Tag: beschizza

Adblock Plus now selling ads

Adblock Plus is to begin reselling the ads it blocks, replacing websites’ original ads with ones under its control—and which it takes a fat cut of the revenue from. The program is meant to be friendly to publishers — it is, after all, letting them display some ads instead of none whatsoever. But there’s still obvious reason for publishers to be unhappy. Acceptable ads [AdBlock Plus’ in-house advertising] are likely to be less valuable than the ads a publisher could otherwise display, limiting what a website can earn. And in setting up its own marketplace, Adblock Plus continues to position itself as a gatekeeper charging a toll to get through a gate of its own making. This was always the gameplan. AdBlock Plus marketed itself as about blocking ads, but it’s really about providing a temporary improvement in user experience to convince readers to insert it as a middleman between them, publishers and advertisers. Once secure, AdBlock Plus can let advertising (and the user experience) creep back to the profitable way it was before, but with it charging rent to everyone. If you block ads, at least block them with something that isn’t taking a shit on both of us: get rid of it and try uBlock Origin . If you don’t like ads but would like to support Boing Boing, buy a t-shirt or an inexpensive gadget from our store. Correction : an earlier version of this post referred to AdBlock Plus as AdBlock. They are different products from different vendors.

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Adblock Plus now selling ads

Mystery magic spells, etched on gold, unearthed in Serbia

Buried nearly 2,000 years ago in Serbia, rolls of gold and silver etched with “magic spells” are baffling archaologists. Reuters reports on a “Middle Eastern mystery” unearthed at the site of an ancient Roman city. “We read the names of a few demons, that are connected to the territory of modern-day Syria,” archaeologist Ilija Dankovic said at the dig, as more skeletons from the 4th century A.D. were being uncovered. The fragile, golden and silver scrolls – which once unrolled look like rectangles of foil similar in size to a sweet wrapper – may never be fully understood. They are the first such items discovered in Serbia but resemble amulets of “binding magic” found in other countries, Dankovic said. Very Pazuzu , isn’t it?

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Mystery magic spells, etched on gold, unearthed in Serbia

Vast collection of Amiga games, demos and software uploaded to Internet Archive

The world’s first psychedelic computer enters the universal library. And it all runs in the browser, meaning you’ll never have to hunt for Workbench disk images again.

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Vast collection of Amiga games, demos and software uploaded to Internet Archive

Kickass Torrents returns after a whole day offline

A day after an expensive, multinational police effort to remove KickAssTorrents from the net culminated in the arrest of its founder and the confiscation of its domains, the inevitable happened . It’s back online. This morning the founder of kat.cr was arrested in Poland. It is another attack on freedom of rights of internet users globally. We think it’s our duty not to stand aside but to fight back supporting our rights. In the world of regular terrorist attacks where global corporations are flooded with money while millions are dying of diseases and hunger, do you really think that torrents deserve so much attention? Do you really think this fight worth the money and resources spent on it? Do you really think it’s the real issue to care of right now? We don’t! You don’t have to believe the rhetoric to understand how futile it is trying to push cybertoothpaste back in the cyberbottle. Effectively, all the attempt did here was turn an underground piracy site into a mainstream phenomenon, its mirrors linked to by every major news site on the internet.

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Kickass Torrents returns after a whole day offline

China’s comment army posted 488m things last year

The Chinese government’s comment army generates nearly half a billion comments a year on apps and social networks, doing all it can to sway opinion in favor of the party. The vast message-managing operation spans the globe, reports Paul Mozur. The common belief that they are paid 50 cents per post leads people in China to call them the Fifty Cent Party. A new study says those people are closer to the government than previously thought. The study, from researchers at Harvard University, says the legions of online commenters are not all freelancers paid by the post. In fact, it says that most are government employees, preaching the principles of the Chinese Communist Party on social media while carrying out their jobs in the local tax bureau or at a county government office. The key technique is distraction — don’t rebut, change the subject — all driven by a growing belief among authorities that direct censorship is too crude and obvious.

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China’s comment army posted 488m things last year

Radiooooo: Pick a country, pick a decade, and listen to the popular music of the era

Radiooooo lets you pick a decade and a country, and will dispense popular music created then and there. (Note the “weird” option, disabled by default.) Thanks to this, I rediscovered Blue Boy’s Remember Me (UK, 1990s, fast, weird), which remixes Marlena Shaw’s Woman of the Ghetto into something very different. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKKNPLowteY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMOGy3MXQSA

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Radiooooo: Pick a country, pick a decade, and listen to the popular music of the era

Rare Shakespeare’s First Folio found in Scottish isle

A rare copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio turned up on a Scottish island, reports the BBC . Only 230 copies are known to exist, or thereabouts, and the last to be sold fetched £3.5m (about $5m) in 2003 and £2.8m in 2006. Countless fakes are knocking around, too. This copy of the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays, published in 1623, was found at Mount Stuart House on the Isle of Bute. Academics who authenticated the book called it a rare and significant find. … Emma Smith, professor of Shakespeare studies at Oxford University, said her first reaction on being told the stately home was claiming to have an original First Folio was: “Like hell they have.” But when she inspected the three-volume book she found it was authentic. The folio represents the first legitimate compendium of Shakespeare’s work; we wouldn’t have much of Macbeth were it not for its publication, among many other works preserved in it.

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Rare Shakespeare’s First Folio found in Scottish isle

Google launches worst corporate April Fools joke ever, quickly takes it down

For April Fools, Google rearranged Gmail’s UI to replace the normal send button with one that attaches a Minions(TM) Mic Drop GIF animation to outgoing email . “Today, Gmail is making it easier to have the last word on any email with Mic Drop. Simply reply to any email using the new ‘Send + Mic Drop’ button. Everyone will get your message, but that’s the last you’ll ever hear about it. Yes, even if folks try to respond, you won’t see it,” Google explained when it launched the button on April 1. Unfortunately, this resulted in things like this: https://twitter.com/waxpancake/status/715752594551869440 Google quickly realized what it had done and turned it off… Well, it looks like we pranked ourselves this year.

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Google launches worst corporate April Fools joke ever, quickly takes it down

China’s military camo looks like Minecraft

The BBC reports on China’s use of a “digital camo” —a pixelated look believed to offer superior concealment than traditional patterns—so exaggerated it resembles the video game Minecraft. (The United States deployed a less aggressive digital camo , but is phasing it out. )

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China’s military camo looks like Minecraft

Long-lost H.P. Lovecraft manuscrupt found

The Cancer of Superstition , a non-fiction treatise commissioned from author H.P. Lovecraft, was found in a memorabilia collection in a defunct magic shop . Magician Harry Houdini asked Lovecraft to ghostwrite the text for a book project, but died shortly thereafter. Now it goes to auction. The collection bounced around after Beatrice Houdini’s death in 1943 and was never truly catalogued or ‘mined’ in all that time. The papers were never researched or inventoried,” said Potter & Potter president Gabe Fajuri. “In all that time, no one seemed to realise the significance of the manuscript.” Fajuri said the collection was recently bought privately, and when “the new owner began sorting through the mountain of paperwork, he began putting the pieces together, and in the process discovered the manuscript and its significance” From the excerpts, it sounds exactly as you’d imagine a Lovecraft text about superstition to sound (‘superstition is an “inborn inclination” that “persists only through mental indolence”’ etc). There is some debate over the authorship, with S.T. Joshi identifying CM Eddy. If you want it, expect to pay $25,000-$40,000 for it.

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Long-lost H.P. Lovecraft manuscrupt found