rewrew

Ha! Well done.

But none of that matters if the publishers can't make money off the distribution -- and most of these deals simply don't allow for that. Apple made some changes recently but it's still not enough, and considering that many B2B sites still can make very good money with direct sales, there's very little incentive to participate.

It's kind of like those sites who want journalists to write for them for "exposure" (or ask photogs to use their photos, or artists to use their art, etc. without paying)-- sure, maybe millions more eyeballs see your writing, but you're making nothing off of it and just hoping you'll get something down the road. Meanwhile, the smart writers are taking gigs that maybe only a few thousand will read but they will get paid reasonable rates (and sometimes very good money) every time.

Not to say that many B2B publishers won't participate, but it'll be at a smaller scale and, I think, always with an eye on the trade-offs, which, again, aren't so great right now.

It gets worse the deeper you get into the article -- they're paying "Christmas Bonuses" instead of their bond payments-- they know they can't pay for any of this and they appear not to care.

That is interesting. What about languages other than English? Any idea about the avg. word count needed to learn them? (Used on TV does seem like a good benchmark for "learned). Or is it roughly the same for every language, do you think?

Or no one in Microsoft feels free to speak up when they see a bad idea coming down the road so something like this just sails through instead of getting flagged. I've seen it -- not this big of scale, but I've seen it.

Yeah, I think them calling it a "vulnerability" makes the entire post seem disingenuous.

Yup, and they've been called out on it, too, by others in the government even: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/03/former-cyber-czar...

Last week the former US "cyber czar" Richard Clarke called the FBI out directly for doing it solely for legal precedent, and stated that virtually no one even in the gov't were on their side: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/03/former-cyber-czar... >>Clarke noted that Comey and the Justice Department were not getting support in their case from the defense and intelligence communities. "The Justice Department and the FBI are on their own here," he said. "The FBI director [Comey] is exaggerating the need for this, and the Attorney General [Loretta Lynch] is letting him get away with it."<<

But the weird thing is that, from the beginning, most legal experts thought the likely outcome would be that All Writs would be found too broad, so the FBI had to have been suffering from some hubris + bad legal council. So maybe someone with enough muscle finally called them out on it?

A lot of this has to do with these sites using ad networks instead of/along with selling ads directly. Ad networks are very common with consumer sites, but many B2B sites don't use any at all. When you work directly with the agency or company (and you know they're a real agency or company), this doesn't happen.

And they were ready months in advance, too.