I for one would be willing to give someone a sliver of the amount saved every time they manipulated my online persona to save me money. You save me $1.00, I’ll give you a dime.

— Cathy O’Neil, mathbabe

Syndicated 2013-09-01 15:05:29 from Don Marti

23 Aug 2013 »

Annoyances

A little while ago, I said something about how the adtech scene is out of touch with regular people. Just found a good example.

John Battelle writes that the solution to getting people to accept creepy web ads is...long weaselly Terms of Service documents!

Quite a concept. You can get people to like one unnatural behavior that only makes sense inside the corporate filter bubble by using another unnatural behavior that only makes sense within the corporate filter bubble.

We're doing stuff that makes you really uncomfortable, privacy-wise, but that's perfectly fine, because it's all in that long Terms of Service document that you automatically agree to by visiting our site.

Unfortunately, this might not be going far enough. In order to really get people to accept creepy targeted ads, the advertisers will need to add in:

clamshell packaging
complicated voicemail systems
Styrofoam packing peanuts

not just a bunch of legal jibber-jabber. How about it?

Syndicated 2013-08-23 14:08:37 from Don Marti

20 Aug 2013 »

Virtual cartoon police for the web

Remember this story from Global Voices a while ago?

...the police in China's capital, Beijing, will start patrolling websites registered on Beijing servers using animated police officers that pop up in a user's browser....According to the Associated Press, the cartoon cops can walk, bike or drive across the screen every 30 minutes, warning Internet users to stay away from illegal Internet content and bad websites.

How about we make something similar for sites in the USA?

Some cute NSA characters, and a little tasteful JavaScript and CSS to show one in action on your site every so often, along with a true fact about Internet surveillance here.

Your hosting provider probably just wants to put some lipstick on the pig, wait for the surveillance story to drop out of the headlines, and go back to business as usual. But once you put a JavaScript thingy in a site template, it tends to stay there.

I'll be adding an animation with a placeholder image to this site...any cartoonists out there want to do some sketches?

Syndicated 2013-08-20 14:31:32 from Don Marti

19 Aug 2013 »

Adversariality and web ads

I have an RSS feed aggregator that subscribes to feeds from people in the online ad business, and also from people looking at the online ad business from the outside. Why does it sound like one group is talking about targeted ads as ponies everyone wants, and the other is talking about them as rats to be exterminated?

From within the online ad business, increasingly detailed tracking, profiling, and targeting of users is a great idea. A recent example, from Jeremy Ozen, is The Ad Industry Must Stand Up for the Collection of Mobile Data.

Meanwhile, everyone else who writes about online ads just wants to avoid being tracked, profiled, and targeted. Here's a recent example of that. Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing covers a browser plugin intended to make it harder to profile your traffic based on surveillance.

So why the big difference? Why does adtech seek relevance, but regular people avoid it? Let's see if I can put it in 140 characters.

I'm interested in what your company says to existing customers, the public, and your mom, not what you'll say on my doorstep to make a sale.

How's that? More in Targeted Advertising Considered Harmful

Bonus links

Seth Godin: No one ever bought anything on an elevator

The Ad Contrarian: Playing The Other Guy's Game and 4 Reasons For Advertising's Radical Remake

Jonathan Mayer To 'Do Not Track' Working Group: I Quit (via Doc Searls Weblog)

How low-paid workers at 'click farms' create appearance of online popularity (via The New Inquiry)

Print Is Dead? 'Vogue' Has Its Second Biggest Issue Ever

Benefits of advertising include the placebo effect? Drug ads may enhance drug performance

The Public-Private Surveillance Partnership - Bloomberg (via John Battelle's Search Blog and Comment is free: Glenn Greenwald on security and liberty)

Bob Garfield: The Natives Are Feckless: Part One Of Three (via Doc Searls Weblog)

Data Brokers Don't Know You From A Naked Man Stumbling On The Beach

34 Insights From Nassim Taleb (via The Big Picture)

Syndicated 2013-08-19 13:30:14 from Don Marti

17 Aug 2013 »

Hijacking the Internet

Who's really hijacking the Internet?

