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How I experience the internet is vastly different depending on whether I am at work, or at home. At work, wherever I go, I experience pop-ups, obtrusive ads, and auto-play movies/noise. Let me assure you, that while teaching, having all the distracting advertising going on in the background does not help the learning experience. But meanwhile, at home I can browse the web unencumbered by any of the annoyances listed above. Pages load quickly and are appealing to read with little clutter to distract the eye and the mind. This peaceful repose is achieved primarily through the use of two program plugins that are available to the Firefox browser – Ad Block Plus and Ghostery. Ad block screens out most of the ads and Ghostery stops websites from tracking your movements and preferences as you browse on the internet (oh, and duck duck go is a nice start to increase your privacy while browsing as well). The powers that be though, are not amused by individuals taking control of their internet experience.
“Global ad spending is expected to reach $600 billion US by the end of next year, according to eMarketer, and grow at an annual rate of about five per cent until the end of the decade. Much of that growth is being fuelled by digital advertising, particularly on mobile devices.
But there was one session in Cannes where some very dark clouds managed to intrude on the sunny forecast. It was a panel devoted to the current scourge of the digital advertising industry — ad blocking.
According to a report by PageFair and Adobe, more than 200 million people worldwide have downloaded software that can block virtually all online advertising.
The number of people blocking ads increased by more than 40 per cent last year, and it is estimated that blocking cost cash-starved publishers more than $22 billion last year.”
Oh my goodness. People not wanting advertising to be part of every facet of their life, not a choice, but a scourge.
“Almost everyone in the ad industry acknowledges that most of the wounds that have led to the rise in ad blocking are self-inflicted.
Advertisers got greedy by assaulting users with too many low quality, untargeted ads, too many auto play videos, too much click bait.
Last fall, the IAB launched an initiative called L.E.A.N. Ads (light, encrypted, ad choice supported, non-invasive).
The IAB hopes that by following the L.E.A.N. guidelines, advertisers will create ads that consumers will be happy to see.”
Hmm, so we alienate people to the point where ad blocking is necessary to have a good browsing experience and then complain that ad-blocking is ‘killing’ the internet. Other entities have decided that they won’t let the user in, if ad-blocking is enabled.
“Sites like Forbes and GQ won’t allow access to their content unless users turn them off. At Cannes, Mark Thompson, the president and CEO of the New York Times, announced that his newspaper would soon be offering an ad-free edition to subscribers at a premium price.
Other publishers are appealing to their readers’ sense of fairness and justice, asking them to turn off their blockers and reminding them they are a critical part of the ecosystem that has powered the internet for the past 20 years. Without ads, there would be no free content online.”
Well, GQ and Forbes you can go frack yourself sideways as the content you produce will be reproduced elsewhere on the web without your restrictions. :) The counterpoint to this though is the insidious beast known as ‘native advertising’.
“So-called “native advertising” has been growing in popularity over the past several years. Also known as “sponsored content,” it looks and feels like editorial content, but it comes from advertisers rather than journalists.
Native advertisements can often pass through ad blocking filters because the filters don’t recognize it as advertising. Many readers seem to prefer this kind of content over traditional advertising, provided it’s properly labelled, although there’s no consensus on what constitutes proper labelling.”
Watch your daily paper, there is more this native advertising junk in there everyday. If there is a scourge to be named, it should be that of the advertising editorial or advertorial.
“But the real victims of the ad blocking surge may not be advertisers and publishers, but the “free” web itself.
The money to pay for content has to come from somewhere, and if you take advertising revenue out of the equation, readers will have to pick up the slack themselves, something they have historically been reluctant to do. Without ads, the web may be a poorer and less interesting place.”
Breaking news: The sky is indeed falling. Also: A-Booga-Booga-Booga! The heart of the very internet itself will crumble if ad-blocking continues!
The advertising industry may piss-off right the frack off with their hyperbole; starting yesterday. If the amount of stultifying drek available on the interweebs is halved tomorrow, not a soul would notice. So I say bring on the next internet apocalypse.
