Month: February 2023
Hackers Claim They Breached T-Mobile More Than 100 Times In 2022
An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: Three different cybercriminal groups claimed access to internal networks at communications giant T-Mobile in more than 100 separate incidents throughout 2022, new data suggests. In each case, the goal of the attackers was the same: Phish T-Mobile employees for access to internal company tools, and then convert that access into a cybercrime service that could be hired to divert any T-Mobile user’s text messages and phone calls to another device. The conclusions above are based on an extensive analysis of Telegram chat logs from three distinct cybercrime groups or actors that have been identified by security researchers as particularly active in and effective at “SIM-swapping,” which involves temporarily seizing control over a target’s mobile phone number.
Countless websites and online services use SMS text messages for both password resets and multi-factor authentication. This means that stealing someone’s phone number often can let cybercriminals hijack the target’s entire digital life in short order — including access to any financial, email and social media accounts tied to that phone number. All three SIM-swapping entities that were tracked for this story remain active in 2023, and they all conduct business in open channels on the instant messaging platform Telegram. KrebsOnSecurity is not naming those channels or groups here because they will simply migrate to more private servers if exposed publicly, and for now those servers remain a useful source of intelligence about their activities.
Each advertises their claimed access to T-Mobile systems in a similar way. At a minimum, every SIM-swapping opportunity is announced with a brief “Tmobile up!” or “Tmo up!” message to channel participants. Other information in the announcements includes the price for a single SIM-swap request, and the handle of the person who takes the payment and information about the targeted subscriber. The information required from the customer of the SIM-swapping service includes the target’s phone number, and the serial number tied to the new SIM card that will be used to receive text messages and phone calls from the hijacked phone number. Initially, the goal of this project was to count how many times each entity claimed access to T-Mobile throughout 2022, by cataloging the various “Tmo up!” posts from each day and working backwards from Dec. 31, 2022. But by the time we got to claims made in the middle of May 2022, completing the rest of the year’s timeline seemed unnecessary. The tally shows that in the last seven-and-a-half months of 2022, these groups collectively made SIM-swapping claims against T-Mobile on 104 separate days — often with multiple groups claiming access on the same days. In a written statement to KrebsOnSecurity, T-Mobile said this type of activity affects the entire wireless industry.
“And we are constantly working to fight against it,” the statement reads. “We have continued to drive enhancements that further protect against unauthorized access, including enhancing multi-factor authentication controls, hardening environments, limiting access to data, apps or services, and more. We are also focused on gathering threat intelligence data, like what you have shared, to help further strengthen these ongoing efforts.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: Three different cybercriminal groups claimed access to internal networks at communications giant T-Mobile in more than 100 separate incidents throughout 2022, new data suggests. In each case, the goal of the attackers was the same: Phish T-Mobile employees for access to internal company tools, and then convert that access into a cybercrime service that could be hired to divert any T-Mobile user’s text messages and phone calls to another device. The conclusions above are based on an extensive analysis of Telegram chat logs from three distinct cybercrime groups or actors that have been identified by security researchers as particularly active in and effective at “SIM-swapping,” which involves temporarily seizing control over a target’s mobile phone number.
Countless websites and online services use SMS text messages for both password resets and multi-factor authentication. This means that stealing someone’s phone number often can let cybercriminals hijack the target’s entire digital life in short order — including access to any financial, email and social media accounts tied to that phone number. All three SIM-swapping entities that were tracked for this story remain active in 2023, and they all conduct business in open channels on the instant messaging platform Telegram. KrebsOnSecurity is not naming those channels or groups here because they will simply migrate to more private servers if exposed publicly, and for now those servers remain a useful source of intelligence about their activities.
