Magazine Piracy

[Krakrok]

This is hilarious. What's even worse is I would probably read magazines again if they were available like this. I browsed a couple on there that I would never buy in a million years. Don't magazines make 90% (random number) of their money from ads? The problem would be tracking the number of readers so they can report them to advertisers.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080815/ap_on_hi_te/magazines_online_piracy_2

[schild]

Thanks for the link!

[Oban]

Would never have found this site without the article, thank you.

[Trippy]

Linky no worky (there's no DNS for it).

[schild]

Type in www.

[Trippy]

It's like the 90s all over again...

[schild]

It's like the 90s all over again...

I know, rite.

[angry.bob]

Wow, welcome to the same stuff you could have been getting off USENET for the last 15 years. At least it's not torrents...

[Oban]

What is USENET?

[Der Helm]

What is USENET?

4chan with ASCII Porn goatse.cx.

[schild]

Wow, welcome to the same stuff you could have been getting off USENET for the last 15 years. At least it's not torrents...

Usenet isn't one hundredth as easy as this site. In fact, MyGazines or whatever it's called is the best implementation I've seen of reading something online, period.

[Oban]

[FatuousTwat]

No Hustler or Penthouse? 

[Krakrok]

You have to make an account to turn off the family filter. I didn't make an account.

Is it easier than Scribd? You can send them your crap and they will scan it for you (see: http://www.scribd.com/paper ).

Example:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/2403061/195803DesertMagazine1958March
(You have to click the iPaper down arrow and select View Mode Book Mode to make it like Mygazines)

[Arnold]

This is hilarious. What's even worse is I would probably read magazines again if they were available like this. I browsed a couple on there that I would never buy in a million years. Don't magazines make 90% (random number) of their money from ads? The problem would be tracking the number of readers so they can report them to advertisers.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080815/ap_on_hi_te/magazines_online_piracy_2

Man, I used to buy multiple guitar magazines EVERY month.  Then they got to the point where there were 10 pages of ads before any content, and an ad every other page... AND they all got to be $6-7 a pop.

Add to that, after reading so many genre magazines for so long, I kept seeing the same articles and topics getting repeated every year, and the fact that the interview were utter, shallow crap, I just stopped buying them.

FUCK YOU, GUITAR (formerly GFTPM, when it was GOOD)
FUCK YOU, GUITAR WORLD (was kinda good, for like 5 minutes)
FUCK YOU, GUITAR PLAYER (still kinda good, but overpriced)

[Trippy]

Okay so I poked around on the site (for research purposes-only, of course) to see what the heck the site is about. According to this article the creator of the site supposedly wants to work with the industry, somehow:

http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=1&storycode=41842&c=1

The site itself actually does make somewhat of an attempt to prevent "offline" reading -- i.e. somebody downloading an entire magazine and reading it through something other than a Web browser. They do this by using a full-screen Flash app as the reader UI and by disabling various browser features like hiding the menu bar (and no it's not easy to turn it back on, I tried) making it difficult to figure out what they are doing behind the scenes from within the browser itself. This might be enough to prevent people that don't know HTTP well enough to keep them from saving a local copy of the magazine except by brute force methods (e.g. making screen caps of the pages), at least until tools are made publically available to "rip" content from the site easily (methodology described below).

However instead of writing (or borrowing) their own data streaming protocol to send the image bits to the Flash reader in some sort of obfuscated format they are actually just making regular HTTP calls to JPG files. So if you can capture the headers of those requests (excerise left to the reader ) you can then just make a request to that URL and bring up the image sans Flash reader garbage. And in fact there's no security in place on those image files (even though you do need to login to view certain things through the Flash reader, *cough*) so you can use batch HTTP tools to pull down the images you want without having to worry about usernames/passwords, cookies, and stuff like that.

[Krakrok]

Smith said that with the co-operation of the publishers the site can “transition into the final revenue model”, although he said he could not reveal the full concept of this as he is saving it for the publishers directly.

The final revenue model is that they would replace the ad pages with ad pages that load dynamically from publishers websites or from an ad system where publishers can control the ads. That would let them track readers.

[HaemishM]

Magazines that don't offer their content online already with ads embedded in the text deserve to be pirated then killed. Some things are too stupid to live.

[FatuousTwat]

It's not loading for me anymore, might be gone already.

[Trippy]

Nope, it's still up.