Re How NY Times Is Deepening Our Cultural Echo Chambers

["Dave Farber" <dave () farber net>]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: John Gilmore <gnu () toad com>
Date: Thu, Jan 12, 2017 at 9:17 PM
Subject: Re: [IP] How NY Times Is Deepening Our Cultural Echo Chambers
To: <dave () farber net>, <gnu () toad com>


> How Netflix Is Deepening Our Cultural Echo Chambers

> By Farhad Manjoo

>
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/11/technology/how-netflix-is-deepening-our-cultural-echo-chambers.html



Yep, and how the New York Times is deepening our cultural echo chambers,

too.



People who configure their browser not to accept and return cookies

(who won't agree to be tracked and surveiled) can't usefully follow

links to nytimes.com (like the one above).  All we get is a page that

demands that we "log in".



I hear that people who'll take cookies can see a few articles -- and

then the Times cuts them off too, unless they will send in a credit

card number that will both deliver money AND definitively identify

them to the Times.



I see a NY Times on paper at some friend's house or newsstand every

few weeks.  I seldom pick it up, I'm usually busy doing something

else.  When people send me nytimes.com links, I ignore them; the Times

has carefully trained me, over and over, to know that they won't work.



The "paper of record" has become the paper of surveillance.  To whom

are they selling the information about exactly who's reading which

articles, in which order, when, from where?  I bet there's real money

in finding out which regulators are reading about which industries;

about which corporate lawyers are reading about which merger targets;

which patent lawyers are looking at what kinds of prior art; and

thousands of other niches.



Until last week, all the intelligence agencies in the world must have

been scooping all that info up, since the Times didn't bother to

encrypt its website until just now.  (And even today's best website

encryption will not stop a dedicated agency, which can watch the

sizes and patterns of accesses to nytimes.com to figure out with high

likelihood which articles the reader is accessing.)



Thankfully it isn't "mass surveillance" -- only because the masses

aren't allowed to read the site!  Besides, mass surveillance on people

who go to open web sites is Google's business model.  The Times is

ill equipped to compete with Google, which has managed to convince

everyone that they're Santa Claus, while quietly behaving like NSA.



Congratulations, NY Times, you are surviving -- but you are only

reaching the subset of people who already agree with you enough to pay

you.  You have created your own little echo chamber.



        John



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