Items tagged with New York Times
Light a candle for the 300-word news bite. The New York Times has announced its initiative to produce an app for the soon-to-be-everywhere (or not) Apple Watch that will offer all the news you need when you need it, in the form of one-sentence stories that are curated by an editorial team dedicated to the task. The New York Times Apple Watch app — a free extension of the NYTimes on iPhone app — will provide news, accompanied by The Times's photography, from among many Times sections, including Business, Politics, Science, Tech, and The Arts. And readers who find a story to be worth more than just a cursory glance will be able to use Apple's Handoff feature...
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The New York Times’ website is having a rough month. Only a couple weeks after maintenance troubles caused several hours of downtime, the iconic paper has again experienced a major disruption. This time, the outage is clearly the result of an attack. The hacker group known as SyrianElectronicArmy claimed responsibility for the attack, as well as attacks on Twitter and The Huffington Post UK. The attack took place Tuesday afternoon, knocking out the site for readers. As a precaution, The New York Times limited email use for its staff and journalists. In the case of each website, the hacker changed the DNS information to reflect its victory. The New York Times posted an article on the hack,...
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A few days ago, the New York Times published an article criticizing the range and performance of the Tesla Model S in cold weather. The author, John Broder, claimed that the car performed poorly in cold weather and that he eventually had to have the vehicle towed to its destination on a flatbed. When Elon Musk strenuously contested Broder's claims of subpar performance, the author doubled down. In a follow-up article for the New York Times, Broder claims that he charged the vehicle properly, reduced his speed to 45 mph, and turned down the heater temperature in an attempt to compensate for the vehicle's fast-draining battery. Today, Musk released the extensive data logs that Tesla keeps on the...
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Attacks on newspapers and journalists aren’t new, though some of the methods are, as evidenced by hackers recently infiltrating The New York Times’ computer network. According to The Times, the newspaper discovered the intruders and monitored their activities before kicking them out of the system. The Times plans to use what it learned from the hackers to bolster its network defenses. The New York Times reported on its own network breach today. Image credit: NYT The Times points to indicators that the attackers may have links to the Chinese military, and speculates that the hacking may be a response to the newspaper’s coverage of China’s prime minister, Wen Jiabao. The...
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Last year, multiple news companies began hopping on the digital subscription bandwagon courtesy of the iPad. The hope was that Apple's 9.7" behemoth would drive a new wave of people to sign up for tablet versions of their favorite news media (paper subscribers were often, but not always, given access to the digital edition for free). After years of losses, traditional print media were desperate to find a replacement engine for plummeting advertising revenue. It hasn't worked. The Pew Research Center has released data showing that while digital advertising with newspapers increased by $207 million in 2011, print advertising fell by more than 10x that amount, to $2.1B. The 10:1 offset is worse...
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Apple recently took a PR hammering after the New York Times published a report claiming that labor conditions at the company's Chinese partner Foxconn continued to be poor--and that Apple knew about it and chose to do nothing. CEO Tim Cook blasted the allegations at the time, but has followed up nonetheless. Apple announced today that the Fair Labor Association will conduct "special, voluntary audits" of Foxconn facilities in Shenzhen and Chengdu. Unlike the suicides of 2009-2010, the recent accusations of poor monitoring relate to aluminum dust explosions at two Foxconn factories in May and December of 2011. Such risks are a known manufacturing hazard, and are seen as something which Apple,...
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Work in IT long enough--say, a week--and you'll inevitably encounter an employee whose enthusiasm for their own ideas is matched only by their utter inability to comprehend their own incompetence. These are the users who open every attachment, volunteer to help the poor millionaires of Nigeria, and who ask to see the company's firewall. It only takes one of these people to wreak havoc on an IT admin's life. If one of these derp-spawned users is a headache, 20 of them in a room are apparently the New York Post. Like many newspapers and magazine publishers, the New York Post has created an iPad app in the hopes of enticing new subscriptions. Like many other companies, it's invested in doing so...
