Linked List: July 9, 2015

Thursday, 9 July 2015

Glenn Fleishman, writing for Macworld:

No matter your feelings about ads, it’s reasonable to be worried about and want to block sites that have no business — literally, it’s none of their business — tracking you, and to be angry at those feeding us malicious software and trying to coax our secrets from us. Some balance would be nice. Without it, readers will continue to take matters in their own hands.

Thomas Piketty: ‘Germany Has Never Repaid Its Debts. It Has No Right to Lecture Greece’ ★

Economist Thomas Piketty, in an interview with Die Zeit:

Piketty: When I hear the Germans say that they maintain a very moral stance about debt and strongly believe that debts must be repaid, then I think: what a huge joke! Germany is the country that has never repaid its debts. It has no standing to lecture other nations. [...]

ZEIT: Many Germans believe that the Greeks still have not recognized their mistakes and want to continue their free-spending ways.

Piketty: If we had told you Germans in the 1950s that you have not properly recognized your failures, you would still be repaying your debts. Luckily, we were more intelligent than that.

Rene Ritchie on Bad Web Ads ★

Rene Ritchie:

We also have no ability to screen ad exchange ads ahead of time; we get what they give us. We can and have set policies, for example, to disallow autoplay video or audio ads. But we get them anyway, even from Google. Whether advertisers make mistakes or try to sneak around the restrictions and don’t get caught, we can’t tell. It happens, though, all the time.

When bad ads appear, we report them and ask that they be disabled. Since different people in different geographies see different ads, it can be a challenge to identify them, and it can take a while to get them pulled. It’s a horrible process for everyone involved.

It’s so bad, our tech team has been exploring their own “bad ads” extension that would identify any resource-heavy ads that violate our policies, and provide us with better information so the ad network can more easily find and kill them. And yes, we’re well aware of how insane that sounds.

Open and honest. I deeply appreciate that Rene and iMore (and Mobile Nations as a whole company) are facing this head-on.

To me, it’s a classic example of a slippery slope. They never should have started with these black box ad exchanges in the first place, but now, years down the road, they find themselves dependent on the revenue from them, with no obvious replacement in sight.

This, to me, exemplifies what’s wrong with the online ad industry:

Just as desktop ads pay far less than old-fashioned print ads, mobile ads pay far less than desktop. Because phone displays are smaller than desktop, ads are also far harder to ignore. They’re not off to the side or a small strip on a big screen. They’re in our faces and in our way.

As more and more people move to mobile, revenue goes down, and the typical response is to amp up the ads in an attempt to mitigate the loss. That, of course, just makes them even more annoying.

Because there is less screen space, and because attention is more focused on mobile devices, mobile ads should cost as much or more than desktop ads. Certainly not less. The industry is fucked up. Exclusivity has tremendous value.

Three Takeaways for Web Developers After Two Weeks of Painfully Slow Internet ★

Gabor Lenard:

When we went to Hungary during the Christmas period last year I bought a 1GB data plan on a prepaid card. However, soon after I went online with my laptop the entire data allowance was used up. Strangely, I wasn’t able to add another data package. Instead, T-Mobile limited my internet access to 32kbps till the end of the month.

Since there was no easy way to fix it and I had nothing critical to do I decided to embrace the situation as an opportunity to understand how it feels to be on a slow network most of the time. I had already started reading the book Responsible Responsive Design at that time anyway so I was curious.

I learned a lot from this first-hand experience. [...] Here’s the three most important things that I became aware of during this time as a web developer.

(Via Eric Meyer.)

Clippers Have a DeAndre Jordan Commitment as Mavs Move to Other Options ★

Exactly as I expected, Steve Ballmer is turning into an outstanding pro sports team owner. This is such a great story.