featherverse

This article is garbage. It's a typical case of a complete outsider trying to analyze a scene he doesn't understand or know anything about based on "research", and trying to write for an audience that also doesn't understand the tech or scene or know anything about it.

There's not some "guy" responsible for online piracy, and there wasn't a "dawn". If Napster hadn't existed something else would have. Piracy existed outside of Napster. Napster did not give birth to piracy. Piracy has been huge since removable storage was invented, whether it was data cassettes or floppy disks. Piracy was in demand and Napster was the answer, not the inspiration.

Considering the source, The New Yorker, none of this comes as a surprise.

Rather than "build our own" we should take back what used to belongs to us in the first place.

They say there's a shortage of qualified I.T. people. If you work for telecoms who support a non-neutral internet, then quit. Go on strike. Work only for companies who support Net Neutrality.

Kill the enemy using free market capitalism.

Just so we're clear next time some emotionally distraught person raises the issue, this is why we have a 2nd amendment.

They wouldn't do it at a lower cost. They'd charge you $50 for E-mail, $100 for streaming video, or $120 for the whole bundle. It would match their existing model for bundled services.

His name is phonetically "suckerberg". Do we really have to tolerate Facebook and it's hideous negative influence on the world?

We make all of this stuff up, we can do whatever we want, let's just get rid of it.

42 million U.S. dollars.

RSS is as important as E-mail.

Sure today people are mostly focused on corporate run social media like Twitter or Facebook but nobody really likes them. Everyone is constantly bitching about their practices. And you can't really make money on Social Media, which means corporate run social media is going to die some day, when they all realize there's no cash in that expensive cluster of cows.

RSS is free, and everyone can use it, no matter what blogging software you use. Operating your own blog gives you more control over content and presentation, as well as smaller details such as how your commenting system works. It's the superior choice.

It's free. That's important. Nobody controls RSS. Anyone can write an RSS reader. Anyone can write a blog app that publishes RSS. This ensures it will be around to survive the rise and fall of social software trends. When the smoke clears and people emerge from the rubble of the corporate landscape, RSS will be there, welcoming them home.

footnote: I saw this article in my "Hacker News" RSS feed.

One obvious exception to this is the blocker 'Ad Nauseum', which loads and clicks the ad in order to screw up tracking data.

It's not the most popular blocker, but it seems to me that the risk of false "impressions" exists.

I should ask the social media platforms what their position on this subject is and write a blog with my findings.

UPDATE: I've done that.

Google is probably OK

Practically all relevant news headlines for the past 2 years suggests otherwise.

Why would anyone ever think they should link to off-site resources?

My guess is their only real experience with the web is a few years in college.

Ha, I wonder how they judge legitimate public interest. Say Trump.. hypothetically tweets about how North Korea "won't be around much longer!" and North Korea interpret that as a declaration of war, is that in the legitimate public interest?

I don't know but it's entertaining as hell.

Vultr offers VPS hosting for $2.50 per month and the WordPress software is extremely simple to use and is 100% free. It even includes several high quality free themes which are perfect for blogging.

WordPress allows you to customize your blog to express yourself in any way that you can imagine, and it supports RSS feeds out of the box so your friends can easily and quickly follow your updates using any of numerous free RSS readers.

WordPress does not impose arbitrary limits on the size of your posts.

Twitter is garbage, it's a toy. If you have ideas you want to express, don't allow corporations to control how you can express them.

The government stepped in when the news broke. Equifax doesn't get to conduct investigations, on itself or anyone else. They can perform whatever theater they like, but it is completely meaningless. Imagine a "crazy" person talking to themselves on the subway. That's Equifax.

haha, oh well as long as the corporation has cleared them then they must be innocent! No conflict of interest here!

Okay joking aside, I am really curious, are these people idiots? Are they criminals? Are they both? What makes them think they can get away with these kinds of behaviors?

Everybody's going to die. I'm not sure what you're talking about.

HAHAHAHA a thousand dollar phone that suffers screen burn-in?

There are processors who don't care, obviously, since all porn websites accept credit card payments. As a business owner you can do the research to figure out which ones to use.

all I'm saying is patreon is a waste of money, and should only be used to expand visibility and reach.

please see my comment above regarding upwork.

