Felger Sounds Off on Internet Insanity

Visit Slate.com and if you're using an ad blocker you'll see this message at the bottom of your browser window: If you join Slate Plus you gain access to a version of Slate with no advertising. Well, at $50/year I'm not going to do that. I like to read Slate content from time to time, but not often enough to pay $50/year. For me this is true for almost all pay sites or sites with a pay alternative. If I joined every website that has occasional content I find interesting the cost would be over $1000 a year. I therefore think advertising is reasonable.So why do I have an ad blocker? It's a relatively recent addition from several months ago. For years I put up with websites that have obnoxious advertising consisting of things like popups that have to be closed or videos that start up without request and have to be stopped. It was annoying but endurable.But finally the ads at one website (Boston Herald Sports) became so obnoxious that the site became unreadable. You literally could not get through an article without being interrupted several times. Once you finished the article if you left the webpage up then videos and ads would start up at random times, so when done you always had to close the webpage. Because I'm interested in the local sports teams, and because the Herald has the best sports page (The Boston Globe's sport page is a very weak sister), I didn't want to stop reading the Herald, so I installed an ad blocker.So when Slate appeals to readers to disable their ad blockers because advertising pays the bills, they should really be appealing to all those obnoxious websites out there that force people to install ad blockers.--Percy

... I have to ask.

Here is one of my favorite sites take on ad blockers:Forbidden - Stack Exchange

quote:

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The truth is: we don’t care if our users use ad blockers on Stack Overflow. More accurately: we hope that they won’t, but we understand that some people just don’t like ads. Our belief is that if someone doesn’t like them, and they won’t click on them, any impressions served to them will only annoy them-- plus, serving ads to people who won’t click on them harms campaign performance.

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Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

Or in a popup window that obscures the article.I figure they don't want my business and look elsewhere for similar content.I think ads are obscene, especially the ones that have slide shows that slide as you try to read or type.My bank is a real offender, the background picture slides while you are typing your password.Are they trying to make people ADHD?Enjoy

The whole world's gone ADHD. Been to a live sporting event recently?--Percy

At heart this thread is about my love/hate affair with the Internet. On the one hand I love it because I can communicate, fetch and exchange information anywhere and anytime around the world. On the other hand I hate it because it keeps pressuring me to transition to ridiculously small form factors while making myself accessible to anyone and anything at all times, and to interact with the web in unfamiliar ways.I've resisted the transition in any significant way to small form factors, i.e., to cell phones and tablets. I strongly dislike pecking away on a tiny unfeeling keyboard when my fingers, when properly positioned, know where every key is, including the number keys, which are missing on the main keyboard of cell phones and tablets. I tend to do 99% of my typing on my computer's wonderful keyboard, which has great tactile response, the numbers where they belong, and even a numeric keypad.I used to think that ingenuity and creativity were primarily forces for improvement and advancement, but that was before the Internet of the last 10 or 15 years. I have nothing against ingenuity and creativity, but on the recent Internet it seems that many want to start with a blank slate and reinvent even the most basic concepts. It's as if in the days of radio some manufacturers had decided to become creative by putting the higher frequency stations on the left instead of the right and have the volume control make counter-clockwise be louder. One of the great utilities of old radios is that a quick clockwise twist of the volume knob turned the radio on and set the volume. Imagine the incredible annoyance if some radios suddenly worked the opposite. Facing a particular radio for the first time you'd never know if you were turning the volume up or down.I like Pandora for music, which allows you to create stations seeded with songs and artists you like. I've been using it since 2010, it's by far my music app of choice, but it has a tendency to become repetitive. The songs I heard yesterday I will hear again tomorrow and the next day and the next day. So I keep auditioning other apps, like Spotify and Rhapsody and iTunes and others. All have had flaws, but I keep looking.Apple has rebooted their attempt at a music app with what they call Apple Music. On my computer I access it through iTunes (I haven't tried it on my tablet yet). At $9.99/month or $120/year it's more expensive than Pandora (only $48/year) but it offered a 3-month free trial, so I'm giving it a try.I gave Apple Music a try in it's previous incarnation (was it called Beats?), which was free, and the new Apple Music is much the same, but without the numerous bugs. You can define stations in a way similar to Pandora, but there can be only a single seed. You choose a group or song or artist, and that's the seed for that station. It plays music similar to that choice, but you can't broaden or narrow your choice with additional seeds, so you're left trying to find that one precise song that exactly characterizes the music you'd like to hear.In practice this means you're constantly creating new stations. Stations are displayed in the order of most recent play, so ones you stop playing eventually roll off the end of your list. You can't edit or delete stations, and you can't order them or organize them into categories. The reality is that after even just a few hours you can no longer remember what kind of station you were trying to create when you created the "Gennadi Cherkasov Radio" station, or even who Gennadi Cherkasov is, so trying to remember you click the station again, which rolls it right to the front of your list. Could Apple just please let me delete the damn thing?No, of course not. Apple has engaged their ingenuity and creativity to reinvent a great deal and not only do it their way, but in a way no one else has done it. And this is what is wrong with much of today's Internet. In the days of radio I could walk up to any radio and instantly have music or news or sports emerge, but in this day of the Internet walking up to any music/radio website or app requires a period of training and acclimation. It takes a while before music or news or sports you actually want emerges. Brazil is a movie from the 1980's about a future era when technology has overwhelmed our ability to keep it in check, to the point where it's sophistication has become a detriment both in terms of using it and maintaining it. With regard to the Internet we have attained the world of Brazil.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Grammar.

