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Why can’t I subscribe to quality local NZ media?

I would pay for local, digital news, but there are no easy ways to do that. Why is it so hard?

I live in New Zealand where we have two large national newspaper brands: the New Zealand Herald and Stuff.co.nz. (side note: these brands are actually trying to merge at the moment). 

I subscribe to the New York Times, but if I want to support a local paper I have unsatisfactory options. Neither of the big NZ brands offer digital subscriptions. Beyond giving local papers ad impressions, the only way to support them is to buy a physical newspaper subscription! Continue reading “Why can’t I subscribe to quality local NZ media?”

Uber becomes (more) legal in NZ

The Land Transport Amendment Bill (No 2) passed its third and final reading in Parliament on 4 August. One of the changes it makes are to ‘small passenger’ service regulations (i.e. taxis). The new rules are expected to come into force on 1 October 2017.

Here are some different perspectives on the change. Continue reading “Uber becomes (more) legal in NZ”

The death of the (official) Ubuntu phone OS

You may recall I bought a Meizu Pro 5 Ubuntu Edition phone from China in June 2016. I wrote up a review here.

Unfortunately Canonical (the company which leads the Ubuntu project) announced they were ceasing development of the Ubuntu phone OS in April this year. (See also this Ars Technica article here.)

Mark Shuttlesworth, the Ubuntu founder, wrote in the announcement that he had high hopes for the Ubuntu mobile OS project, but it never took off: Continue reading “The death of the (official) Ubuntu phone OS”

Briefly: the outsized role of the US in historical emissions

From the New York Times:

The New York Times asked Climate Interactive to calculate when Americans would have run out of fossil fuel if the nation’s population had somehow, at the beginning of the industrial era, been allocated a share equal to those of the rest of the world’s people. The calculation was premised on limiting emissions enough to meet international climate goals.

The answer: Americans would have used up their quota in 1944, the year the Allied armies stormed the beaches of Normandy.

The future of Scoop.co.nz

Screenshot from 2017-05-07 19-04-37

I’ve been meaning for a while to put down in writing my thoughts on Scoop.co.nz. What follows is hopefully constructive criticism.

What is Scoop?

Scoop calls itself an “independent news website” but it’s fundamentally a big collection of press releases. It’s been collecting them since 1999 — mostly from New Zealand — and now has a huge number of historical press releases. The fact that it has all these press releases in one place is really useful. As organisations and companies change their websites these press releases often go missing — so it’s great from a research perspective to have them collated in one place.

Recently Scoop has run into financial problems (seemingly mostly because of the collapsing market for advertising) and has been repeatedly crowdfunding to stay afloat. It has also been transitioning from a “for-profit” company (although losing money) to a non-profit member organisation. Part of this shift involves the Scoop Foundation offering grants for investigate journalism.

Scoop has also introduced what it calls an “ethical paywall”. Basically if you’re a commercial user Scoop expects you to pay for using the website, although there’s no actual paywall stopping you from looking at the content. This strategy seems to have been pretty successful based on the number of organisations paying for a licence.

The website is terrible!

If you go to Scoop.co.nz you’ll see straight away that it has a terrible website. (It’s straight out of the mid 2000s. In fact if you look at a 2006 version of the site, it doesn’t look that different.) There’s far too much going on — too many columns of different content and an overly comprehensive navigation system at the top.

I know Scoop is well aware of this website problem. They have taken the good step of introducing a beta mobile website, but the main website remains seemingly frozen in time.

[Update 13 May — see bottom of the post for details of the new website]

Continue reading “The future of Scoop.co.nz”

Briefly: What’s the value of a free service?

At the New York Times, Patricia Cohen has written an interesting piece on how economic growth measures (e.g. Gross Domestic Product, or GDP) aren’t great at measuring some parts of the economy.

That’s because a country’s GDP doesn’t include goods or services which are ‘free’. For instance, a mother or father who doesn’t work and looks after their kid doesn’t add a dollar to GDP because they aren’t being paid — but they’re performing an immensely valuable service.

Another — increasingly important — GDP blackhole is free digital services:

The growing suspicion, however, is that in a digital world overflowing with free services like Facebook, Google and YouTube, price is an increasingly ill-suited proxy for value.