You're wrong in that temp contracts have different sorts of terms. Full term temps can usually only work with one hiring customer but that is not the only model. By taking a cut of the salary as a fee, websites like freelancer and upwork are temp agencies.

Also, upwork is a shithole. You should really not use them. I spent 2 months trying to set up an account there as a freelancer and they were complete dicks for 2 months straight. They refuse to adhere to the constitutional laws of the united states where they are based, and their support department is mockingly hostile to their freelancers.

I made a broad generalization in my first comment about all of those websites being the same. Obviously I haven't used every single one, there are hundreds of them. But the ones I have used have all been the same. It's obvious you want to use them, I strongly encourage you to stop using Upwork and look for one that treats it's contractors better.

All of those "freelancer" websites are scams.

Freelancing is about not working for other men. It's about being your own boss. Those websites are not really freelancing, they're temp agencies hiring out short term contract work. That is not freelancing. Those websites all share specific qualities: The salaries are too low, the service quality is poor, and you'll be outbid by unskilled indian labor 90% of the time.

Put your portfolio online and find your customers through other methods. If you have to pay someone else even $1 to find customers you are being ripped off.

The answer is simple. Regarding technology, _most_ people are still in the 1980s.

More than anything, this is proof that tech industry salaries are on average _way too low_. Stop working for peanuts. Let them go back to pen and paper. Let their corporations collapse. Demand to be paid what you're all worth.

The web isn't dying. The web isn't going to die. The day to day, month to month, or even year to year web trends are not indicative of the future of the web.

The irony here is that if anything were going to kill the web, it would be stupid articles like this one. Thankfully, the internet is bigger than all of the short-sighted johnny-come-latelys in the world.

Frankly, if you weren't using the web before CSS, then you shouldn't be wasting people's time with your predictions.

It occured to me last night that password strength is a predatory system similar to capitalism.

My bank recently reduced it's max password length from 20 characters to 15, so in an E-mail I was writing to the CEO demanding they fix it, I was recommending improvements and I realize that an 18 character password SHOULD be minimum, however...

If an 18 character password is minimum that actually reduces the length of brute force attacks. If the minimum length is 8 characters and the maximum something ridiculous like 64, then people with 32-64 characters will have the strongest passwords.

However, this relies on the assumption that lots of people will be using weak passwords, the brute forcers are going to target and exploit those people first. The number of possible permutations are increased by allowing weaker passwords, but that isn't enough. If everyone uses 18 char or greater passwords then brute forcers will start their searches at 18 characters so it would matter if 8 characters are allowed.

Just some food for thought, and reason to encourage the use of stronger passwords than the recommended 180 bits. If the system supports 64 characters, might as well use 64 characters. And if it doesn't support 64 characters, fix it.

last I checked it was 10%.

They charge 5% for processing payments which is 2% higher than paypal and stripe charge for processing payments, which they are certainly pocketing as hidden profit. Which is lying, another reason not to work with them.

It is _so easy_ to set up a wordpress site and start taking payments using something like wp-invoice or woocommerce. You don't need a fancy custom theme. The built in themes work great, nobody is going to care if a graphic artist uses a custom theme or not.

Just put a link to your website in your profile. Or in the emails you send out to your patrons periodically.

Patreon probably uses a credit card processor that prohibits selling pornography, as many of them do.

If you're an original content creator you should not be using Patreon as your sole source of income. Patreon is a good way to get attention for your brand, but your primary goal as a creator of goods for sale should always be to funnel your fans to your own website where you control all sales and you don't have to give a portion of each sale to someone else.

that's okay because they're going to pass those costs onto the community.

no duh. Why do people tolerate google? Nobody is so dumb to not realize what they're doing, everyone has seen or read 1984.

Something doesn't add up.

I've had to deal with Hostgator on a number of occasions and I can tell you they don't know how to utilize SSH keys their systems are misconfigured and their support people are clueless.

Also I believe they're now owned by EIG which is a corporation that owns a thousand crappy shared hosting companies and is universally reviled in professional circles.

Ease of use has always been a major selling point

You're right, but that doesn't mean people need shared hosting, it means people need managed hosting.

Shared hosting is a gimmick model designed to make hosting companies rich based on the concept that 99% of websites will be failures.

And it is _nothing more than that_.