Each advertises their claimed access to T-Mobile systems in a similar way. At a minimum, every SIM-swapping opportunity is announced with a brief “Tmobile up!” or “Tmo up!” message to channel participants. Other information in the announcements includes the price for a single SIM-swap request, and the handle of the person who takes the payment and information about the targeted subscriber. The information required from the customer of the SIM-swapping service includes the target’s phone number, and the serial number tied to the new SIM card that will be used to receive text messages and phone calls from the hijacked phone number. Initially, the goal of this project was to count how many times each entity claimed access to T-Mobile throughout 2022, by cataloging the various “Tmo up!” posts from each day and working backwards from Dec. 31, 2022. But by the time we got to claims made in the middle of May 2022, completing the rest of the year’s timeline seemed unnecessary. The tally shows that in the last seven-and-a-half months of 2022, these groups collectively made SIM-swapping claims against T-Mobile on 104 separate days — often with multiple groups claiming access on the same days. In a written statement to KrebsOnSecurity, T-Mobile said this type of activity affects the entire wireless industry.
“And we are constantly working to fight against it,” the statement reads. “We have continued to drive enhancements that further protect against unauthorized access, including enhancing multi-factor authentication controls, hardening environments, limiting access to data, apps or services, and more. We are also focused on gathering threat intelligence data, like what you have shared, to help further strengthen these ongoing efforts.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
‘The Mandalorian’ Season 3: Trailer, Release Date and Baby Yoda’s Future – CNET
The Star Wars show returns to Disney Plus for its third season this week.
The Star Wars show returns to Disney Plus for its third season this week.
The biggest stories from Hot Pod Summit
This is Hot Pod, The Verge’s newsletter about podcasting and the audio industry. Sign up here for more.
I hope you all had a great week! Hot Pod Summit was a lot of fun — it was great to meet so many of you in person and chat about some of the biggest issues in the industry.
We’ll have more on that below, but first, some acknowledgments. Big thanks to our partners at work x work and the whole On Air Fest team for bringing the event together as well as to the Wythe Hotel for hosting us. Also, I absolutely would not have made it through this without the help of my Verge colleagues Kara Verlaney, Esther Cohen, T.C. Sottek, Helen Havlak, and, of course, Jake Kastrenakes. Plus, we were so lucky that the Decoder team was down to put on their first live show at the summit. You can hear Nilay Patel’s interview with Conal Byrne, CEO of iHeartMedia’s digital audio group, right here.
And finally, thank you to our sponsors for the event: AdsWizz and Subtext. AdsWizz is a self-serve advertising platform for creating and running audio ads. Subtext is a text messaging platform designed to connect creators directly with their subscribers.
It takes a village to make a podcast industry event, folks! Now, some highlights from the summit.
YouTube announces that podcasts are coming to YouTube Music
Love to break some news at Hot Pod Summit. I had the opportunity to sit down with Kai Chuk, head of podcasting at YouTube, and Steve McLendon, Google’s product lead for podcasting, and talk about their plans for the medium. The crux of it: podcasts will soon be available on YouTube Music in both the free and paid versions. It marks a major departure from YouTube’s video-first approach to podcasting so far.
“There’s a whole new cohort of users and creators who we haven’t really been optimizing for as well as we can,” said YouTube podcasting chief Kai Chuk. “That’s something that we do want to change.”
They were keenly aware of YouTube’s new-ish position of power in the industry and also the drawbacks of their platform. Although it has become the most-used podcast platform on the market, it is still best for video podcasts. Audio-only podcasts function in the same way but with a static image and none of the listening features consumers are used to with other platforms. “It’s pretty obvious that we haven’t had a great solution for audio as of yet. And there’s a whole new cohort of users and creators who we haven’t really been optimizing for as well as we can,” Chuk said. “That’s something that we do want to change.”
On YouTube Music, listeners will have access to the kinds of features they have come to expect on other platforms, like background listening, downloads, speed control, and the ability to switch between video and audio. McLendon also said the team is working on integrating RSS into the platform; at launch, though, the platform is essentially just enabling a better consumption experience for existing video podcasts. While that all sounds grand, YouTube Music is much smaller than YouTube proper: 80 million subscribers versus 2.5 billion users. YouTube’s edge is its searchability and reach. Chuk and McLendon said it does not have to be an either / or approach.
