My friend Richard MacManus wrote a great blog post in February on the passing of Clive James, and made this poignant observation: âBecause far from preserving our culture, the Web is at best forgetting it and at worst erasing it. As it turns out, a website is much more vulnerable than an Egyptian pyramid.â
The problem: search engines are biased to show us the latest stuff, so older items are being forgotten.
There are dead domains, of courseâeach time I pop by to our linksâ pages, I find Iâm deleting more than Iâm adding. I mean, who maintains linksâ pages these days, anyway? (Ours look mega-dated.) But the items we added in the 1990s and 2000s are vanishing and other than the Internet Archive, Richard notes its Wayback Machine is âincreasingly the only method of accessing past websites that have otherwise disappeared into the ether. Many old websites are now either 404 errors, or the domains have been snapped up by spammers searching for Google juice.â
His fear is that sites like Clive Jamesâs will be forgotten rather than preserved, and he has a point. As a collective, humanity seems to desire novelty: the newest car, the newest cellphone, and the newest news. Searching for a topic tends to bring up the newest references, since the modern web operates on the basis that history is bunk.
Thatâs a real shame as it means we donât get to understand our history as well as we should. Take this pandemic, for instance: are there lessons we could learn from MERS and SARS, or even the Great Plague of London in the 1660s? But a search is more likely to reveal stuff we already know or have recently come across in the media, like a sort of comfort blanket to assure us of our smartness. Itâs not just political views and personal biases that are getting bubbled, it seems human knowledge is, too.
Even Duck Duck Go, my preferred search engine, can be guilty of this, though a search I just made of the word pandemic shows it is better in providing relevance over novelty.
Showing results founded on their novelty actually makes the web less interesting because search engines fail to make it a place of discovery. If page after page reveals the latest, and the latest is often commodified news, then there is no point going to the second or third pages to find out more. Google takes great pride in detailing the date in the description, or â2 days agoâ or â1 day agoâ. But if search engines remained focused on relevance, then we may stumble on something we didnât know, and be better educated in the process.
Therefore, itâs possibly another area that Big Tech is getting wrong: itâs not just endangering democracy, but human intelligence. The biases I accused Google News and Facebook ofâviz.their preference for corporate mediaâbuild on the dumbing-down of the masses.
I may well be wrong: maybe people donât want to get smarter: Facebook tells us that folks just want a dopamine hit from approval, and maybe confirmation of our own limited knowledge gives us the same. âLook at how smart I am!â Or how about this collection?
Any expert will tell you that the best way to keep your traffic up is to generate more and more new content, and itâs easy to understand why: like a physical library, the old stuff is getting forgotten, buried, or evenâif they canât sell or give it awayâpulped.
Again, thereâs a massive opportunity here. A hypothetical new news aggregator can outdo Google News by spidering and rewarding independent media that break news, by giving them the best placementâas Google News used to do. That encourages independent media to do their job and opens the public up to new voices and viewpoints. And now a hypothetical new search engine could outdo Google by providing relevance over novelty, or at least getting the balance of the two right.
With my last two cellphones, Iâve not used the default browser. I usually opted for Firefox, and in December 2018, I believe thatâs what I did on my then-new Meizu M6 Note.
I donât recall it being too problematic, but the type on some sites displayed a tad small, so I sampled a few others. I must have tried the usual suspects such as Dolphin and definitely recall seeing the Brave icon on my home screen, but my friend Robin Capper suggested Edge.
You might think that thatâs a ridiculous option given what Edgeâs (and IEâs) reputation has been like, but it actually worked better than the other browsers I sampled. It played the videos I loaded on it, and it displayed type generally well, but there was one very regular bug. If I left a session and came back to it later, or let the phone go to sleep or standby, Edge would almost always falter when I tried to pick up where I left off. It would stutter and close. When I opened it up again, it was fine.
The latest version began displaying in my notifications that it wouldnât work properly without Google Services, which was a blatant lie, since it was still stable other than the bug above, and all previous versions were absolutely fine. I wonder if this was some leftover from the Chromium base, but, as with the overwhelming majority of Android apps, Google Services are unnecessary.
The other bug that began happening on a more recent version was Edge getting confused by stylesheets and not knowing what size to display type at. It might change as you browsed, and when you scrolled back up the page, the text that was legible before had turned minute. It did this on Lucire, and it is serious enough for us to redevelop a template for the site.
