Articles tagged as "web"

Last week, I received an ominous email with the subject line “Notification of Account Removal” from a company that I get podcasts from. “This is a note to alert you that your account has been removed, if you believe this action was taken in error, please contact us at this address”. My first thought was phishing, but this was also the second time I had received an email like this from this company. Something that I was doing was mistakenly triggering an automated system to flag the account (besides using an email alias, I cannot possibly think what else it would be). While I would have been okay just letting the account close, I was also curious if the support agent would have an explanation, and I was a little bit upset at the insinuation that I was doing something wrong. If I was doing something improperly, I also wanted to know so that I could correct it and stop causing them problems. After going through the process, no explanation was given, and instead of having the ability to restore the account, they just unlocked the email so that I could start fresh. In this instance, not a big deal, but if that account was actually important (on the level of an Apple ID or Google account for most people) I would have been pretty upset. It was a harsh lesson that we don’t actually control some of the biggest parts of our digital lives.

This week, the Wall Street Journal reported that both CNN and Reuters are moving to put paywalls in front of their content. Ironically, you probably won’t be able to read that article unless you are a subscriber to the WSJ. Quality news isn’t getting harder to find, but it is getting harder to afford. The cause of this isn’t a single factor, rather a blend of social phenomenal that are all colliding to form the state of the web in 2024. Advertising revenue, while not flat, is dependent on eyeballs on pages. With the introduction of better large language models, copycat sites have begun to spring up, rewriting stories via chatbots. These are next to impossible for news outlets to chase down, and can flood search results to drown out real stories. News outlets are increasingly requiring accounts to read free content, in an effort to avoid this, however they still have to compete with fresh content generated from scratch. It is a hard time to be a journalist, at a time when the work they do should be valued more than ever in a rapidly changing world.

Links are the primary way we navigate the internet. With just a simple string of characters I can point you to specific resource on another server that I think you should check out for one reason or another. This can be incredibly useful for citations, in which researchers want to include many articles worth of knowledge to support their claims, but cannot fit all that text within their own article. These get included at the end of the article, in the References section, and historically they would have included metadata to allow someone to go find a physical resource in a library. In the digital age it is now common and expected to digitally link to the location of the resource on the internet. It is vital that the link placed in the references stays stable and resolveable, because once published scientific papers usually aren’t edited unless there is a necessary revision or retraction. So, what defines these “permalinks”, and are they really as stable as we think?

Universal Resource Locator (URL) shorteners have been around since the early 2000’s[1]. A URL shortener takes an otherwise ugly hyperlink and converts it to something short and catchy. This can be helpful if users have to manually type in an address, such as from a PowerPoint presentation, or if the number of characters are limited (such as on an advertisement). However, they also normalize following links where we have no idea what is on the other end. Additionally, using a URL shortening service means that critical communication can be out of the control of the original organization. Here I’ll outline the benefits and pitfalls of URL shortening (as I see them) and why I ultimately don’t see why they are worth it.

Ads are annoying – that is as true now as it was five years ago. According to a report by Blockthrough and Eyeo[1], usage of adblockers is on the rise, growing at a rate of approximately 30% per year. With just under a billion people estimated to be using adblockers of some kind, advertisers are beginning to take note, and browsers like Google Chrome are beginning to limit the ability of adblocking extensions to work effectively. This means that ads may begin to again have the upper hand, and that can have terrible effects on how people browse the modern web. There is a point at which ads begin to completely take over a site, and affect the safety of the user, and here I will outline a couple of sites in which this is the case.