“I don’t expect podcasts to only live on YouTube Music, that’s the only way that people consume podcasts on YouTube,” Chuk said. “We expect there to be kind of a back and forth between the two.”
McLendon used his own experience as an example, when he found a Kevin Systrom podcast interview on YouTube when he was at his work computer and then switched to the audio version when he got into his car to go home. Allowing consumers to hop from one to the other is going to be a priority. “We’ll bridge some of those experiences in seamless ways for the user and really center on the user journey,” McLendon said.
That is already how many people use YouTube podcasts anyway (or I do, at least): finding it through Google and then switching to a listening platform. The key, I think, will be getting them to stay in YouTube’s ecosystem. Right now, you can start something on YouTube and finish the rest on Spotify or Apple. I’ll be curious to see whether and how users will be directed straight to the YouTube Music platform — and whether this could help bulk up YouTube Music’s subscriber numbers.
How the economics of audiobooks may change
I was also really pumped to dig into the world of audiobooks, which got a new big player in Spotify when the company completed its purchase of Findaway last year. I spoke with Spotify’s head of audiobooks, Nir Zicherman, as well as author and podcaster Gretchen Rubin and Penguin Random House Audio’s senior vice president of production, Dan Zitt. With the whole pipeline represented — creator, publisher, and platform — we were able to examine how Spotify’s plans for shifting the business model of audiobooks could impact the industry.
As an extension of the traditional publishing economy, the audiobooks model has been pretty steady for a while now. Consumers, who mostly come to the medium as book readers, either buy premium titles a la carte on something like Apple Books (usually for $10–$20 a pop) or have a subscription to Audible or audiobooks.com for about $15 a month. It keeps prices closely in line with print prices. Spotify has chosen the a la carte route to start, but Zicherman says that the company will seek to expand how it monetizes audiobooks.
“Applying a blanket approach to everything — every piece of content, every creator, just like in podcasting — I think actually hurts the industry,” Zicherman said. “So the future that I see at Spotify is many different business models to support all the different types of podcast content that exists and all the different types of audiobook content that exists.”
Former Spotify content and advertising chief Dawn Ostroff mentioned at an investor event last year that audiobooks could be available for free, supported by advertising. Zicherman would not say whether Spotify would go down that path but only said that the model would be “interesting” (cryptic!). He also mentioned that Spotify is looking into a Netflix-style subscription option as well.
Rubin, who has another book coming out this spring, went through the potential benefits and drawbacks of using ad-supported distribution for her own work. “On the one hand, a listener might really like advertising support, because then that means it’s free to them. So that could bring in people to my work that wouldn’t otherwise get it,” she said. “On the other hand, we all know that if people are used to paying for something, you would rather them keep paying for it, rather than starting to give it to them for free. Because once people give something for free, it can be hard to reel that back.”
Zitt was also intrigued, if concerned, about what it could mean for the ability of creators to make a living. “I think a menu of options in how people sell content is a good thing — with the aside that content creators are being paid fairly for the content,” he said. “Some of the models I’ve seen that have come and gone have not been beneficial to the artist, only to the platform.”
Can narrative podcasts make money?
This is Nick Quah’s area, and unfortunately, his flight from Idaho was snowed out. So I stepped in with varying degrees of success. (You’ll have to ask the people who witnessed it.) Big thanks to John Perotti, co-founder and CCO of Rococo Punch, and Kate Osborn, EVP of development at Kaleidoscope, for putting up with me. They gave great insight into how you get a premium narrative podcast made these days, especially when studios can opt for chat shows that are cheap to make with potentially high returns.
So how much does it cost to make a decent limited-run narrative podcast? “$250,000 is the floor to make truly good narrative, engaging content,” said Osborn. “I’d rather make less than make it for under the resources that we [need].” And if the story requires travel or lengthy investigations, that will push the price tag up even higher.