I began wondering if there was life outside Edge. I returned to Firefox to find it stable but utterly incapable of playing videos. I donât remember it being like this when it was my default, but like so many software programs, the more they upgrade, the crappier it gets. I also believe that a lot of these boffins donât test with older gear, for reasons Iâve outlined elsewhere on this blog.
Four browsers were suggested to me as replacements: Vivaldi (which I went to anyway, since I use it on the desktop), Duck Duck Go (which I had heard was slow, but I downloaded it anyway), Brave (they have a programme where they claim to give money to publishers but itâs impossible for a publisher like me to sign up to), and Bromite (hadnât heard of it before today). I had already tried, and rejected, UC Browser on another occasion.
Vivaldi has been and gone from my phone as I write this post. Itâs buggy as heck. Twitter displays about half a centimetre off, so you think youâre clicking on one thing you see on the screen but youâve just activated the link thatâs 0¡5 cm above. YouTube will crash the browser (two out of four times). It loses the tab you were browsing on when you come back to a session. It gives the same BS about needing Google Services when it doesnât. I was very disappointed considering it syncs with Vivaldi on the desktop, the settings seem comprehensive, and the interface looked pretty good.
Vivaldi struggles to display YouTube before crashing
Vivaldi displays everything a bit low (though it functions as though everything is fine, leading you to click on the wrong things), and the tabs I set it to show have gone
Duck Duck Go has been working quite well. Other than the pop ups that tell me about things I already know as a decade-long user of the search engine, I havenât noticed the slowness that Iâve heard from a very reliable and knowledgeable source.
Brave was back, still telling me about their rewardsâ programme, but I havenât experimented with it enough to form a proper opinion. But it has sent a notification about my first Brave advertisement, which I actually canât see. I admire what theyâre trying to do but if only theyâd let me sign up as a publisherâyet their site doesnât permit it. It might be short-lived on my phone, too.
Bromite, so far, has worked in a standard fashion with nothing too remarkable, and Iâll be investigating further.
The day has ended rather differently on the cellphoneâa whole lot of time invested on a device I barely use. But itâs been a fun exploration of whatâs out there and how some fall well short of the basics of stability, consistency and compatibility. Duck Duck Go has so far won the default slot but the jury is still out on Bromite.
For a guy who gave up updating his own Facebook in 2017, and uses it just for work stuff, Iâm still amazed at how many bugs I come across.
Two days ago: discovered that you canât post links. The âPublishâ button is greyed out.
Yesterday: I wanted to tag one of our writers on Lucireâs Facebook page. Donât think it worked but the other thing that didnât work was the link preview. This is an old bug and I remember it from when I used Facebook regularly, so things must move really slowly there. You can post links againâsort of. Basically, the posted link and the link in the preview have different URLs. The one in the preview takes you to a 404: itâs the correct URL with the authorâs Christian name appended to it, to make it wrong. Iâm glad that for the most part, I leave this page to automationâitâs actually more accurate than going in there and posting directly into Facebook! You would think the opposite would be true.
What is good is that you can delete posts now, which you couldnât three weeks ago.
Today: theyâve got rid of the news feed, which is actually a good thing, but I know how others like it. I went in just before I wrote this post in case it was a fleeting bug this morning, but thereâs still no news feed.
Iâll might look again next week if work stuff comes up. Three visits like that, one or two a day, is anomalous for me these days. All these visits showed is that Facebook is no less buggier than it was half a decade ago, with pretty much the same bugs: regular failures in posting, linking, and displaying databased content. In fact, it may be worse as the whole thing appears to crumble under its own weight.
I really love Hong Kong ćźŤçŤ or manhua, and found this in one of the boxes from the move.
This was before the days of our having a computer scanner, and I had photocopied it out of a magazine or newspaper. There were years the copier was on the blink and everything would come out way darker than it should beâit was only with a bit of photo editing in a modern program that I got it looking better.
I swear that copier had a psychic circuit like the Tardis. My father was a technician and knew his way around the machine but could never find anything wrong with it. It was fine when new but there were years everything came out too dark. After my mother passed away, the machine went dark instantly. After a period of mourning, without warning, it brightened again and all was back to normal. The computer monitor at the time did the same thing: I had to set it to its maximum setting to see the screen properly. And around the same time, it fixed itself, and I could turn it back to where it was. Gadgets in mourning.
