I'm suprosed no one has suggested paying people for advertising. If the Netscape folks would integrate digicash into Communicator, then I could program my browser to only send referer to sites that paid for the information, and rent cookie space. Want your cookie to live till 1999? Thats 24 months, at 50 cents per month...do you want to pay? These tools would allow users to set a value on their privacy, and get the money from advertisers. I know nothing encourages me to buy a product like getting cold hard cash from the maker. Adam Bill Stewart wrote: | >Of course there should be a toggle to allow users to turn off the | >referer field. I tried to get a recomendation to do this put into the | >spec. People then started shouting at me saying that it was impossible | >to enforce and so the recomendation shouldn't be there. | | Perhaps too much commercial advertising capability already depended on it? -- "It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -Hume

Steve wrote: | > If the Netscape folks would integrate digicash into Communicator, | > then I could program my browser to only send referer to sites that | > paid for the information, and rent cookie space. Want your cookie to | > live till 1999? Thats 24 months, at 50 cents per month...do you want | > to pay? | That would only work until someone abuses it. People could create web | robots to run around selling referers and several gigabytes of | worthless cookie space. Worthless, because nobody cares about the web | browsing habits of J. Random Robot, and they certainly don't want to | blow $50 e-bucks on the bot's repeated visits. Thats true, but can they avoid it? I'm considering writing a database pollution bot, which runs around, claiming to be Mozilla or IE, and randomly following a link once per minute. Why? Database pollution. If there are a few thousand of these randomly collecing links and creating arbitrary (or perhaps biased) viewing habbits in the databases of the advertisers, then their individual data becomes worth less. They'll need to actively solicit peoples permission to collect data before doing so, to avoid people polluting their databases. Similarly, putting a randomly generated email address in those sign up fields produces pollution in the data used by spammers, which costs them (and no one else) money. If you run your own site, you can even bit bucket the email, trading their bandwidth for yours, and making them think they're delivering more junk email than they are. Adam -- "It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -Hume

Eric Murray wrote: | User-Agent: Mozilla/3.0Gold (X11; U; Linux 6.6.6 i386) | In order to maximally fuck up stats, what should be put into | the windowing system/OS fields? It has to be something that | exists and is fairly common, so that its not able to be thrown out | by the stats-gathers. I could use "(X11; MVS; IBM MVS some version number)" | but that'd be easy to throw out, even though ports of X to MVS really did | exist. | | Maybe I'll just make every copy of Cookie Jar look like | it's running on Linux. I think you should rotate through a list, in case they're keeping track of it in conjunction with your other information. Thus, have the same cookies comeing from different user agents, say rotate between Rhapsody on PowerPC and Linux on an Alpha. Alternately, have it come from Internet Exploder on various UNIX boxes. (Unless thats now generally available.) Adam -- "It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -Hume

At 03:32 PM 4/20/97 -0500, Adam Shostack wrote:

Thats true, but can they avoid it? I'm considering writing a database pollution bot, which runs around, claiming to be Mozilla or IE, and randomly following a link once per minute. Why? Database pollution. If there are a few thousand of these randomly collecing links and creating arbitrary (or perhaps biased) viewing habbits in the databases of the advertisers, then their individual data becomes worth less. They'll need to actively solicit peoples permission to collect data before doing so, to avoid people polluting their databases.

Similarly, putting a randomly generated email address in those sign up fields produces pollution in the data used by spammers, which costs them (and no one else) money. If you run your own site, you can even bit bucket the email, trading their bandwidth for yours, and making them think they're delivering more junk email than they are.

You are forgetting to separate the marketers from the businesses being marketed here. While they're occasionally one and the same (see Cantor & Siegel), in today's world, the marketing is being handled by a third party (doubleclick). These marketers get paid by hit-count ratings: if they deliver the message to 1,000 browsers, they get some amount, say $15.00. If they deliver it to 100,000 browsers, they get $1500.00. They're not paid by the number of respondents, referred sales, or even valid e-mail addresses snarfed. So, you'd only be artifically inflating the cost of the marketers to the advertisers. Here, your hope is that the advertisers notice a diminishing ROI for marketing costs, but that's a big hope. The numbers for a small site might look something like this: January - 20,000 hits, 50 sales February - 22,000 hits, 60 sales March - 25,000 hits, 70 sales April - 50,000 hits, 90 sales <-- pollutionbot strikes 20,000 times So, you've watered it down a bit. To make the pollutionbot truly effective, you'd have to hit a site by at least 10x the general population strikes: May - 440,000 hits, 100 respondents <- pollutionbot strikes 400,000 times In the meantime, they're billing the business: Month Hits Sales Billing Cost/sale Pollutionbot hits/inflation January - 20,000 50 $300 $6.00 0 $0 February - 22,000 60 $330 $5.50 0 $0 March - 25,000 70 $375 $5.36 0 $0 April - 50,000 90 $750 $8.33 20,000 $300 May - 440,000 100 $6600 $66.00 400,000 $6000 Hopefully, the advertisers will pull out at this point. It's easy to see that something "bad" is happening, and that they're not getting the bang for the buck that they need. However, with some megasites (where they reportedly get 2,000,000+ hits per day) subscribing to doubleclick.com, it's doubtful you could make a noticable dent unless you started your attack from a T3 connected backbone site. And even then, are you sure you want to spend your resources this way? The marketers will also try to keep this sham up by saying to the businesses, "It's the Internet, who the hell knows? Keep going another month, it'll get better. In the meantime, just pay your bills." Even if you were successful at flooding doubleclick, many of their advertisers are Big: IBM, Micro$oft, HP, etc. They don't even care about direct responses, they're just after name recognition. Ultimately, it'll reduce the ability of Mom & Pop (or Cantor & Siegel) to advertise on the same playing field as Micro$oft. Doubleclick won't go broke; neither will Micro$oft. The only good hope you may have is of breaking a "mom & pop" version of doubleclick, and keeping the world less polluted. But, doubleclick will still be around and be able to move in and fill the void. What have you gained then? John -- J. Deters "Don't think of Windows programs as spaghetti code. Think of them as 'Long sticky pasta objects in OLE sauce'." +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ | NET: mailto:jad@dsddhc.com (work) mailto:jad@pclink.com (home) | | PSTN: 1 612 375 3116 (work) 1 612 894 8507 (home) | | ICBM: 44^58'36"N by 93^16'27"W Elev. ~=290m (work) | | For my public key, send mail with the exact subject line of: | | Subject: get pgp key | +--------------------------------------------------------------------+

Rachel Willmer wrote: | At 09:34 19/04/97 -0500, Adam Shostack wrote: | > I'm suprosed no one has suggested paying people for | >advertising. | | This is one of the more novel ideas that Digital have come up with for | Millicent. | | In return for allowing the advertiser to download their advert to you, you | get credited with an amount of scrip which is redeemable at their site. At their site? Feh. Thats a coupon, not money. I was cash. Cold, hard cash that I can spend on nifty toys. Otherwise, what good do all those Microsoft cookies do me? I accept your cookie, I get paid for it. If I don't buy your product, then, heck, get yourself better advertising, or a better product. Adam -- "Cash value 1/20th of a cent."