Perotti explained how, when he went out pitching the show that became last year’s critically acclaimed series Welcome to Provincetown, he got no bites. So he self-financed the project until getting investment from Stitcher’s Witness Docs. The risk was worth it. “Because we did it that way, we own the feed. Not only do we own the feed, it’s going to be a television show, or at least it’s been optioned for television,” he said. “So it’s like, yeah, that’s a lottery ticket, I get it. But that’s value.”
Getting optioned for TV may be a lottery ticket for podcast creators, but there are other ways to monetize their shows. “The IP game is great, but that’s not all it is, right?” Osborn said. “It could be a play, it could be a live show, or literally a physical product… doing all of those things together, I think, makes sense.”
iHeartMedia’s Conal Byrne on trading exclusivity for broad reach
Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel sat down with Conal Byrne, CEO of iHeartMedia’s digital audio group, for a live interview. They covered a lot of ground, but one theme that kept coming up over and over again was iHeart’s strategy to get as wide an audience as possible and letting places like Spotify and Audible make plays for exclusive content.
“I choke my audience if I choose to pull my RSS feed out of a distribution app, because people who go there and expect it there won’t see it anymore,” Byrne said. “It’s why we widely distribute. Otherwise, I’d be sitting up here saying, ‘We are really working hard to get everybody on the iHeartRadio app.’ The business and the economics of podcasting today still sit with the creator and the publisher, because you own the pipe that you distribute your shows through. I haven’t found a business model that proves it differently, so I think it behooves all of us to plug that pipe into as many distribution points as possible.”
“We have about 70-ish shows in the iHeart Podcast Network that drive over 1 million monthly downloads or more,” Conal Byrne, CEO of iHeartMedia’s digital audio group, said. “The only reason we have that number is because of broadcast radio marketing.”
Byrne also insisted that marketing podcasts on broadcast radio has been invaluable for the company’s podcast business. “We have about 70-ish shows in the iHeart Podcast Network that drive over 1 million monthly downloads or more,” he said. “The only reason we have that number is because of broadcast radio marketing.” That is much easier to accomplish, of course, when your parent company owns more than 860 radio stations across the country and would benefit from other podcast companies following in kind!
As Nilay noted, there are risks with casting such a wide net. He asked Byrne about a Bloomberg report last year that found iHeart had worked with a firm called Jun Group to buy podcast downloads through freemium mobile games. First, Byrne denied doing such a thing. Then he qualified the practice. “We have experimented with Jun Group across the years. I think our stats were something like never more than 1 percent, 2 percent, 2.5 percent of our downloads in any given month,” he said. “We don’t use it anymore.”
It was a fascinating conversation, and you can listen to it wherever you get podcasts or check out the transcript on The Verge.
Whew that was a long one! I slept for like 15 hours after this event. I’ll need a beat for the next one. See you next week.
This is Hot Pod, The Verge’s newsletter about podcasting and the audio industry. Sign up here for more.
I hope you all had a great week! Hot Pod Summit was a lot of fun — it was great to meet so many of you in person and chat about some of the biggest issues in the industry.
We’ll have more on that below, but first, some acknowledgments. Big thanks to our partners at work x work and the whole On Air Fest team for bringing the event together as well as to the Wythe Hotel for hosting us. Also, I absolutely would not have made it through this without the help of my Verge colleagues Kara Verlaney, Esther Cohen, T.C. Sottek, Helen Havlak, and, of course, Jake Kastrenakes. Plus, we were so lucky that the Decoder team was down to put on their first live show at the summit. You can hear Nilay Patel’s interview with Conal Byrne, CEO of iHeartMedia’s digital audio group, right here.
And finally, thank you to our sponsors for the event: AdsWizz and Subtext. AdsWizz is a self-serve advertising platform for creating and running audio ads. Subtext is a text messaging platform designed to connect creators directly with their subscribers.
It takes a village to make a podcast industry event, folks! Now, some highlights from the summit.