Usually you just hear stories of light bulbs frying but we were more high-tech.
When Dadâs Imac gave up the ghost days after he died (actually, that was the first time we tried to switch it on after he passed away), I didnât bother trying to get it fixed. I had a sense it wouldnât be worth it.
Iâve done several Zoom meetings since the pandemic was declared, and two Google Hangouts. While Iâm not thrilled at having to use two companies with patchy (to say the least) records on user privacy, the meetings (three for Medinge, one for another board I sit on) have been productive, and the only bottleneck has been, of course, Google.
Iâve never known what to do with those meeting.ics files that come in but I assume they are digital diary entries for those who donât like paper. But I can open them in a text file and figure out when meetings start and end and with whom Iâm having them.
If someone sends me a Zoom or Google Hangoutsâ link then Iâm all good, as I can head straight there and attend the meeting. But for one organization, which has been on Google for longer than Iâve been on their board, Iâm expected to get this from the ICS file itself. Fortunately they have an excellent secretary and convener who sends me the link privately since Iâm the only one out of the 10 or so who attend these Google-based meetings who canât figure out how to use this technology.
Apparently, for everyone, they receive the email and they get a Google Hangout link inside a Calendar entry like this:
and for me, and Iâve spent two hours on this, this is all I get:
I can tell you itâs not inside the ICS file. Thereâs no link at all.
Before you say, âJack, you have non-standard privacy settings on your browser and computer,â let me answer that now: Iâve downloaded a fresh copy of Opera with no privacy blocks whatsoever, and instead of retrieving the ICS from my usual Eudora email client, Iâve gone into Gmail, where theyâve sent the same invitation, and pretended to like Google and tried to do everything within their ecosystem. This is my only Gmail account, which we are all required to have on this board.
Iâve opened the email containing this link. If I click on âAdd to calendarâ, I get the screenshot of mine above. Next to the meeting.ics attachment is âDownloadâ. If I click on that, I download exactly the same file I had on my regular email, with no Google Hangoutsâ link. Surprisingly, there is no way to add an ICS file from Gmail to your Google Calendarânot even a customized right-click optionâwhich must rank as one of the stupidest things that Google could do if they expect us to use their products as a suite.
There is no obvious way to open meeting.ics from within Google Calendar. However, you can import (Settings, then Settings, then Import/Export) the file, and the result? Same as before.
Our notifications are sent through a service called Our Cat Herder, and when I click for the full meeting details, I just get taken to that site, again with no Google Hangoutsâ link.
I get that our brains are all wired differently, but there must be a simple, logical explanation on why everyone else can see this link and I canât.
I realize that when I spot something Google does, and write about it on this blog, I usually go, âThatâs dodgy. These guys are a bunch of wankers,â and 99 per cent of people go, âThatâs dodgy but Iâll put up with it because free stuff,â so I know we are different. However, Iâm struggling to think how anyone has managed to navigate Gmail, Google Calendar and all their non-search crap to find this link.
Iâve asked the person convening the meeting to show me in person how they get to their Google Calendar window after we come out of lockdown, but I really have clicked everything under the sun in Gmail, Calendar, Google Account, my profile, and anything else they let me access. I spent 90 minutes one morning and another half-hour today: two hours of letting this Big Tech crowd know all about my computer and invade my privacy. It just cannot be done. Except logic tells me if nine other people can, then their brains must be wired so differently that they are clicking on something that I obviously cannot see. That Google has made it that invisible or that illogical to my 1 per cent brain. But, Gmail users, what else should I click on? There isnât anything else. I’ve clicked on everything that’s obvious and even on things that were obvious dead ends.
Above: I’ve clicked on what I thought are the obvious links, so where’s this mystery Google Calendar file that reveals a Google Hangouts’ link?
But logic also says that if we are all receiving the same emails and the same meeting.ics file then why are they different? Even the time is different (theirs is 4.30 to 6 p.m., mine is 4.30 to 6.30 p.m.) as is the title (theirs has the name of the organization in it).