Due to broken promises and subsequent budget cuts, our previous government forced CBC radio to resort to using advertisements to supplement funding. It was outrageous then and it is outrageous now. The CRTC is now inviting the public to express their opinions on the matter and Friends of Canadian Broadcasting has set up a convenient online form to do just that.
I have submitted my letter and I strongly encourage all of you to do the same. Unlike other online campaigns, this online form does not come with a cookie cutter letter that you can just throw your name at the bottom of. That’s right, you will actually have to write the letter. If that feels a bit daunting, don’t be discouraged. It is not as hard or as time consuming as you might think, I assure you. For the especially reluctant, I am including the letter I wrote. Use some, all, or none of itl to help you write your own letter.
To whom it may concern,
CBC radio is a cornerstone of Canadian culture. It ties this large country together. It is a huge part of who we are individually and, as a result, who we are as a nation. Being such an important part of our identity, CBC radio is an essential service and should be fully funded by the government.
The cuts to CBC’s funding and the subsequent need for them to use advertising to keep afloat felt like a deeply personal betrayal. Our bright shining gem was tainted and dulled with the ugly tar of commercial advertising. This should not be!
Like access to water free of contagions, access to CBC free of advertisements is a fundamental right of Canadians. After all this time, I still feel the sting of each wretched ad I hear on CBC – like a thorn jabbing in and reopening a wound, making healing impossible.
I beseech all who have influence in such matters, all that can be done to get CBC fully funded and ad free, must be done. An ad free CBC is something that made Canada great. We cannot let that greatness slip away.
I’m not sure if talking about patriarchy while discussing a TV show based on conspiracy theories is the best plan, but what the hell. If this sort of shit is happening to Gillian Anderson, it can (and probably does) happen to you, if you happen to be female.
“Anderson and Duchovny’s legendarily potent onscreen pairing—rife with sexual tension yet ambiguous enough that a simple embrace could leave fans swooning for days—has been the object of heated obsession for decades, ever since The X-Files, a show that transformed serialized TV and elevated the potential of genre storytelling, premiered in 1993.
Tales of alien abductions, malicious government conspiracies, shadowy figures, and a plot to take over Earth drove the series’ “mythology” arc, in which Mulder (a believer) and Scully (a skeptic) hunted down the truth about what really happened to Mulder’s missing little sister.
But it was the unexpected magnetism between Anderson and Duchovny that truly gave the show its rabid appeal.
“The chemistry was there from the first day they ever appeared together in [Mulder’s] office,” series creator Chris Carter tells me. “It was not apparent until that first day that these two people were gonna click. The chemistry you can’t manufacture. It was just total luck.”
The success of Fox’s six-episode X-Files event series, which premieres with an episode written and directed by Carter on Sunday, hinges in part on whether that chemistry—and the excitement and anguish of watching the agents, clearly two halves of a whole, engage in the will they/won’t they dance—can be reignited again, nine seasons, two movies, and 25 years of X-Files history later.”
I’m excited to see the new shows, as I was a fan back in the day. Unfortunately, here comes the P…
But while Scully asserted her authority at every turn, Anderson found herself fighting just to stand on (literal) equal ground with her male co-star. The studio initially required Anderson to stand a few feet behind her male partner on camera, careful never to step side-by-side with him. And it took three years before Anderson finally closed the wage gap between her pay and Duchovny’s, having become fed up with accepting less than “equal pay for equal work.”
“I can only imagine that at the beginning, they wanted me to be the sidekick,” Anderson says of Fox’s curious no-equal-footing rule. “Or that, somehow, maybe it was enough of a change just to see a woman having this kind of intellectual repartee with a man on camera, and surely the audience couldn’t deal with actually seeing them walk side by side!”