YouTube announces that podcasts are coming to YouTube Music
Love to break some news at Hot Pod Summit. I had the opportunity to sit down with Kai Chuk, head of podcasting at YouTube, and Steve McLendon, Google’s product lead for podcasting, and talk about their plans for the medium. The crux of it: podcasts will soon be available on YouTube Music in both the free and paid versions. It marks a major departure from YouTube’s video-first approach to podcasting so far.
They were keenly aware of YouTube’s new-ish position of power in the industry and also the drawbacks of their platform. Although it has become the most-used podcast platform on the market, it is still best for video podcasts. Audio-only podcasts function in the same way but with a static image and none of the listening features consumers are used to with other platforms. “It’s pretty obvious that we haven’t had a great solution for audio as of yet. And there’s a whole new cohort of users and creators who we haven’t really been optimizing for as well as we can,” Chuk said. “That’s something that we do want to change.”
On YouTube Music, listeners will have access to the kinds of features they have come to expect on other platforms, like background listening, downloads, speed control, and the ability to switch between video and audio. McLendon also said the team is working on integrating RSS into the platform; at launch, though, the platform is essentially just enabling a better consumption experience for existing video podcasts. While that all sounds grand, YouTube Music is much smaller than YouTube proper: 80 million subscribers versus 2.5 billion users. YouTube’s edge is its searchability and reach. Chuk and McLendon said it does not have to be an either / or approach.
“I don’t expect podcasts to only live on YouTube Music, that’s the only way that people consume podcasts on YouTube,” Chuk said. “We expect there to be kind of a back and forth between the two.”
McLendon used his own experience as an example, when he found a Kevin Systrom podcast interview on YouTube when he was at his work computer and then switched to the audio version when he got into his car to go home. Allowing consumers to hop from one to the other is going to be a priority. “We’ll bridge some of those experiences in seamless ways for the user and really center on the user journey,” McLendon said.
That is already how many people use YouTube podcasts anyway (or I do, at least): finding it through Google and then switching to a listening platform. The key, I think, will be getting them to stay in YouTube’s ecosystem. Right now, you can start something on YouTube and finish the rest on Spotify or Apple. I’ll be curious to see whether and how users will be directed straight to the YouTube Music platform — and whether this could help bulk up YouTube Music’s subscriber numbers.
How the economics of audiobooks may change
I was also really pumped to dig into the world of audiobooks, which got a new big player in Spotify when the company completed its purchase of Findaway last year. I spoke with Spotify’s head of audiobooks, Nir Zicherman, as well as author and podcaster Gretchen Rubin and Penguin Random House Audio’s senior vice president of production, Dan Zitt. With the whole pipeline represented — creator, publisher, and platform — we were able to examine how Spotify’s plans for shifting the business model of audiobooks could impact the industry.
As an extension of the traditional publishing economy, the audiobooks model has been pretty steady for a while now. Consumers, who mostly come to the medium as book readers, either buy premium titles a la carte on something like Apple Books (usually for $10–$20 a pop) or have a subscription to Audible or audiobooks.com for about $15 a month. It keeps prices closely in line with print prices. Spotify has chosen the a la carte route to start, but Zicherman says that the company will seek to expand how it monetizes audiobooks.
“Applying a blanket approach to everything — every piece of content, every creator, just like in podcasting — I think actually hurts the industry,” Zicherman said. “So the future that I see at Spotify is many different business models to support all the different types of podcast content that exists and all the different types of audiobook content that exists.”
Former Spotify content and advertising chief Dawn Ostroff mentioned at an investor event last year that audiobooks could be available for free, supported by advertising. Zicherman would not say whether Spotify would go down that path but only said that the model would be “interesting” (cryptic!). He also mentioned that Spotify is looking into a Netflix-style subscription option as well.
Rubin, who has another book coming out this spring, went through the potential benefits and drawbacks of using ad-supported distribution for her own work. “On the one hand, a listener might really like advertising support, because then that means it’s free to them. So that could bring in people to my work that wouldn’t otherwise get it,” she said. “On the other hand, we all know that if people are used to paying for something, you would rather them keep paying for it, rather than starting to give it to them for free. Because once people give something for free, it can be hard to reel that back.”
