I talk with Chris Lynch about the Commerce Commission decision to decline the proposed merger of Vodafone and Sky Television.
Bill Bennett “Vodasky a bridge too far in Commerce Commissions eyes”
Talking Vodafone-Sky on Newstalk ZB Christchurch
Category: media
Throw Yahoo mail overboard now, then worry about everything else
Yahoo can’t do anything right with email. It can’t do anything right by its customers. The web company has also been a nightmare for partners like Spark NZ.
The sooner Yahoo wraps up and stops trading the better for everyone.
If you haven’t already severed your ties with Yahoo, stop reading this, go to the site and close your account now.
Divorcing Yahoo may be tricky. If you have an old Spark Xtra email account, the page where you close your Yahoo account asks you to ring a Spark support hotline. Do it anyway.
If you had a Yahoo account in the past, go and check it is dead. You don’t want it to come back from beyond the grave and haunt you.
Yahoo mail hacked… again
Last month Yahoo told the world that criminals had stolen data on 500 million users. The stash includes mail addresses and telephone numbers. There are dates of birth, encrypted passwords and security questions.
That’s bad, but to compound matters Yahoo failed to act in good faith. It only told customers their data was stolen after the press had the story.
If that wasn’t enough, details emerged today that Yahoo is scanning hundreds of millions of mail messages on behalf of US intelligence or law enforcement agencies.
Untrustworthy
Both the hack and the capitulation to US government snoops are massive breaches of trust. They are not the only problems with Yahoo mail, but they dwarf everything else.
While the crooks didn’t get credit card data in the attack, they had access to enough information to link users to bank accounts. The crooks could read mail messages. That way they could learn sensitive personal data about Yahoo users. It includes the kind of information that can hurt people and the kind of information that can cost money.
Two years
It took Yahoo two years to tell its customers about the attack.
When thieves get hold of personal data, people need to move fast to protect themselves, their online identities and their secrets. For two years Yahoo left its customers vulnerable.
Yahoo is not the only company to take years to report a serious security breach. LinkedIn didn’t disclose a major data theft for four years. It took MySpace, kids ask your parents about that name, three years to go public after a similar event.
It is possible these companies were not aware of the breaches. Or perhaps they were not aware how serious the the data thefts were before they were public. After all, the average time it takes for an attacked company to know its online security defences have been compromised runs to around six months.
But Yahoo didn’t admit to anything until the story was already in the media.
Immoral if not illegal
Scanning users’ mail messages on behalf of the US government Yahoo was almost certainly illegal. It’s one thing to snoop on US citizens, but to let US spooks poke their noses into innocent non-citizen’s business is playing with fire.
It’s unpleasant, outrageous and immoral. But there’s something far worse at stake here. If US government snoops have a backdoor into the Yahoo mail system, there’s a good chance other state intelligence services — unfriendly ones — also have access. And that means criminal gangs have access too.
The big question is that if the US government leant on Yahoo to give it customer mail, has it done the same with other mail providers. Are American spooks peering through your Facebook, Gmail, Microsoft Outlook.com mail or Apple Mail while you are reading this?
And does that bother you?
Facebook not the media messiah
For years publishers, broadcasters and anyone else in the media business have wondered if Facebook could be their salvation.
The old publishing business model has crumbled. Building mass audiences with entertainment or information then selling advertising no longer delivers rivers of gold.
Some saw Facebook as an answer. Perhaps not the answer, the question is too complex for a single response. And anyway, Facebook has always been part of the problem.
Yet for a moment it looked as if the social media giant could breathe life back into the advertising-lead business model.
Mighty empire
After all Facebook is a mighty empire. It has greater reach and more influence than any organisation in history.
Yet it turns out the emperor has no clothes. Well, fewer clothes.
The Wall Street Journal reports Facebook has misreported its viewing figures for the past two years.
Advertisers have been given numbers that overestimate the amount of time Facebook users watch video by between 60 and 80 percent. This comes after the social media giant talked about the rapid growth in its video numbers.
Advertiser fears
There’s a growing fear among advertisers that Facebook and Google hide too much of this kind of information. That’s ironic, because one reason advertisers tell traditional publishers they prefer online media is ‘accountability’.
This isn’t the only bad news Facebook has for traditional publishers. In June there was an algorithm change which saw Facebook prioritise material from human accounts while decreasing the number of posts users would see from media companies.
Those publishers who depend on Facebook to deliver readers get less traffic as a result.
Many publishers feel they have no choice but to throw in their lot with Facebook. After all, it is the largest source of traffic for most big media companies. And Facebook has consistently pushed itself to publishers in a bid to fill its pages with their, free-to-Facebook, material.
Fickle, unsympathetic
Yet Facebook has proved a fickle and unsympathetic partner. Its relationship with traditional media is asymmetric.
It’s not clear if Facebook’s recent misreporting was deliberate or accidental. The difference doesn’t matter much to publishers, either way they suffer.
Facebook’s business is all about building compelling services that win large audiences. It then sells that attention to advertisers. Google is the same.
Scale
In many respects both are following the traditional media-advertising model, although there are huge differences of scale and neither invests heavily in producing original material. Instead they let other people do the heavy lifting.
