The descent of Twitter

Dawn Huczek/Creative Commons 2·0 This Tweet was probably half in jest: Twitter 2009. I like apples.I like pears.That’s cool.Yeah. Twitter 2018. I like apples.So you’re anti pears then.No, I just prefer apples.So you hate pears.I never said that.Fucking pear hater.I don’t hate pears!Yes you do. You make me sick. Scum. — Amanda (@Pandamoanimum) September 13, […]

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Turned alcohol ads off in Facebook? Did you honestly think they’d respect that?

Steve Wozniak has quit Facebook, and apparently was surprised at the advertising preferences that the company had built up on him. Like me, Woz had been deleting the ad preferences and advertisers one at a time. Now, if Woz is surprised, then it shows you how serious it is. As I noted in my last […]

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Facebook’s ad preferences’ page and user archive tell totally different stories about their tracking

I decided there’d be no harm getting that Facebook archive since I was no longer using it. And while I didn’t see phone logs as Dylan McKay did (I only had the app for about a month or so in 2012), what I did find was entirely in line with the privacy breaches I had […]

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Facebook overestimates and underestimates reach depending on the story it wants to tell

Funny, isn’t it? Last year, Facebook was busted for claiming that in some demographics, their ads could reach more people than there were people. When it comes to the US’s Russia probe, they claim their ads reached far, far fewer people: they initially claimed they reached 10 million, but Jonathan Albright, a researcher at Columbia […]

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Wired’s Louise Matsakis did what no other journalist could: break the story on Facebook’s forced malware scans

With how widespread Facebook’s false malware accusations were—Facebook itself claims millions were “helped” by them in a three-month period—it was surprising how no one in the tech press covered the story. I never understood why not, since it was one of many misdeeds that made Facebook such a basket case of a website. You’d think […]

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The folly of Windows 10

Now that I’ve gone four days without a BSOD, it does appear Microsoft realized it had rolled out another lemon, and, nearly two months later, patched things. Goodness knows how many hours it has cost people worldwide—the forums have a lot of people reporting BSODs (maybe it’s confirmation bias, but I really don’t remember this […]

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An accomplishment: debunking every single point in a Guardian article on Julian Assange

Elekhh/Creative Commons Suzi Dawson’s 2016 post debunking a biased Guardian article on Julian Assange is quite an accomplishment. To quote her on Twitter, ‘The article I wrote debunking his crap was such toilet paper that I was able to disprove literally every single line of it, a never-before-achieved feat for me when debunking MSM smears. […]

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The perfect storm: there’s a spike in users being told by Facebook they have malware today

Many years ago, I was locked out of Facebook for 69 hours. It was completely a Facebook database problem, but in those days, they just locked you out without any explanation. It happened on a Friday. I believed I would not get back in till Facebook staff got back to work on Monday—and I was […]

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Stefan Engeseth’s Sharkonomics out in China with a new edition

My good friend Stefan Engeseth’s Sharkonomics hit China a year ago, and it’s been so successful that the second edition is now out. It looks smarter, too, with its red cover, and I’m sure Chinese readers will get a decent taste of Stefan’s writing style, humour and thinking.    I even hope this will pave […]

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Consumer’s choice: how I bought a car from the UK over the ’net and shipped it home

Originally published at Drivetribe, but as I own the copyright it only made sense to share it here for readers, too, especially those who might wish to buy a car from abroad and want to do the job themselves. It was originally written for a British audience. Above: The lengths I went to, to make […]

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