This is yet another case where Google doesnât work. Iâve written plenty about why this companyâs products are bad for us, their record of censorship, their exercise of a monopoly, their taking and exposure of user data, and their general incompetence. We all know about their failure to be transparent, especially with the one product which makes the most moneyâtheir (independently unaudited) advertising. Recently I wrote about how Google Drive does not work, and now you can add Gmail and Google Calendar to the list. Conclusion: this hodgepodge of services is a waste of time. Like Microsoft Word, I’m glad I didn’t get laboured with them early onâand know to stay well away from them in the general course of my work.
One bonus of the lockdown was the live Easter Day concert held by Hong Kongâs own Sam Hui (訹ĺ ĺ), perhaps fairly described as the king of Cantopop.
I had no idea this was even on if it werenât for the fire at the Baxterâs Knob transmitter that took out television transmission in our area. Faced with the prospect of no television during lockdown, and as Iâm not a cat in an NZI commercial, I hooked up my laptop to the old LG monitor, relocated to the lounge, and streamed that evening.
We put on TV1 but later that night, I headed to RTHK TV31, a government-funded channel in Hong Kong, and came across the commercial for Samâs live concert at 5 p.m. HKT on Easter Day, which translated comfortably to 9 p.m. NZST.
Hong Kong has some COVID-19 restrictions, with the safe distance a lower 1¡5 m, though most people wear masks. Even TV hosts are masked on their programmes. There isnât a big physical audience for the concert: just Sam, his guitar, sitting atop a building on the Kowloon side, with the Hong Kong Island business district skyline as the backdrop. The host is seated a suitable distance away. Some folks are seated in a roped-off area, sitting a bit closer, though masked. There’s a four-camera set-up. For such a massive star, this might have been his smallest physical audience, though on YouTube, the concert netted a six-figure audience (160,000 when I looked) around the world, and no doubt others will have watched on their television sets, while I watched on TV31âs stream. One source suggests a total viewing audience of over 2 million.
Samâs still got the same voice, despite being in his 70sâfor the most part, he sounds like the young guy in his 20s that I watched on TV before I emigrated, and whose cassette tapes I cherished when they arrived from Hong Kong in the first few years we were in Aotearoa.
For someone who missed contact with my birthplace, Samâs music was a connection, something that took me back, a tiny slice of âhomeâ that was both grounding and enjoyable.
In those early days, Samâs music struck a chord with HKers because he often sang about the working class, and in plain language. Few artists had done this at the time; most lyrics tended to be in properly structured Chinese, so Sam broke new ground by singing colloquially. A skilled composer and lyricist, we saw him regularly performing his own songs on programmes such as ćĄć¨äťĺŽľ (Enjoy Yourself Tonight), a variety show that was a big hit back in the 1970s.
When he broke into films with his brothers, he was frequently cast as the hero type, and could genuinely claim to âstar in it, write the theme tune, sing the theme tune.â
His solo career as an actor hit a high in the 1980s and as the video cassette boom began, I indulged in the ć佳ććŞ (Aces Go Places) series. Most kids in the west watching Hong Kong cinema knew about Bruce Lee or that new guy Jackie Chan, but we locals knew that Sam was who you watched if you wanted decent entertainment with a mix of action and humourâand the obligatory Sam Hui theme tune.
Watching the Easter Day concert brought back a lot of those feelings of connection, and Sam performed plenty of those earlier hits that anyone my age would know. You never lose your connection to the land in which you were born. Hong Kong might look different to how it did in the 1970sâthe tallest building then, Connaught Tower, is dwarfed by the International Commerce Centre a short distance awayâbut the music took you back, and thanks to the cleaner air during the pandemic, the skies even looked as clear as they did back then. The cityâs character remains intact, the concert a reminder of what unites Hong Kong people both there and abroad. We have a distinct culture, one that evolved through the will and the freedom of our people, that I hope will go on regardless of one’s political stripes.
The monitor, incidentally, was much easier to view than the television, with softer colours and less brightness. No matter how I played with the settings on the TV, I couldn’t get them to match. I suspect the TV has a lot of blue light, which makes prolonged viewing difficult. I notice that one can buy blue-light glasses, highlighting once again where we have gone wrong: we humans shouldn’t be adapting to technology, it’s technology that should be adapting to us. The LG (LED) monitor isn’t new, so clearly the technology is available to make TVs calmer on the eyes. Yet no one touts this as a selling proposition. Head into an appliance shop (outside of one’s lockdown) and all the TVs are set on the brightest setting, which would completely turn me off buying one.
