much see no ads.
The one big area that you guys left out of your advertising discussion was native advertising which seems to be spreading (at least amongst the podcasts I listen to).
I hadn’t noticed that the news coverage had been reduced in the new format. If there are news topics you want to discuss, I think that’s fine, but if not I think doing more focused topics is fine too. In some ways, it would be nice to get the feedback into the first show (assuming you record both shows at once) so that it is more timely, but I know it feels more natural to put the feedback at the end.
A collective micro payment system is OK. You could have a
PAYG system where you pay x amount per article with a
monthly cap of, say, £13 and a fixed amount option of,
say, £10. Personally I detest adverts. I never watch any
on TV because I rarely watch live TV apart from the news
and, if watching ITV player etc., I go out of the room or
switch the sound off and read whilst they are on. I never
click on ads – I don’t want to encourage them. I am a
staunch BBC supporter and I don’t want to see any change
or any further ‘fines’ given out by the Government.
I do however object to some of the BBC money going to
Channel 4 because they have such a B awful on-line
service. Try and plug your tablet into a TV and they
block playback. Try changing the useragent in the browser
and it wants Flash – so doesn’t work.
Paying for access to discussions and knowledge bases for non-registered users who do not contribute is one intriguing model.
For example, Reddit has a wealth of knowledge, about all sorts of things. Useful things that people would like to know. And would pay a nominal sum (say $1) to get access to if they reach the search results by Google or Bing. Rather than monetize the discussions by advertising against a rowdy crew which was Ellen Pao’s mistake, pay to see the results is a good model. As long as its cheap enough and those who generate the knowledge base don’t have to pay.
The 1998 Microsoft antitrust trial was the _second_ one. Their first was the 1995 trial with Judge Sporkin about “CPU tax” contracts forbidding motherboard manufacturers from selling any _without_ windows. The manufacturers could bundle a copy of windows with every single motherboard they shipped, or they couldn’t sell DOS or Windows to anybody. http://www.csmonitor.com/1995/0216/16091.html
This was clear monopoly leverage forcing distributors to sign anticompetitive contracts against their own interests and the interests of consumers. (The target that time around was DR-DOS, a second implementation of DOS from the original company Microsoft copied DOS-1.0 from in the first place. Microsoft was not the only DOS vendor, so they flexed their muscles to put the other one out of business by cutting off its distribution.)
The 1998 trial was over violating the terms of the 1995 trial’s verdict. Microsoft’s statement that they could “bundle a ham sandwich with windows if they wanted to” (http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1998/02/02/237213/index.htm) was a direct statement that they would not abide by the terms of the 1995 consent decree.
But the complaint that initially reopened the investigation (leading to the second antitrust trial in 1998) was games Microsoft was playing with Windows NT to exclude Netscape’s server product. Remember the period where Netscape gave away the browser and sold the server? Microsoft tried to strangle their revenue stream by bundling their competitor (IIS) with NT Server and preventing the competitor from running on NT “workstation” (by checking a repository key and artificially limiting the number of connections when the server/workstation code were actually identical). http://archive.oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/news/differences_nt.html
That’s why the second antitrust trial centered around browsers, the NT server complaint started an investigation into other things Microsoft had done specifically to attack Netscape, which they’d publicly admitted they felt threatened by. (Remember the “MSN will kill the internet” pledge in back 1995?)
The reason Microsoft wound up getting sued is they were doing so many DIFFERENT dodgy things they presented an enormous attack surface to regulators. (Remember when they stole stacker’s data compression thing? Partnered with them, got proprietary info, then cancelled the partnership and used the priorietary info to come out with a competing product? That was between the two antitrust trials too.) They defended themselves in the press by saying no one thing they did justified the regulatory response, but the pattern of many different things is what triggered the response.
(Keep in mind also that Microsoft has an entire PR department dedicated to eroding past misdeeds and make them seem unjustly persecuted rather than living on ill-gotten gains. And yes “shooting the messenger” goes at back to http://articles.latimes.com/1995-03-08/business/fi-40262_1_antitrust-case and earlier. Anyone who ever criticized them is clearly a biased loon. Flocks and flocks of biased loons.)
Rob
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