Interesting Links for 10-01-2016

[andrewducker]

• Forbes forces readers to turn off ad blockers, promptly serves malware
  • malware advertising OhForFucksSake web
• Researchers find a way to decipher some words in the mind before they are spoken
  • So, given a few years to up the accuracy and reduce the size of the components, and a decent text-to-speech converter, we have telepathy!
  • telepathy technology

Comments

[gonzo21]

Wow, that telepathy thing could potentially revolutionise interrogations, no? Doesn't matter how good a liar somebody is, the police/security services just hook them up to the machine, ask the questions, and read the pre-formed thoughts?

[meowpurrr]

my first thought too :|

[gonzo21]

And 'if he thought he was guilty, does that make him actually guilty?'

[pennski]

He is Arnold J Rimmer. That is his crime. It is also his punishment.

[radiumhead]

there are no right wing stand ups because they have no fucking sense of humor. the only two i can think of are dennis miller and ron white, and they fucking suck.

[threegoldfish]

And if you have javascript off by default, the Forbes malware article doesn't show text. That's kinda funny.

[kalimac]

I'm sure and the heck not going to find out why there are no right-wing stand-ups if the article explaining why is written in all-caps Comic Sans. Christ in a frigging basket!

[iainjcoleman]

That's a pity because, formatting aside, it is an intelligent and insightful essay.

[ckd]

Definitely a use case for Safari's "Reader Mode" or the equivalent in your browser of choice.

[skington]

I pay a subscription instead, because I prefer to give them money directly rather than polluting pages with ads.

[kalimac]

Here's what I'd like news sites to do: Allow readers a certain number of free articles per time period, and then offer the choice of either a subscription or a low per-article fee if they wish more than that. The sites I read really often I'd subscribe to (at present I do so for 3). The ones I read moderately I'd pay the fee. And the ones I visited only occasionally I'd just be a visitor. That strikes me as fair, and leaves ads out of it.

And of course I got an ad blocker in the first place not because of malware, which was less of a problem back then, but because the ads were so annoying to see. Pop-ups, pop-unders, autoplay videos, shaking ads and other forms of animation. If they hadn't abused their power in the first place, they wouldn't have lost it with me.

[andrewducker]

Yeah. If ads were text-ads then I wouldn't be blocking them in the first place!