Friends tell me that OLED is the way to go in terms of getting the right setting. One of these days I’m going to look into it, but I will bet you that no one who sells these things in the shops will know what a “calm” screen is. They’ll just get excited about forkay, or maybe even atekay, not someone who wants 32 inches or less who wants to preserve their eyesight. ‘Big! Big! Big!’
Don’t worry, I won’t make this too regular, but as I had done some more number-crunching of the available stats during the daytime, I thought I’d share them. Iâve noticed that some countries update their test numbers on a less regular basis, e.g. France, Singapore, Sweden and Switzerland, though Worldometers now has updated ones since my last COVID-19 post. Franceâs test figure hasnât changed, so we can safely conclude that its infection rate as a percentage of tests done is lower than whatâs cited below. The same applies to Singapore.
New Zealand has dipped below 2 per cent, finally, but thanks to rounding itâs cited as 2¡00 per cent below. These figures include what Dr Ashley Bloomfield announced an hour ago. Happily, the US has started to see a fall since I last did these figuresâthereâs one post I didnât write even though I had the calculations ready (it was too late at night for me to compose something cogent). Goes to show how quickly the landscape changes.
I had overestimated the number of tests Sweden had done: it turns out they havenât increased in number at the same rate as the fortnight before, though my use of 75,000 in the previous table wasnât far off. Despite my overestimation, their infection rate continues to rise.
The UK has also risen but not at the same rate, though judging by Twitter there, some are questioning whether deaths in aged care facilities are being included.
Germany should be happy with its rate going from the 9s into the 7s.
France 147,863 of 333,807 = 44¡30%*
Spain 180,659 of 650,755 = 27¡76%
UK 98,476 of 398,916 = 24¡69%
USA 644,089 of 3,258,879 = 19¡76%
Sweden 11,927 of 74,600 = 15¡99%
Italy 165,155 of 1,117,404 = 14¡78%
Switzerland 26,336 of 199,000 = 13¡23%
Germany 134,753 of 1,728,357 = 7¡80%
Singapore 3,699 of 72,680 = 5¡09%*
KSA 5,862 of 150,000 = 3¡91%
New Zealand 1,401 of 70,160 = 2¡00%
South Korea 10,613 of 538,775 = 1¡97%
Australia 6,462 of 377,024 = 1¡71%
Hong Kong 1,017 of 116,273 = 0¡87%
Taiwan 395 of 49,748 = 0¡79%
I can cite these COVID-19 calculations (infections as a proportion of tests done) with a bit more confidence than the last lot, where many countriesâ testing figures had not updated. I see the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has released its total test numbers now, and they show a pretty good result, too.
Compared to my post of the 7th inst., there are improvements in France, Italy, Switzerland and Germany, while Spain has shown a marked and positive improvement (from 39¡58 per cent to 28¡25 per cent).
The UKâs delay and its initial reliance on herd immunity, with sycophants up and down the country agreeing, is showing up now as its number grows slightly, from 20¡4 per cent on the 7th to 23¡88 per cent with the latest data.
The USâs numbers are holding fairly steadily with an increase of 0¡8 per cent since the 7th (to 19¡78 per cent).
Swedenâs total test figure is one of two inaccurate ones here, having remained unchanged since the last tables, which obviously cannot be right. I estimate they have done around 75,000 tests so far, which would bring the figure to 13¡98 per cent, fairly close to the 7thâs, rather than the 19¡16 per cent that the Worldometersâ table would have me calculate.
Also statistically similar are Switzerland, South Korea, Australia and Hong Kong, though Hong Kongâs total test figure is also inaccurate (unchanged from the 7th). Singapore is showing a rise with the reports of community transmission. New Zealand is showing a small drop (2¡71 to 2¡15 per cent), though the percentage change here is less than what the USâs is.
Taiwan continues to see its percentage decline with another 8,000 tests done and only an additional 17 infections since the 7thâs post.
