It seems like this would not be possible: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37334942/how-to-avoid-la...
Maybe a piece of JavaScript on the opened page could close the page? In that case you would see the page open and then immediately close. Though it may seem to some users that their rating submission failed.
I should probably add more useful information to the opened page. Right now it says "You will see more content from 2 RSS feeds and 3 people that recommended this". But I could add links to the item details page that has related recommendations. Or I could add links to the RSS feeds so you could explore them more.
What if every household enabled an open "guest" SSID on their Wifi router? Wouldn't it have a huge positive impact of giving access to people who can't afford mobile data or home internet?
Like the old somewhat-tongue-in-cheek "Linksys Community Network Project".
The idea was roughly this:
Such a large portion of wifi equipment sold at the time had the SSID "Linksys" and no password. So everyone's devices had a saved setting to connect to that, even if we later configured our networks differently.
Therefore it's super convenient if you just call your guest network that. When you actually have guests over, chances are good that their devices will automatically use your wifi with zero hassles whatsoever.
(Also implied but unspoken: The existence of this craptastic webpage explaining the Linksys Community Network Project is plausible deniability if you get caught using someone else's open wifi that they shared out of ignorance rather than because they read this page and agreed with it.)
Sure, but then you have random people doing illegal things on your network and it gets linked back to you. Also, most of the major ISPs are implementing data caps, so I wouldn't want to get overage charges because someone used all my data.
Sure, there is absolutely no upside for me personally to do this.
There are only downsides for me, but I think they are limited:
- My router lets me set the bandwidth limits for the guest network. I set it to 10Mbps down/1Mbps up which is unnoticeable.
- My ISP has no data caps.
- The laws here are not draconian
Your link just makes me more comfident that I don't want to run an open WiFi network.
Most of their defense is based on the assumption that you have all the same protections as a network operator. However, as the article points out, this has never been tested in court. So you might be fine, and you might go to jail, we don't know.
And even if you do get network operator status, there are still legal notices and copyright systems you have to comply with.
And thats all just copyright. That article doesn't deal with more serious online crimes.
If the FBI finds someone downloading child porn from your network, you will be arrested. You will have to convince the police that it was someone else. Even if you don't end up with any serious penalties, that's a hell of a lot more hassle than I'm willing to put up with.
I read the Civil white paper linked from the article hoping to see a description of a new business model for journalists and publishers but only found how they will use CVL tokens to vote on who is in the whitelist.
Can someone please explain how/why readers would pay for the content? That's the important part, isn't it?
FWIW, I still have close to no idea what DLT/Crypto/Decentralization/etc. even is, or rather is for. Assuming the tech actually has wings we won't really understand the how and why until certain use cases come to dominate. Even then, it can be difficult. After Western Union was founded (19th century), people would walk into WU offices to send money over the telegraph line and say things like, "Where can I see the little man who runs along the wire carrying the money?" Having said that, here's my explanation:
How? Readers can pay newsrooms for content using a debit/credit card or purchasing and sending CVL to the newsroom.
Why? Because they like the pieces coming out of a set of newsrooms and want access to that type of content.
Effectively, journalists end up running their own newspaper, but that newspaper is a subsidiary of a parent company that is hands-off for content but not for governance (which just means it's not totally hands-off for content). This newspaper would compete against other subsidiaries of the parent, and would have a certain percentage vote on what other subsidaries exist. Moreover, journalists would often be paid by selling their stock options in the parent.
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Obviously, the hypothesis here is that such a direct connection between journalist and reader will lead to higher-quality content then can be found at the MSM rags. I'm agnostic about whether that is the case.
To pay journalists directly there are platforms where you can already pay directly for the article (Blendle), plenty of blogging platforms and new media startups than pay journalists at least in part by page impressions/revenues, and online tipjars.
Whether these clickbait factor or article quality depends on the journalist and audience as well as the model, but all of these approaches seem much closer to the ideal of helping journalists earn by the popularity of their output than a startup paying part of journalists' salary in tokens whose main utility according to the white paper appears to be votes to censor/censure other publications for ethics violations.
Blendle is in Beta, which means people are just now coming up with revenue models that only charge customers for the articles they want to read, and allow them to do this across different outlets.
The unique (not that this is good or useful) thing about purchasing CVL tokens is that it allows you not only to pay for the articles you want to read, but allows you to vote on how the Civil constitution is applied and thus how existing and newly formed newsrooms are shaped as well as affording you the opportunity to start your own newsroom (I think, not certain about this).
My explanation here and my explanation above doesn't in fact explain much of anything. Again, assuming blockchain/[insert buzzword] has wings, we won't really understand much of the how or why until clear use cases begin to dominate.
When Morse was trying to convince Congress to fund his endeavors, it was only after the second attempt they just gave him some money to make him go away (though, there were a couple Congressmen who really pushed for supporting him). When Morse had a telegraph line constructed in D.C. and running north (40 miles?), people still didn't understand the how when a message could be sent by telegraph faster than by a messenger sent south on the train. People still didn't grasp the why until criminals that previously had used the trains to elude police, began to get caught. Even then, it was still difficult to understand because it stood outside their conceptual framework for understanding/interpreting the world.
Not that the crypto stuff actually has wings. I'm emphatically agnostic.