I've been fighting passwords since before there was an Internet. At first, going back over 40 years, I only needed one password. The instructions were that passwords should be impossible to guess or figure out, they should never be told to anyone, and they should never be written down. I had one of those passwords, and then many years ago my workplace implemented a policy change that forced a change of passwords every 70 days. I argued that the more frequently people changed passwords the more they would be forced to write them down, and the more often people would find themselves locked out of their accounts, but naturally to deaf ears.Then the Internet came along with increasing numbers of websites requiring passwords, and as the password requirements became more stringent and varied, people had too many passwords to remember. Though browsers began offering to save website passwords for you, and though concepts like password vaults were developed, and though you still weren't supposed to write passwords down, that's what many people did.Today I accessed my propane supplier website, and they said it was time to choose a new password. When I was done it said, "Please record your password so you can log in again in the future." Nice to see a website admit the password situation is bad enough that remembering them is impossible.Passwords are a hassle. I hope we eventually come up with a better way.--Percy

I signed up for the new government service this week - do these people not read the things they write?Your password must be between 9 and 16 characters long and contain a mixture of upper and lower case letters, numbers and a special character (!,@,#,$,%,^,&,*).For maximum security your Password should not:Have two repeating characters
Include the user name as part of the Password
Use dictionary/common words
Use words/common phrases with substituted numbers for characters e.g. he110 for hello. But above all make it easy to remember and keep it in a safe place. It must be changed every 90 days.

So somehow I got linked to the Forbes website, and they won't even let me in without turning off my ad blocker.ForbesSo now instead of having a "bad" customer, they have no customer at all!Dumbasses.

Have you considered, instead of memorizing a string of characters for your password, using a pattern of keys on the board? Like: draw two doughnuts and hold the shift button for one of them? For example: press '345tgfde', then hold shift and press '567ujhgt'.The password will come out as:345tgfde%^&UJHGTIt'll meet all the requirements and it's actually really easy to input.Also you don't ever have to remember what the password actually is, you just have to remember how to make it.Too, if you're writing it down then it'll still be encoded: "doughnuts 3 and 5, lower - upper"You can also do things like: "987, lower upper lower"For that you can just start at 9 and move down the board, then do 8 and then do 7, hold shift for the middle one:9ijn*UHB7ygvIf you're good enough you can just do three "swipes" down the board and get all the keys pressed. Super simple yet still secure.

I've heard that password hackers and hacking programs are aware of keyboard progression strategies.--Percy

So how do you remember the strategy? It seems that every site that wants a password thinks that you only have one - I have literally hundreds.Whilst we're waiting for a solution, I think a long site specific phrase is best.DarwinGive$G0DaH3adAcheMacs have the keychain which means you can find any password you've used which is pretty useful. If you encrypt the drive, put a 15 minute timeout on it for no use, and have a long phrase to get into it and you're pretty safe and only marginally inconvenienced.

The problem with this strategy is that not every keyboard is laid out the same, especially when you're getting into extraneous punctuation buttons. The problem is worsened if you find yourself trying to use a public computer where the programmed keyboard layout (as opposed to the physical shape) is different too.My biggest gripe with passwords is why we need so many of them. There's a website I use for live football scores, primarily because it shows me which games are on TV in this country (including foreign channels you can pick up through an aerial in some parts of the country). I have an account so I can change the default layout. My account contains no information about me, and there is no money involved (the site being paid for by extensive advertising for gambling websites). If someone else accessed my account the only danger is that they could, for example, add the MLS to my favourite leagues or list today's fixtures by competition rather than chronologically. Why am I required to password protect this?

Unfortunately the safety of your passwords can't be guaranteed. There are too many sites with inadequate security. Having a different password for each site means that if one is compromised the others are still safe - as safe as they were before.What's the password security like here, Percy?

If you trust the security of your own computer, then there are plenty of technical aids that allow you to retrieve your passwords for a site using a single password or pass phrase that you enter at your computer. With such a system your passwords on every site can be randomly chosen strings that meet the requirements. You can have the computer generate those for you since you don't have to remember them.Of course, now your password storage becomes a huge attraction for hackers. But you can keep that in one or more physical media that you keep on your person. Just don't lose it...