She laughs again, this time at the absurdity of the notion of Dana Scully as anyone’s mere sidekick. “I have such a knee-jerk reaction to that stuff, a very short tolerance for that shit,” she says acidly. “I don’t know how long it lasted or if it changed because I eventually said, ‘Fuck no! No!’ I don’t remember somebody saying, ‘OK, now you get to walk alongside him.’ But I imagine it had more to do with my intolerance and spunk than it being an allowance that was made.”
The work Anderson put into securing equal pay back in the ’90s seemingly came undone when it came time to negotiate pay for this year’s event series. Once again, Anderson was being offered “half” of what they would pay Duchovny.
“I’m surprised that more [interviewers] haven’t brought that up because it’s the truth,” Anderson says of the pay disparity, first disclosed in the Hollywood Reporter. “Especially in this climate of women talking about the reality of [unequal pay] in this business, I think it’s important that it gets heard and voiced. It was shocking to me, given all the work that I had done in the past to get us to be paid fairly. I worked really hard toward that and finally got somewhere with it.
“Even in interviews in the last few years, people have said to me, ‘I can’t believe that happened, how did you feel about it, that is insane.’ And my response always was, ‘That was then, this is now.’ And then it happened again! I don’t even know what to say about it.”
She stammers for a moment, at a loss for words. “It is… sad,” she finally says. “It is sad.” (Sources told the Hollywood Reporter Anderson and Duchovny ultimately took home equal pay for the event series.)
Yeah, 2015 and sexist bullshit is still flying high in Hollywood. Awesome.
Hey…heeeeey… JSTOR, Springer, Sage, and Elsevier…frack you and your paywalls.
This is from Sci-Hub’s main page.
“We fight inequality in knowledge access across the world. The scientific knowledge should be available for every person regardless of their income, social status, geographical location and etc.
Our mission is to remove any barrier which impeding the widest possible distribution of knowledge in human society!
We advocate for cancellation of intellectual property, or copyright laws, for scientific and educational resources.
Copyright laws render the operation of most online libraries illegal. Hence many people are deprived from knowledge, while at the same time allowing rightholders to have a huge benefits from this. The copyright fosters increase of both informational and economical inequality.
The Sci-Hub project supports Open Access movement in science. Research should be published in open access, i.e. be free to read.
The Open Access is a new and advanced form of scientific communication, which is going to replace outdated subscription models. We stand against unfair gain that publishers collect by creating limits to knowledge distribution.”
Knowledge, available to the plebs? What is heresy is this??
Of course the fascists are up in arms –
“That’s all well and good for us users, but understandably, the big publishers are pissed off. Last year, a New York court delivered an injunction against Sci-Hub, making its domain unavailable (something Elbakyan dodged by switching to a new location), and the site is also being sued by Elsevier for “irreparable harm” – a case that experts are predicting will win Elsevier around $750 to $150,000 for each pirated article. Even at the lowest estimations, that would quickly add up to millions in damages.
But Elbakyan is not only standing her ground, she’s come out swinging, claiming that it’s Elsevier that have the illegal business model.
“I think Elsevier’s business model is itself illegal,” she told Torrent Freak, referring to article 27 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, which states that “everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits”.
She also explains that the academic publishing situation is different to the music or film industry, where pirating is ripping off creators. “All papers on their website are written by researchers, and researchers do not receive money from what Elsevier collects. That is very different from the music or movie industry, where creators receive money from each copy sold,” she said.
Elbakyan hopes that the lawsuit will set a precedent, and make it very clear to the scientific world either way who owns their ideas.
“If Elsevier manages to shut down our projects or force them into the darknet, that will demonstrate an important idea: that the public does not have the right to knowledge,” she said. “We have to win over Elsevier and other publishers and show that what these commercial companies are doing is fundamentally wrong.”
To be fair, Elbakyan is somewhat protected by the fact that she’s in Russia and doesn’t have any US assets, so even if Elsevier wins their lawsuit, it’s going to be pretty hard for them to get the money.”
[Sci-Hub]
Our Canadian media is taking a beating as of late. Neil Macdonald opines:
“Consider Postmedia, the biggest newspaper chain in the country.