You can see this as a parasitic way of making money. Despite all the goody-two shoes rhetoric about extending the reach of the internet into the poorer areas of the world or bringing people together, the pair are vast empires that care little for what goes on down at the grass-roots level.
Facebook is not the answer to publishers’ prayers, it is yet another nail in their coffin.
New Zealand Herald digital — newspaper without paper
The New Zealand Herald sent an email today inviting readers to subscribe to a NZ$25 a month digital edition.
This is a good idea. A digital edition is an exact electronic copy of the print edition. The paper is available online at 6am each day. It is separate from the website version of the paper at http://nzherald.co.nz.
You can read the digital edition from a Windows PC or Mac in a browser. There are apps for iOS and Android users.
Read on PCs, tablets, phones
The NZ Herald digital edition displays well on a big PC screen. A digital facsimile of the daily paper would be a joy to read on, say, the large version of the iPad Pro. You’ll get by fine on most laptops and 10-inch tablets.
A digital newspaper is harder work on a mobile phone. Small screens are not the best way to read tabloid pages. Yet even that format can be useful sometimes.
Digital newspaper editions are not new. They’ve been around since the 90s. A digital version of The New Zealand Herald was available on Pressdisplay (now called PressReader) when the Herald was still a broadsheet.
Like a newspaper, without paper
There are two reasons why a digital edition could be better than reading a website. First, web news pages lack context. You can instantly grasp the relative importance of stories and how they relate to each other.
While editors place the most important stories at the top of a list on a site’s home page, that’s not the same. And anyway, few readers arrive via the home page. For most news context is something decided by a Google algorithm or another automatic process.
Online news sites serve up atomised news, digital editions give a bigger picture.
The other aspect of old school print papers that you miss when reading news websites is the lack of filtering.
Papers are organised into sections: News, world news, business, sport and so on, but they serve up a wide range of material within these broad sections. You’ll find you’ll read more widely and are better informed — even if that is just a matter of glancing at headlines in passing.
The downside of a digital edition is that is out of date after publication. Although you might see this as a positive if you think of it a snapshot frozen in time.
At $25 a month, the NZ Herald digital edition is about half the price of having the print edition delivered. Some print subscriptions include the digital edition at no extra cost. For some readers that makes the digital edition great added value.
Money
Given the high cost of printing and distribution, it might seem the publisher isn’t passing on all the potential cost savings.
In practice, it’s more complicated. Setting up the technology to deliver a digital edition is expensive, it may require frequent tweaking. Reader numbers for digital editions is often a fraction of print edition reader numbers. So these costs are shared by a relatively low number of readers.
One trick the Herald’s digital edition marketing effort has missed is offering a sample edition so potential customers can check the format is right for them.
Six years ago Rupert Murdoch hailed tablets as the newspaper industry’s saviour. That was premature. The industry is still stumbling to find a way to make money after the advertising apocalypse. Digital editions could help, but it puts the onus back on publishers to ensure the content is worth paying for.
Bill Bennett writes features for New Zealand Herald business reports.
Wired doesn’t get it about ad blockers
If I used an ad blocker Wired’s pop-up screen would be annoying but deserved. Publishers need to sell advertising. Ad blockers undermine their business. You can’t argue with the logic.
Sure some publishers abuse readers. They serve inappropriate, even offensive advertising. Many ads overstay their welcome. Others disrupt viewers with noisy video. Or they get too much in-your-face.
Online ads can make reading an ugly, disjointed business. And yet they pay the bills.
Wired isn’t guilty of those bad things. Or at least not in recent memory.
Journalism is not free
It’s reasonable for publishers to ask for readers to contribute something in return for journalism. That something could be seconds of attention to an online ad or it could be a form of pay-per-view.
But here’s the other thing Wired, I don’t use ad blockers.
My browser doesn’t have one installed. If Wired let me past the front gate, I’d see its advertising in all its glory. From that point of view, I’d be a good reader. Maybe even a lucrative one, because I read a lot of tech stories. Back in the day I’d buy the printed version of Wired if the cover story appealed enough.
I may not have an ad blocker, but I do use a browser extension to block intrusive data collection.
There’s a Ghostery in my house
At the time Wired’s pop-up message appeared, I was using Ghostery. I’ve switched since to Disconnect.
These extensions aim to stop companies from collecting data. I’ve no objection to Wired knowing I’ve seen a page or an ad on its site. I’ve every objection to the commercial snitches watching all my online interactions then selling that data to bottom feeders so they can make my life a misery.
When Ghostery was installed, I didn’t use all its blockers. I customized the settings first to protect against possible malware injections and second to stop tracking firms I’ve never heard of from spying on me. I also object to Facebook knowing what I’m up to away from its site.
But that’s it. So it appears Wired’s pop-up message is doing something naughty.
Zealous
Either it is over-zealous and springs into action at the merest whiff of a user taking back control of their online experience. That’s the benign interpretation.
Or, it’s more evil and Wired has a commercial arrangement with one of the nastier data collection outfits and damn well wants to intrude on my privacy if I visit the site.
The other option is Wired’s coders are incompetent or its business managers are too clueless to discriminate against different types of blocking activity.
Whatever the reason, it’s not good business to punish your customers. No doubt I’ll return to Wired again, but until this is fixed, it’s going to get less, not more of my traffic.