$1 a month subscription to Luminous Landscapes

[ChrisLivsey]

They take paypal.

That offers me, and I would suggest you also, no reassurance at all.
My PayPal account was hacked by clever, sophisticated people who were able to open two new bank accounts at widely separated geographical locations with fraudulent addresses with ease and no checks from PayPal. Certainly a lot easier for them to do that than for me to sort out the mess with PayPal.
Early and persistent intervention from me with limited support from PayPal prevented around £15,000 of fraud and I suffered no financial loss.
My PW by the way was mixture of upper and lowercase and numbers totally random.

 

[raid]

Where would we be without so many great websites on photography. What is wrong with charging $1/month? Someone has to cover the cost of running a website. Stephen happens to have also a business. Some websites do not have a business in place.

Be gracious.

 

[btgc]

How does that work? Ken's reviews print, just tried it.

Technically it works just as anything else. At the end of pages is request to pay $5 to have it legal.

 

[Jerevan]

I agree with the sentiment that people actually need to earn some money, either to make a living or just make the cost of running "the service" they provide a bit less costly.

Twenty-odd years of "information wants to be free" has turned a lot of stuff on its head.

 

[krötenblender]

Historically it is the new idea, that information should not be free.
Free information is actually the original idea. The origins of the internet just gave that very old idea a new boost for some time.

LULAs subscription model won't do too much about that. They can do, whatever they want with their site. But IMHO it it a very doubtable decision.

 

[Jerevan]

Yeah, but I never lived in the 16th century, so ... 😛

 

[krötenblender]

Science, culture and knowledge at all were built up by the paradigm of free information, not by disclosed one. So you still profit from this origin. I think, it would be better to stick with that as far as possible - and to give something back. Not money, but otherwise useful information in exchange.

I can understand, however, that the LULA-guys need to pay for the servers and bandwidth, and so need to get that money back, somehow.

 

[Larry Cloetta]

Historically it is the new idea, that information should not be free.
Free information is actually the original idea. The origins of the internet just gave that very old idea a new boost for some time.

Could you please document this bit of magical thinking wherein things which had actual and significant production costs associated with them, were universally given away for free, "historically"?

 

[krötenblender]

Could you please document this bit of magical thinking wherein things which had actual and significant production costs associated with them, were universally given away for free, "historically"?

Would you please pay for that information first?

 

[Larry Cloetta]

Would you please pay for that information first?

Am willing to pay for your nonexistent information with my nonexistent money.

 

[Darthfeeble]

Somehow absorbing the efforts of someone else's labor and resources and asking it for free rather heatedly isn't greedy?

 

[Darthfeeble]

Oh, and where do I pay my dollar?

 

[krötenblender]

Am willing to pay for your nonexistent information with my nonexistent money.

How about that deal: Since you don't believe me, you may take a bet with me. I give you links to some existing (surprisingly free) scientific papers about the subject, and you donate the one dollar discussed here to the open science project (and proof, that you have done so! http://www.openscience.org/blog/?page_id=45).

I can provide you with some links, I need to search them, however. Because when I studied computer science and had some classes about that subject, we were in the middle of the 90ies...

Deal?

 

[ChrisLivsey]

I am pretty shocked that Paypal would not notice and stop, such large movements of cash. My bank would have stopped it.

Firstly I have never used either PayPal or E-Bay on public WiFi my personal phone line was hacked to steal data. Attempts by both PayPal and E-Bay to contact me by phone, my e-mail was diverted, failed as they had placed a call diversion on my line to a false number. How they did that BT (our phone company) have yet to tell me and probably will not after speaking to a fairly high level person in the fraud and security dept. that facility has never been enabled on the line by BT. They physically checked the line for what is called a T ie a tap but it was clean at the time.

My E-bay was hacked as well and fake ads for £5,0000 Rolex watches placed.
It seems the fraud involved a "buyer" taking a buy it now then lodging a claim for non delivery. The payment going in by PayPal and straight out to their account set up by them, so no loss or gain for them then the claim for a non delivery refund being taken from my bank account to "repay" the false buyer.

To my eyes the Rolex auctions were obvious fakes but EBay did not take them down, many times I have reported clearly fraudulent Hasselblad H5D ads never thought my account would host a similar one!!
As I had not sold anything on Ebay for three years you may have thought their software would have flagged an issue when three Rolex £5,000 watches went on!!

You are perfectly correct that plain passwords are poor protection but my on line bank account was secure because they use a web page that only takes a random part of the password that changes each time and the order is different to log in and you can't opt to stay logged in or save the password. Paypal and Ebay both take full password each time and allow browsers to store them so much easier to hack.
They had ordered TVs as well and other goods on line using the Pay Pal account but all were blocked in time, you may think the delivery addresses would help tracking them but the volume of this kind of fraud is such that as in this case of no loss there are no resources to pursue them I was told.

Apologies for this long OT post but forewarned is forearmed.

 

[Larry Cloetta]

How about that deal: Since you don't believe me, you may take a bet with me. I give you links to some existing (surprisingly free) scientific papers about the subject, and you donate the one dollar discussed here to the open science project (and proof, that you have done so!).

I can provide you with some links, I need to search them, however. Because when I studied computer science and had some classes about that subject, we were in the middle of the 90ies...

Deal?

Always interested in what kind of counterfactuals people are under the sway of, so PM me with the links and I'll donate the dollar. Just nothing from Huffington Post, please. Happy to continue this outside the thread.

 

[krötenblender]

Always interested in what kind of counterfactuals people are under the sway of, so PM me with the links and I'll donate the dollar. Just nothing from Huffington Post, please. Happy to continue this outside the thread.

Done. Happy Reading.

 

[Eric T]

$1 per month for Luminous Landscaper is money well spent. I am a VERY satisfied subscriber. I have learned a great deal from it and I have no concern about how much money I can make from the knowledge gained.

 

[Baby of Macon]

I've paid my dollar. Print magazines in Ireland are about eight dollars a month so I don't think twelve dollars a year for access to a quality website is exorbitant.

 

[calebarchie]

Did some members from the Argumentative Photography Users Group flock over here while it's down? 😀

 

[uhoh7]

Obviously it's not alot of money and easy to see the motivation. But the hit count which drives other advertising is going to drop. Right or wrong, many people don't like paywalls.

I don't really go there much, but once in a while research does land in at an article or discussion.

It will be interesting to see how the idea plays out over the next year.