It is largely owned by an American hedge fund, which regularly drains the member newspapers’ dwindling profits at a handsome interest rate as their newsrooms are merged and hollowed out to cut costs, and editorial direction is dictated from corporate headquarters.
No one knows where it will end, but end-stage asset stripping is probably a safe bet.”
My very own Edmonton Journal has been gutted in the latest round of cuts to the editorial board. Where do people think ‘news’ comes from? Primary sources – professional journalists – are the ones reporting and writing the stories that provide the grist for the mill for carrion feeders (bloggers like myself and the rest of the internet) possible. We should be very concerned that our eyes and ears to the world are slowly being hacked to death by corporations that prioritize everything but the actual process of Journalism.
“Baron, now executive editor of the Washington Post, acknowledged the economic forces ripping the business to shreds.
It is so on target that I’m going to quote its most salient passage:
“The greatest danger to a vigorous press today,” he begins, “comes from ourselves.
“The press is routinely belittled, badgered, harassed, disparaged, demonized, and subjected to acts of intimidation from all corners — including boycotts, threats of cancellations (or defunding, in the case of public broadcasting) …
“Our independence — simply posing legitimate questions — is seen as an obstacle to what our critics consider a righteous moral, ideological, political, or business agenda.
“In this environment, too many news organizations are holding back, out of fear — fear that we will be saddled with an uncomfortable political label, fear that we will be accused of bias, fear that we will be portrayed as negative, fear that we will lose customers, fear that advertisers will run from us, fear that we will be assailed as anti-this or anti-that, fear that we will offend someone, anyone.
“Fear, in short, that our weakened financial condition will be made weaker because we did something strong and right, because we simply told the truth and told it straight.”
Yeah. The facts of matter might be offensive, but they still are the facts of the matter. We seem to have lost sight of this salient feature in much of society. The problem, of course, is that our press depends on advertising and therefore behest to many sorts of of influences that detracts from the reporting of the facts.
I hope we as a society get back on track and start supporting our journalists and the crucial role they play in society. Being able to comment and critique in a contextually appropriator manner is founded on having access to the facts of any particular situation.
“But the original information, before it is aggregated and re-aggregated a thousand times, has to come from someone with the experience, brains and training to uncover it in the first place.
That is usually the work of credentialed journalism. It’s what Baron did in Boston. The alternative is usually just spin and corporatist fantasy, and let us all hope the latter does not overwhelm the former.”
This just isn’t right, not at any time or circumstance. Yet, these witty ad-wizards have decided that sexism sells and are trying to promote a translation device that allows you, as demonstrated, to creep on non-English speakers.
Awesome.
Cringe worthy to say the least.
Oh hey, if you have not zipped over and read the whole article on the New York Times, you should. The attitudes expressed and the hurdles women face are replicated in almost every occupation and fascinatingly enough the dudes in charge seem pretty “OK” with the situation.
“There had long been a strange sort of omertà on talking about the gender disparity. Even though women watched things getting worse, said Helen Hunt, the actress and director, it was hard to speak up: ‘‘Women who say it’s not O.K. are wet blankets or sore losers.’’ When I began reporting this article several months ago and asked some male moguls in the entertainment industry for their perspectives, they shrugged the issue off as ‘‘bogus’’ or ‘‘a tempest in a teapot.’’
‘‘Not that many women have succeeded in the movie business,’’ one top entertainment boss told me, while insisting on anonymity. ‘‘A lot of ’em haven’t tried hard enough. We’re tough about it. It’s a hundred-year-old business, founded by a bunch of old Jewish European men who did not hire anybody of color, no women agents or executives. We’re still slow at anything but white guys.’’
When I phoned another powerful Hollywood player to ask about the issue, he said dismissively, ‘‘Call some chicks.’’
Yep. Go call some chicks… Indeed.
Need more lobe blowing fun(?):shitpeoplesaytowomendirectors
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