Effectively, yes. However, assuming they implemented something with (and I can't believe I'm using this term) checks-and-balances, and also didn't give reader-investors too much voting power, then maybe it works out alright? I have no clue.
The only real rebuttal to your point is that journalists have effectively always been censored, to a degree, as the market so demands. Assange is perhaps the least censored, if not totally censor-free, but I'm not sure his model of censorship-free journalism is particularly scalable.
The tokens allow you to do more than simply pay journalists. Something to do with how the Civil constitution is applied and how new newsrooms are created. That's what I gleaned from the whitepaper. I could clearly be wrong about this.
Crypto whitepapers, even read charitably, are difficult to interpret and not because what is being said is too complex or something.
tbf, the whitepaper is unusually candid in suggesting that journalists on the platform in control of their revenue model will often charge in other currencies instead...
I think I can explain the Civil proposition but I'm not associated with the project or Consensys so I may be incorrect / plain wrong.
It starts with a Token, a Token Curated Registry and micro-payments / paywalls..
The token has a double purpose:
- Allows token holders to vote on which news sources should be in the Civil registry (ie, the trustworthy news sources).
- Allows token holders to pay for content using micro-payments to access articles (ie, think Brave browser and Metamask enabled paywalls)
The token curated registry is basically a whitelist of news sources/ agencies / newsrooms that are trusted by the token holder community + this organisation dubbed the "Civil Council" (veteran news and media people associated with the project) consider to be trustworthy in their reporting / fact checking etc.
The plan seems to be for people who consume media to pay for content deemed to be of high quality by accessing the traditional sites / platforms (ie, unlike FB the plan is not to make a profit by aggregating other people's work in your own platform) with a type of "paywall" that requires a payment in civ tokens.
Hope this helps, but if anyone wants to discuss the cryptoeconomics of TCRs and how this primitive can improve the signal/noise ratio in polling or voting systems... let me know :-)
"""with a type of "paywall" that requires a payment in civ tokens"""
In my opinion this is the most important part. Why would the Civil paywall work better than a non cryptocurrency based paywall?
Especially, if they want to accept regular payments as well?
They seem to be focusing on the wrong problem - how to govern a registry of news sources. While the real problem is how to get readers to pay for content.
I think the idea is that people feel that news sources can't be trusted in general so don't want to pay for access to a "news" article in particular. The idea of the registry is then to represent social validation by a community incentivised by their own selfish best interests (ie the token would appreciate hence they can resell for a profit...) to be accurate and judicious about their curation efforts.
The paywall tech could be something like what SpankChain is doing for cams, for instance. Technically it's an interface that allows token holders to sign a message to access a content URI by placing the tokens in a state-channel contract. If the consumer does "enter" the site, the tokens are deduced, otherwise they remain available for future use. Users should be able to pay with fiat but behind the scenes the balance would still be kept in tokens for the payment infrastructure to remain trustless.
(caveat: I'm speculating on a solution that doesn't exist yet and I'm not involved in building)
Starting with the game theory:
If the TCR shows a specific bias (ie: political inclination) or some form of censorship, less people will want to own the token because the "fairness" promise is broken and that should reduce the token price.
If the curated items (newsrooms in this case) have low adoption (few people use tokens to purchase viewing rights) then the tokens will lose value too.
For token holders this should motivate them to be judicious in their curation efforts.
The voting mechanism also plays a significant part on the whole system. Traditional TCRs use a partial lock commit reveal scheme that allows us to find the Schelling point for a challenge.
Personally I'm quite partial to other voting systems that reduce the impact of token ownership disparity like the one Glen Weyl, Buterin and others have called "Liberal Radical" and its simpler root the quadratic voting mechanism. The way this works is that only the square root of voter's balance counts as voter's voting "weight". So 1 vote costs 1 token but 2 votes cost 4 tokens and those with less "power" have a higher representation relative to their balances.
I don't think the voting mechanism is the problem. The problem is the humans who vote. For example, let's say that Civil attracts 10 publications to its platform, all of which are liberal leaning (which seems to be the case). So, when a conservative newsroom wants to join, what do you think will happen?
The Civil Constitution [1] has no guarantee of freedom of speech. Instead they say they are "committed to the ethical practice of journalism," which is open to be arbitrarily abused by the majority of voters, irrespective of the voting system.
I don't actually understand why there is any voting at all.
The author of the original article says he believes that Civil's leadership has 'good intentions" but if they can't understand that their system will not solve the problems they set out to solve, then perhaps they don't deserve to gain the funding and attention they have actually managed to get.
What I think will happen is that voters are incentivised to make good on the promise of the platform. If they reject a conservative site based on anything dubious then the whole effort will lose credibility.
Don't forget that some form of voting is necessary for the token holders to have a say in the governance of the business. That's one of the premise of blockchain native businesses, the decentralisation of equity and power.
The voting and incentive mechanisms are the cryptoeconomic properties of the project and what I can discuss intelligently. The Civil constitution is out of my scope but I trust the incentives are there to allow high quality media to enter the list regardless of political bias.
UBI will be financed by those software engineers and doctors because they are in the higher income tax bracket. Those people will still be paying more to the system than getting from it.
I should probably add more useful information to the opened page. Right now it says "You will see more content from 2 RSS feeds and 3 people that recommended this". But I could add links to the item details page that has related recommendations. Or I could add links to the RSS feeds so you could explore them more.