Tonight's Chat Topic: The Future of the Newspaper Industry

In tonight's chat at 8PM, eastern time, we're going to ponder the future of the newspaper industry, and look at the stock charts of various newspaper companies. It should be an interesting discussion and everyone's welcome.

Reading Roundup - The Future of Fishwrap; Odds are, You're a Sucker; Japanese Curiosities

Yesterday's papers
["In the 1960s, four out of five Americans read a paper every day; today only half do so ... Whereas 56% of Americans haven't heard of blogs, and only 3% read them daily, among the young they are standard fare, with 44% of online Americans aged 18-29 reading them often ... the blogosphere is, so far, mostly an expanded op-ed medium. But there is nothing to suggest that bloggers cannot also do original reporting ... Mr Murdoch says that some media firms, at least, will be able to navigate the transition as advertising revenue switches from print-based to electronic media ... What is clear is that the control of news - what constitutes it, how to prioritise it and what is fact - is shifting subtly from being the sole purview of the news provider to the audience itself." This article is several months old, but I just stumbled across it since it's still live online instead of lining a litterbox.]

General Comments Regarding Odds
["To get the probability of winning the jackpot, multiply .00000034847 by the probability of matching the power ball, to get .0000000082969 or odds of 1 in 120,526,770." Minnesota is one of the few states that provides its lotto players with detailed explanations of the odds of winning their various games. They even helpfully explain hypergeometric distribution, lol. Of course if the sad, poor people who play the lotto (yes, I think of the lotto as a "poor tax") actually understood the odds, they'd never throw their money away in the first place.]

Curiosities from Japan's Porno Shops
[Hilarious post NOT FOR THE SQUEAMISH OR PRUDISH -- more proof that the Japanese are sick puppies.]

SoPhishticated Phishing

Phishing scams are getting more and more sophisticated. Look at this phoney PayPal email I received. I'm sure that many people have been fooled and defrauded by it... most folks probably don't notice the "cmd=_login-run" catch at the end of the link they provide. Another giveaway that it's bogus is the lack of a space at the beginning of the sentence "Protect yourself against fraudulent websites..." (cheeky bastards).

UPDATE: A reader helpfully emailed me to explain how this scam works:

Thanks a lot for correcting me, Dave. The masked address in the fraudulent email I received was: "http://successgift-front1.heb.fr.colt.net/images/commun/.,/webscrr/update.html"