Zitt was also intrigued, if concerned, about what it could mean for the ability of creators to make a living. “I think a menu of options in how people sell content is a good thing — with the aside that content creators are being paid fairly for the content,” he said. “Some of the models I’ve seen that have come and gone have not been beneficial to the artist, only to the platform.”
Can narrative podcasts make money?
This is Nick Quah’s area, and unfortunately, his flight from Idaho was snowed out. So I stepped in with varying degrees of success. (You’ll have to ask the people who witnessed it.) Big thanks to John Perotti, co-founder and CCO of Rococo Punch, and Kate Osborn, EVP of development at Kaleidoscope, for putting up with me. They gave great insight into how you get a premium narrative podcast made these days, especially when studios can opt for chat shows that are cheap to make with potentially high returns.
So how much does it cost to make a decent limited-run narrative podcast? “$250,000 is the floor to make truly good narrative, engaging content,” said Osborn. “I’d rather make less than make it for under the resources that we [need].” And if the story requires travel or lengthy investigations, that will push the price tag up even higher.
Perotti explained how, when he went out pitching the show that became last year’s critically acclaimed series Welcome to Provincetown, he got no bites. So he self-financed the project until getting investment from Stitcher’s Witness Docs. The risk was worth it. “Because we did it that way, we own the feed. Not only do we own the feed, it’s going to be a television show, or at least it’s been optioned for television,” he said. “So it’s like, yeah, that’s a lottery ticket, I get it. But that’s value.”
Getting optioned for TV may be a lottery ticket for podcast creators, but there are other ways to monetize their shows. “The IP game is great, but that’s not all it is, right?” Osborn said. “It could be a play, it could be a live show, or literally a physical product… doing all of those things together, I think, makes sense.”
iHeartMedia’s Conal Byrne on trading exclusivity for broad reach
Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel sat down with Conal Byrne, CEO of iHeartMedia’s digital audio group, for a live interview. They covered a lot of ground, but one theme that kept coming up over and over again was iHeart’s strategy to get as wide an audience as possible and letting places like Spotify and Audible make plays for exclusive content.
“I choke my audience if I choose to pull my RSS feed out of a distribution app, because people who go there and expect it there won’t see it anymore,” Byrne said. “It’s why we widely distribute. Otherwise, I’d be sitting up here saying, ‘We are really working hard to get everybody on the iHeartRadio app.’ The business and the economics of podcasting today still sit with the creator and the publisher, because you own the pipe that you distribute your shows through. I haven’t found a business model that proves it differently, so I think it behooves all of us to plug that pipe into as many distribution points as possible.”
Byrne also insisted that marketing podcasts on broadcast radio has been invaluable for the company’s podcast business. “We have about 70-ish shows in the iHeart Podcast Network that drive over 1 million monthly downloads or more,” he said. “The only reason we have that number is because of broadcast radio marketing.” That is much easier to accomplish, of course, when your parent company owns more than 860 radio stations across the country and would benefit from other podcast companies following in kind!
As Nilay noted, there are risks with casting such a wide net. He asked Byrne about a Bloomberg report last year that found iHeart had worked with a firm called Jun Group to buy podcast downloads through freemium mobile games. First, Byrne denied doing such a thing. Then he qualified the practice. “We have experimented with Jun Group across the years. I think our stats were something like never more than 1 percent, 2 percent, 2.5 percent of our downloads in any given month,” he said. “We don’t use it anymore.”
It was a fascinating conversation, and you can listen to it wherever you get podcasts or check out the transcript on The Verge.
Whew that was a long one! I slept for like 15 hours after this event. I’ll need a beat for the next one. See you next week.
I don’t want to log in to your website
No thank u. | Image: The Verge
There is a new trend among websites where they want my email address before I’m allowed to read their free content. While I sympathize with the struggles of the media business, I am just going to point out something obvious: not reading is easier than reading — and way easier than logging in.