What is the worth of a free software update that protects against a nasty virus? Of the streaming service that enables you to watch shows on your computer instead of on a television? Of the hours and hours saved by looking up a fact on Wikipedia rather than having to go to a library? All have productive value but no price.

I’ve thought about this problem in relation to free/open source software too. The more people who are using open source software, the lower GDP goes, even if the user is happier than if they’d paid for propriety software.

A few simple tips to protect your privacy online

We all know we’re being tracked when we’re on the web, but what can we do about it?

Tip 1: install the Privacy Badger extension

Tracking protection is a must have. As I’ve written before:

Although I feel too guilty about using an ad blocker on the web, on the basis that it deprives websites of advertising revenue, I feel quite within my rights to use tracking protection. The message I’m sending to advertisers and websites is that “you can show me advertising, as long as it’s not creepy!”. Once you activate the feature it’s amazing how many ads are blocked.

I won’t get into it in this post, but there are many reasons why advertisers and others using creepy tracking technology to follow your every movement on the web is a really bad idea. If you want to know more, I suggest you have a look at Don Marti’s blog.

The Electronic Freedom Foundation makes this nifty extension called privacy badger for Firefox and Chrome. It sits in the background while you’re browsing and blocks dodgy domains from tracking you around the web.

It can sometimes break websites (things won’t finish loading), but if that ever happens you can easily turn off tracking protection temporarily (or you can switch browsers temporarily).

Tip 2: use DuckDuckGo search instead of Google search

Duck Duck Go is a privacy-centric search engine, which doesn’t track you around the web.

It works well, but not quite as well as Google. I recommend specifying your country in the settings which helps it work much better.

It has a few cool features like ‘bangs‘, which allows you to search other sites from DuckDuckGo. For instance, “!w Beyonce” (without the speech marks) would search Beyonce on Wikipedia, and “!gi cute cats” would search Google images for cute cats.

Tip 3: use Mozilla Firefox instead of Google Chrome

Firefox is my favourite browser (you can read more about why here.)

In short, Firefox is backed by a non-profit organisation which cares about your privacy, rather than a profit-driven company who has an interest in tracking you all around the web (I’m looking at you Google!).

Tip 4: turn off third-party cookies

This will stop every website you go to loading you up with a whole lot of useless cookies from every man and his dog.

In Firefox: open Preferences > Privacy > History. Change the setting from “Remember” to “Use custom settings for history”. Change accept third party cookies to “never”.

In Chrome: open Settings > Show advanced settings (at the bottom) > Privacy > Content settings > check the box which says “Block third-party cookies and site data”.

 

What are Facebook’s responsibilities as an information gatekeeper?

By Oliviu Stoian, RO (CC-BY)
By Oliviu Stoian, RO (CC-BY)

I’ve previously written about how Facebook is a sort of quasi monopolistic utility. Part of Facebook’s status as a dominant player is that it has a huge rule in determining what news people see. A few developments in the past few months have raised interesting questions about how Facebook deals with its role as an information gatekeeper.

Humans = bad, robots = good

You have read a while ago that Facebook was in trouble for supposedly showing a left-wing bias in an obscure part of its platform which was curated by human employees. This was not the main newsfeed but a small section called ‘Trending Topics’. In response to the controversy, Facebook switched from having humans curate the topics to using a supposedly more neutral and fundamentally workable algorithm (in other words moving to a newsfeed-like model). Continue reading “What are Facebook’s responsibilities as an information gatekeeper?”

More battles in the regulatory war between Uber and the Government

It’s been interesting to watch ongoing developments in the regulation of ‘small passenger services’ in New Zealand. The Government has conducted a review of the sector, but that doesn’t seem to have calmed the waters at all.

In March, Uber launched in Christchurch (expanding from Auckland and Wellington). The taxi industry wasn’t pleased, particularly given Uber said it was launching with a different set of rules to taxis.

In April, Uber dropped its fares in Auckland and Wellington, and also announced that it was relaxing the rules for driver registration. Uber said it would no longer require a “P” endorsement before allowing its drivers on the road — instead they would get a criminal background check from the Ministry of Justice and an NZTA driving history check. The Transport Minister Simon Bridges and the NZTA responded by saying Uber’s new practice was illegal. Continue reading “More battles in the regulatory war between Uber and the Government”