France 132,591 of 333,807 = 39¡72%
Spain 169,496 of 600,000 = 28¡25%
UK 84,279 of 352,974 = 23¡88%
USA 560,433 of 2,833,112 = 19¡78%
Italy 156,363 of 1,010,193 = 15¡48%
Sweden 10,483 of c. 75,000 = c. 13¡98%*
Switzerland 25,449 of 193,800 = 13¡13%
Germany 127,854 of 1,317,887 = 9¡70%
KSA 4,462 of 115,585 = 3¡86%
Singapore 2,532 of 72,680 = 3¡48%
New Zealand 1,349 of 62,827 = 2¡15%
South Korea 10,537 of 514,621 = 2¡05%
Australia 6,359 of 362,136 = 1¡76%
Hong Kong 1,010 of 96,709 = 1¡04%*
Taiwan 393 of 47,215 = 0¡83%
Not withstanding that I canât edit my advertising preferences on Facebookâthey took that ability away from me and a small group of users some time ago (and, like Twitter, they are dead wrong about what those preferences are)âI see they now lie about what ads Iâve seen and clicked on.
I can categorically say I have not seen an ad, much less clicked on an ad, for the US Embassy.
Itâs pretty hard for a person who doesnât use Facebook except for work to have clicked on any ads on their platform.
And as Iâve largely quit Instagram itâs highly unlikely I accidentally swiped and clicked on an ad there, too.
On the remote chance that I did, then it shows that either Facebookâs or the US Embassyâs targeting is appallingly bad since Iâm not American. I doubt that the US Embassy would have had such a wide market as to include me.
I theorize, and I do so with zero proof, that Facebook is so deep in its con to claim certain advertising reach numbers that itâs falsely attributing hits to random users across the site. These may have been hits done by botsâbots that it endorses, incidentallyâand now they want to pin them on legitimate people.
Itâs a hypothesis but given that Iâve been right about a few way-out ones (false user numbers, bot epidemics, malware downloads), Iâm going to advance it. Now letâs wait four years for this to blow up into something.
Above: The only way I can view my advertising preferences on Facebook is through the mobile version. But here they cannot be edited. (The web version won’t show them at all.) They are also quite wrong that these are my interests, but since when have they been right anyway?
Hereâs quite a funny one for you this Easter weekend: Facebook apparently has filed suit against companies that do the following, according to Social Media Today.
⢠Companies that sell fake followers and likes, which Facebook has pushed harder to enforce since New York’s Attorney General ruled that selling fake social media followers and likes is illegal last February
⢠Two different app developers over ‘click injection fraud’, which simulates clicks in order to extract ad revenue
⢠Two companies over the creation of malware, and tricking Facebook users into installing it in order to steal personal information
In other words, Facebook has filed suit against people who do things that are variations of what Facebook itself does.
The first. This has long been proven by Veritasium, and one would hope the defendant points out that Facebook has endorsed such behaviour, and that its terms and conditions have generally meant squat. Facebook allows hate groups (hate speech is âcounter-speechâ, they tell me), hates drag queens and kings, drags its heels in removing illegal content (eight clips of the Christchurch massacre are still on there, a year later), and preserves bots, fake accounts and phishing pages, all contrary to what their own terms and conditions say. These happen with such frequency that one might say they are Facebook policy.
Now, Facebook mightnât do the second but it certainly extracts ad revenue from customers, and not necessarily fairly. Click fraud? How about audience fraud? Thatâs been the subject of lawsuits against it. Weâve gone through this before on this blog, least of which is Facebookâs lying about its user numbers. It cites heaps of people but we know among them are bots; and we know that it claims more people in certain demographics than there are people. I’ve said this for a long, long time.
Third: Facebook tricked users for years into installing a âmalware scannerâwith purposes it would not go into. But it essentially admitted their scanners collected data from users (as reported in Wired, ‘Facebook tells users when they agree to conduct the scan that the data collected in the process will be used “to improve security on and off Facebook”ââit seems reasonable to conclude this is personal information). The scanner never appeared in oneâs installed programsâ list, either, and in my case, knocked out my real antivirus software. We also know that when Facebook accused certain people of having malware, the company was lying. The scanner took a long time to run, so what was it sending back to the mothership? Conclude from all of that what you will, but tricking Facebook users into installing software that is hidden on a userâs PC and takes data off it is right out of a fraudsterâs playbook.
Given the amount of crooked activity that Facebook itself engages in, and the lies its team tells, criminals would be forgiven into thinking that it was a website that collected and ran scams, and that Mark Zuckerberg was a kindred spirit.
The hypocrisy remains strong at Facebook.