I don’t mind that The Atlantic requires an email — it has kept me from hate-reading the astounding churn of bad takes they publish — but just about everyone else has got to knock this off. You hear me, Reuters? I am annoyed with Reuters, specifically, because it’s a wire service, and I can usually find its articles without logging in by avoiding the Reuters website. As for you, The New York Times, I do not want to read your stories in your app! No thanks!
Let’s keep naming names. Hey, Google? I don’t want to log in to do a search. If I wanted to log in, I would. All the pop-ups in the world are not going to get me to log in. You know how, on my phone, you keep asking me when I open a link in my email whether I want to open it in Chrome? I don’t, and I can say no forever. All you’re doing is making me resent you.
The more each site tries to create its own little walled garden, the less valuable the open web becomes
And confidential to Substack: if I have clicked into a newsletter on the web, blocking my view of the thing I’m trying to read with a subscription pop-up isn’t going to make me more likely to subscribe. It just means I’m probably not going to read the newsletter.
One of the major problems with salesbros is that they think “always be closing” is a mantra to live by because they didn’t understand the point of Glengarry Glen Ross, which is that salespeople are nightmares. That’s why there’s always some silly pop-up chat at the bottom of every website now. No, Pamela — if that is your real name — I don’t want live assistance booking my yoga class. You are hogging valuable screen real estate.
This is some real tragedy of the commons shit. The web is becoming a miserable experience because some salesbro who is trying to meet his KPIs is doing stuff to marginally increase the number of paying customers. (And you know, the hell with the rest of us!) The more each site tries to create its own little walled garden, the less valuable the open web becomes.
I suspect this has gotten more common lately because of privacy concerns. See, a change to EU privacy laws means it’s not as easy to track users around the web; Apple’s privacy initiatives on its phone similarly make this harder. In the case of publishers, I assume the company is trying to create a richer ad profile for me to better compete with Facebook and Google. Plus, you know, maybe they can sell my email as part of a targeted marketing list. So what we’re looking at here is creating a worse user experience in order to pursue a variety of scummy money-making schemes.
There are no real public spaces on the internet
And that sucks because there are no real public spaces on the internet. Here in reality, I can fuck off to a park and hug a tree and sit on a bench and do stuff without ads, without anyone trying to track me, and without having to pay a dime. There was a time within my memory when people tried to make websites feel like semipublic places — you could hang out on someone’s cool blog and enjoy yourself. Sure, there might be a banner ad, but that’s like paying a buck for coffee and then just sitting in a diner all day with free refills.
The semipermeable paywall? I understand that. Shit, if I’m reading more than 10 of your articles a month, I probably should subscribe. Fair’s fair, and writers have to eat just like everyone else. But I’m starting to feel like I’m being strip-mined for data, and for what? Google already has access to my email. Why on earth does it need more of my information? How much more of my life does this behemoth want to surveil?
I don’t know, man. I was on the internet in the 1990s, and I remember when people just made stuff for fun — as a gift to other people. It seems like there’s less and less of that spirit remaining, and it’s why the internet sucks now. It’s why I have to append “reddit” to my Google searches to avoid getting SEO glurge — the for-profit stuff drowns out everything else. It’s why people are using DALL-E for newsletter header images to make sure their newsletter gets a bigger card in a social media feed — because it doesn’t matter what the image looks like as long as it exists. It’s why people intentionally put errors in their TikToks to juice engagement — because all the people commenting to tell you you’re wrong boost you in the algorithm. This is the bad place!
I’d like to believe we’re better than this, that it’s still possible to make weird, beautiful stuff online and find an audience without doing the scummy marketing grotesquerie. But realistically, it’s a matter of time before I beat someone to death with a copy of Lewis Hyde’s The Gift because they’ve let slip in casual conversation that they made all their money by making the web worse. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some grass to go touch.
No thank u. | Image: The Verge
There is a new trend among websites where they want my email address before I’m allowed to read their free content. While I sympathize with the struggles of the media business, I am just going to point out something obvious: not reading is easier than reading — and way easier than logging in.
