The newspaper used to cost $1 (each! every day!) and it was full of ads. Probably about as much percentage of area as a typical news site today.
There must be a balance between "no payment" and "no ads" - the optimum profit doesn't necessarily happen at one of the extremes. Do you think you'd choose a higher priced subscription if it offered no ads?
well, newsprint ads have the benefit of curation so that they are not overly sexualized or from scam artists, and they don't attempt to track and collate you. They also have the benefit of being bought by local services in your town, if it's a local paper. So advertisements actually serve a useful function there.
That said, if my local paper started producing the swill I encounter merely seconds after turning off adblock, I would consider the "no bullshit" version as well!
What's wrong with clicking on an unknown link? It can only hurt you by taking advantage of an unpatched security bug in your software. But if you have that, you might be vulnerable doing all sorts of other things on the internet. And you probably do have that and are vulnerable doing all sorts of other things. It's just not very likely to hurt you in either case.
It's about preemptively scaring people on how much is easy to have them do this and that action when the communication looks legit
And following a link from a scam email has a greater risk of drive by infection, since it is specifically crafted for that and has the user already has convinced being legit: you have to take in account that once the seems legit feeling is active escalating action gradually is likely to succeed.
It's about context and psychology. If one of those link from an officially sounding page had a download this to check if you have been scammed a lot of people would have done just that. In the same way you need to preemptively scare them, so that the message of trust no one really comes across vivid
This is a paradox of runners and cyclists too. They use high-tech gear to make running easier - easier than a naked human can do it - but they refuse powered assistance. I don't understand why they make such a clear distinction between using gadgets to save power and using gadgets to provide more power. If it's about natural un-assisted ability, they shouldn't wear shoes either.
By bad luck he happened to be the same person who also did something legal that they really didn't like and also something illegal. So his legal actions have caused an excessive sentence for the relatively minor crimes he was actually convicted of.
If embarrassing people was a crime, the ex-partners who gave him the photos would be charged too. Those people are even more at fault than him.
> If embarrassing people was a crime, the ex-partners who gave him the photos would be charged too.
It is a crime (disorderly conduct). See California Penal Code 647(j)(4). California Senate Bill No. 1255 made this into law.
> Any person who intentionally distributes the image of the intimate body part ... under circumstances in which the persons agree or understand that the image shall remain private, the person distributing the image knows or should know that distribution of the image will cause serious emotional distress, and the person depicted suffers that distress.
Convictions for the people who gave him the photos probably won't be news.
He did far more than just "embarrass people". He knowingly and willfully extorted people. He caused major psychological damage. How would you like someone to gather sexual images of you, attempt to extort you to keep them hidden, and then, when you didn't pay up, publish those pictures for the world to see. Would you feel as though you just let out a fart in public, or would it be someone worse?
27 counts of extortion is not a "relatively minor crime".
I feel like we've seen so many (genuine) cases of government overstep that we've been sensitized to see any crime involving the internet as "blown out of proportion." What this guy did was no better than a stereotypical Mafia protection racket.
Sounds like if you pay Cryptolocker to recover your files then you can have you money frozen too. Perhaps this is a good incentive to stop people paying extortionists.
If true, this also shows the TRUSTe privacy seal is worthless. The name implies it's undergone some kind of assessment that showed it's good for privacy when just looking at an encrypted file would immediately show the problem. TRUSTe itself is a bit vague on what they really do.
I can't find NQ in their search tool for certified companies. Perhaps it's been retracted or was never really issued? Maybe I'm looking in the wrong place
Never trust a website just because it has a seal of approval from an organization like TRUSTe.
I routinely perform code and web app audits on companies that proudly bear this seal and find security flaws that will compromise users. The seal means nothing.
Pretty much all the seals you see on the bottom of a website are worthless. Nobody ever does an actual code audit. But it makes the users feel safe, so that's what matters.
There certainly are. Iphones smuggled into mainland form Hong Kong are sold at a premium. Whatever the reasons for that are among the conditions that Apple must have conceded to to sell legally in the mainland.
Actually, yes. Any water shortage in a developed area with cheap water isn't actually a water shortage, it's a mismanagement or incorrect pricing. California can simply produce more water if they really need it, which they would if everyone was leaving their taps on.
We're fooled into believing water shortages are environmental problems we need to make sacrafices to prevent. But just paying more for more expensive, higher volume production or recylcing would work too. Eg Isreal.
Not stupid, but they either didn't understand or relied on the placebo effect and didn't perform experiments that were actually useful at distinguishing helpful from harmful or useless medicines - AND communicate that information to others. When an ancient remedy turns out to be useful, it's not useful until we rediscover that it actually works. The idea of science and sorting out mysticism from reality is fairly new in most of the world. In China, doctors in public hospitals still prescribe untested herbal remedies and diagnose diseases without any idea of the effectiveness of what they're doing. Patients just trust authority, tradition and popular belief. You could argue that the same is true to some extent in the west today too - see general "have some antibiotics" prescriptions, and cough and cold medicine.
There must be a balance between "no payment" and "no ads" - the optimum profit doesn't necessarily happen at one of the extremes. Do you think you'd choose a higher priced subscription if it offered no ads?