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It's pretty easy it was to get around the New York Times' newly erected paywall, and now there's a free Chrome browser extension that does exactly the same thing for the Wall Street Journal. The extension, "Read WSJ Extension," has been labeled as a way to "cheat" the Wall Street Journal, but we're not quite so hyperbolic in our view. The reason is because it's always been easy to get around the WSJ paywall. Since arrivals at the WSJ that are directed to the site via search engines like Google skip through the paywall just fine, a simple search on the WSJ article title usually works. Still, this is a much easier solution. How does it work? Exactly as above. If you click on a "locked" WSJ...
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As promised, the New York Times paywall was erected on Monday, March 28. It seems to already be working, in fact. End users can read 20 articles per month on the site. Pass the limit, and you are asked to subscribe to be able to read more, via a pop-up message. As you close in on the limit, as well, you should see a pop up that tells you that you are nearly at the limit. As the Times said earlier, there are loopholes through the paywall, including clicking through articles via Facebook or Twitter. Additionally, users can access five articles daily, each found through five different search engines (AOL, Bing, Google, Yahoo, Ask), for a total of 25 additional articles per day (with a little work)....
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One of the most significant impacts of the iPad (and of tablets more generally) has been the devices' perceived ability to alleviate the crushing financial woes currently afflicting most major newspapers and magazines. The general theory is that customers, who are used to reading web content for free, will pay a monthly charge for the privilege of reading content through an application. The New York Times has been working on its own paywall and has released some preliminary information on what the various services will cost. For now, at least, free service isn't going away. The Gray Lady will allow occasional readers to view a certain number of pages per month and has vowed that readers arriving...
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If you need any further validation that e-books have finally made it big, here it is. The New York Times plans to launch a bestseller list for e-books in early 2011. The New York Times bestseller lists are the gold standard for defining a book's success. The print version of the bestseller lists are divided into several categories. For e-books, things will start "small." The New York Times will have only two lists covering fiction and non-fiction when it launches. Rankings will be independently verified by third party company RoyaltyShare. You can read the full press release below. The New York Times to Launch eBook Best-Seller Lists Independent Third Party, RoyaltyShare, Inc., Will Help Validate...
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According to a report in the Los Angeles Times, you better keep your iPad out of the bedroom if you need to get up early in the morning. The reason? Light emitted from the bright touchscreen display stimulates your brain telling it to stay alert rather than drift off into unconsciousness. It isn't just the iPad that has this effect, but all abnormal light sources, including cell phones, televisions, computer screens, and so forth. Sleep experts claim that exposure to abnormal light sources inhibits the secretion of melatonin, a chemical which is secreted in darkness and regulates the sleep-wake cycle by causing drowsiness. "The take-home lesson is that insomnia and electronics gadgets emitting...
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Ah, Christmas. The word itself conjures images of hearth and home, inspires (occasionally debaucherous) celebration, and is a time of spiritual contemplation for millions. In this crazy modern age, it's also a time when the bewildered parents of tech-savvy children all over the civilized world, regardless of race, ethnicity, religious background, or nationality are united through the magic of a single shared emotion—panic. From October to December, the advertising departments of a thousand companies exhort children to beg, cajole, and guilt-trip their parents for all manner of inappropriate digital entertainment. As supposedly informed gatekeepers, we sadly earthbound Santas are reduced to scouring...
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According to a report in the New York Times, Google has its sights trained squarely on the e-book market. This move would pit Google against Amazon.com, which has a big head start in the e-book market with the versions it sells for its Kindle device (pictured below). The report stated that Google had discussions with publishers at the annual BookExpo convention in New York over the weekend. Publishers might be happier with Google's pricing structure than with Amazon.com's. Amazon allows publishers set wholesale prices but then sets its own prices for consumers. Amazon sells Kindle editions of most new best sellers for $9.99, far lower than the typical $20+ at which publishers sell new hardcovers....
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