I don’t mind that The Atlantic requires an email — it has kept me from hate-reading the astounding churn of bad takes they publish — but just about everyone else has got to knock this off. You hear me, Reuters? I am annoyed with Reuters, specifically, because it’s a wire service, and I can usually find its articles without logging in by avoiding the Reuters website. As for you, The New York Times, I do not want to read your stories in your app! No thanks!
Let’s keep naming names. Hey, Google? I don’t want to log in to do a search. If I wanted to log in, I would. All the pop-ups in the world are not going to get me to log in. You know how, on my phone, you keep asking me when I open a link in my email whether I want to open it in Chrome? I don’t, and I can say no forever. All you’re doing is making me resent you.
And confidential to Substack: if I have clicked into a newsletter on the web, blocking my view of the thing I’m trying to read with a subscription pop-up isn’t going to make me more likely to subscribe. It just means I’m probably not going to read the newsletter.
One of the major problems with salesbros is that they think “always be closing” is a mantra to live by because they didn’t understand the point of Glengarry Glen Ross, which is that salespeople are nightmares. That’s why there’s always some silly pop-up chat at the bottom of every website now. No, Pamela — if that is your real name — I don’t want live assistance booking my yoga class. You are hogging valuable screen real estate.
This is some real tragedy of the commons shit. The web is becoming a miserable experience because some salesbro who is trying to meet his KPIs is doing stuff to marginally increase the number of paying customers. (And you know, the hell with the rest of us!) The more each site tries to create its own little walled garden, the less valuable the open web becomes.
I suspect this has gotten more common lately because of privacy concerns. See, a change to EU privacy laws means it’s not as easy to track users around the web; Apple’s privacy initiatives on its phone similarly make this harder. In the case of publishers, I assume the company is trying to create a richer ad profile for me to better compete with Facebook and Google. Plus, you know, maybe they can sell my email as part of a targeted marketing list. So what we’re looking at here is creating a worse user experience in order to pursue a variety of scummy money-making schemes.
And that sucks because there are no real public spaces on the internet. Here in reality, I can fuck off to a park and hug a tree and sit on a bench and do stuff without ads, without anyone trying to track me, and without having to pay a dime. There was a time within my memory when people tried to make websites feel like semipublic places — you could hang out on someone’s cool blog and enjoy yourself. Sure, there might be a banner ad, but that’s like paying a buck for coffee and then just sitting in a diner all day with free refills.
The semipermeable paywall? I understand that. Shit, if I’m reading more than 10 of your articles a month, I probably should subscribe. Fair’s fair, and writers have to eat just like everyone else. But I’m starting to feel like I’m being strip-mined for data, and for what? Google already has access to my email. Why on earth does it need more of my information? How much more of my life does this behemoth want to surveil?
I don’t know, man. I was on the internet in the 1990s, and I remember when people just made stuff for fun — as a gift to other people. It seems like there’s less and less of that spirit remaining, and it’s why the internet sucks now. It’s why I have to append “reddit” to my Google searches to avoid getting SEO glurge — the for-profit stuff drowns out everything else. It’s why people are using DALL-E for newsletter header images to make sure their newsletter gets a bigger card in a social media feed — because it doesn’t matter what the image looks like as long as it exists. It’s why people intentionally put errors in their TikToks to juice engagement — because all the people commenting to tell you you’re wrong boost you in the algorithm. This is the bad place!
I’d like to believe we’re better than this, that it’s still possible to make weird, beautiful stuff online and find an audience without doing the scummy marketing grotesquerie. But realistically, it’s a matter of time before I beat someone to death with a copy of Lewis Hyde’s The Gift because they’ve let slip in casual conversation that they made all their money by making the web worse. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some grass to go touch.
Rivian Lost $6.8 Billion Last Year as Production Fell Short
The maker of electric trucks said it expected to double production in 2023 as the supply of parts became more reliable.
The maker of electric trucks said it expected to double production in 2023 as the supply of parts became more reliable.