Back in the day, the "agency discount" for advertising was 15 percent. That means that every time your company bought a magazine ad, the publishing company got 85% and the ad agency got 15%.

For a typical business or tech magazine, the subscription price paid for the printing and postage, and the advertising paid for the reporters, editors, photographers, and designers. And things pretty much worked. Business or tech media wasn't the most lucrative job in the world, but people could make a living at it.

Now let's look at the publisher's share for web ads. It's about 25% to 45%. Instead of an ad agency spending 15% of your ad budget on salaries, rubber cement, and three-martini lunches, you now have a bewildering array of adtech middleweasels spending 55-75% of your ad budget on Macbooks Pro (is that even the right plural—hell with it, copy editing was the first thing to go) artisan coffee, Big Data, and gourmet food trucks.

It's an example of the Internet making an industry less efficient. Which should be in an Economics paper somewhere, but really, we need to find honest work for software developers now stuck in adtech. And for real advertisers to quit the adtech-captured IAB, but you knew that.

Syndicated 2013-08-17 19:07:58 from Don Marti

9 Aug 2013 »

More on Persona

The big Mozilla Persona News is that Persona now has a gateway for Gmail users. If you have GMail and use Persona to sign in to a site, then Google can see that you're using the gateway, but not which site you're connecting to.

Privacy win. With BrowserID, by design, your identity providers are not involved in the login transaction. This means they need not be aware of your entire Web activity, a significant privacy advantage. With OpenID, your identity provider is, unfortunately, a necessary participant in the login flow.

If your email address is on a domain that doesn't have a gateway or full Persona support, you can still use Persona, just with an extra step of filling out a form and getting an email confirmation. Try it.

Now for the fun part. If you're interested in adding first-class Persona Identity Provider support to your own site, so that people who have an email adddres on your domain can use it to log in at other places, read one webmaster's experience. After a few days of hacking, "rfk.id.au" now acts as an Identity Provider for the BrowserID protocol, a.k.a Mozilla Persona. This means I can now log in as ryan@rfk.id.au on any persona-enabled website while retaining complete control over my identity. I do not have to delegate my details or my credentials to a third party, even one that I would trust as much as Mozilla.

Bonus links follow.

How BrowserID works

Persona is a complete implementation of a new, distributed login system from Mozilla. BrowserID is the open protocol that governs how Persona works.

Persona is distributed. Today.

Persona on Firefox OS phones

Adding Persona authentication to richard

New Persona Beta: Millions of Users Ready to Log In using Any Browser

Persona and Surveillance

Fixing Sign-in

Mozilla Continues to Build the Web as a Platform for Security

Users don't like social login.

getting web sites to adopt a new identity system

Syndicated 2013-08-09 13:26:15 from Don Marti

8 Aug 2013 »

Automatically run make when a file changes

Hey, kids! makewatch script!

Really simple: do a makewatch [target] to re-run make with the supplied [target] when any files relevant to that target change.

This is something originally discussed in a thread on the linux-elitists mailing list.

Andrew Cowie has written something similar. The main thing that this one does differently is to ask make which files matter to it, instead of doing an inotifywatch on the whole directory. Comments and suggestions welcome.

Syndicated 2013-08-08 13:49:12 from Don Marti

7 Aug 2013 »

Listening to Podcasts on Android

Here's how behind on native apps I was: I was still running Google Listen even after it died last year. (The thing kept working since it was synchronized to Google Reader somehow, but then Google Reader went away, too.)

Anyway, I have finally moved to the current decade (If the Internet works on dog years, a decade is 17 months) and installed AntennaPod. Works for me. Nice clean look with easy-to-hit controls, and starts up quickly.

Two music podcast recommendations: The Casbah and Rathole Radio.

Syndicated 2013-08-07 13:09:38 from Don Marti

4 Aug 2013 »

QoTD: Bruce Sterling

Even US Senators are decorative objects for the NSA. An American Senator knows as much about PRISM and XKeyScore as a troll-doll on the dashboard knows about internal combustion.

—Bruce Sterling

Syndicated 2013-08-04 11:41:30 from Don Marti

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