Ads that pop up on your screen and won’t close, audio and video ads that play automatically, ads that pop up when you mouse over text, ads masquerading as news: Websites have become a minefield.
In a refreshing change, Google has announced that in 2018, it will end nonskippable 30-second ads that appear before a YouTube video, known as pre-roll ads. “We’re committed to providing a better ads experience for users online,” Google said. Some browsers such as Safari and Chrome have added a way to shut off audio from an individual tab even if you are not on that page.
TechMan has long thought that one of the reasons internet advertising is not as successful as it could be is the idea that the way to gain a customer’s attention is to grab it and then hold it hostage. What about better, more informative ads? Take a lesson from the Super Bowl, where some people tune in just to see the ads.
Could they pay in bitcoin? Bill Gates, former head of Microsoft, has put forth the idea that robots that take human jobs should pay their share in taxes.
“Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed ...,” Mr. Gates said in an interview with Quartz’s editor-in-chief Kevin Delaney. “If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you’d think that we’d tax the robot at a similar level.”
The tax money could come from the savings that companies get from not having to pay human workers, or from a tax on the robot companies themselves, Mr. Gates said.
Hand over the tweetgun. U.S. Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., sent a letter co-signed by 14 other members of Congress to the House Oversight Committee requesting an investigation into President Donald Trump’s phone and general cybersecurity practices. Mr. Trump has refused to drop his older Samsung S3 in favor of the standard secured phone. That’s a huge security problem, since conventional phones are vulnerable to any number of outside attacks, according to theverge.com.
Aliens dropped my call. When your phone crashes or freezes, do you curse the manufacturer? Maybe you should direct your frustration to outer space, says Bharat Bhuva from Vanderbilt University. In a recent paper, he said the cause could be the “impact of electrically charged particles generated by cosmic rays that originate outside the solar system.” Mr. Bhuva said millions of invisible, subatomic particles that flow through Earth can alter bits of data stored in the memories of electronic devices, causing a problem, according to the International Business Times.
Free the FM. You may not know that your smartphone comes with an FM radio receiver built in and some manufacturers don’t activate it. New FCC chairman Ajit Pai last week urged phone makers to switch on the FM chip to allow users to save on data usage and get emergency alerts in a crisis, such as when internet networks go down. But the FCC can’t require it.
Send comments, contributions, corrections and condemnations to pgtechtexts@gmail.com
First Published: February 21, 2017, 5:00 a.m.
