What I do when someone uploads my private information on to Facebook

I can’t be the only person who does this. This is one of the few things that I do on Facebook. Removing off-Facebook activity is another.        1. Let me check my Facebook advertising preferences. Who has been uploading my private information to Facebook without my permission? Hmm, Ramp, @rampcard, that’s new. I’ve […]

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Contextual targeting worked, so why abandon it?

Didn’t I already say this?     Contextual targeting worked for so long on the web, although for some time I’ve noticed ads not displaying on sites where I’ve blocked trackers or had third-party cookies turned off. That means there are ad networks that would rather do their clients, publishers and themselves out of income […]

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Admiral doesn’t understand that I’m not blocking ads, only trackers

It’s pretty bad that Admiral, which detects whether you are using an ad blocker or not, now advises this with Privacy Badger.    Let me make this very clear: I am not against advertising on websites. I have advertising on our websites.    I am against tracking by people such as Google. And that is […]

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How to stop tailgating

I thought if we were serious about stopping tailgating, then the solution in the form of public service announcements would be remarkably simple, as far as the men are concerned. My concept, but not my photos. Since we’re talking lives here, one hopes the photos’ copyright owners will allow me to make these proposals.   […]

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On OneDrive, Flickr, and FLOC

Yesterday, I worked remotely, and I don’t know what possessed me, but as OneDrive was activated on my laptop, I decided to save a word processing file there, planning to grab it from my desktop machine later in the day. Normally I would just leave the file where it was and transfer it across the […]

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How to get your Facebook ad account shut down: do something honest

‘We can’t level, you crazy bastard, we’re in advertising!’—Paul Reiser as Stephen Bachman, in Crazy People (1990)   Signal   You can run ads with misinformation, and you can launch bot nets of thousands of accounts, but what can’t you do on Facebook? Buy ads that expose their tools with which you have bought their […]

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Computing in 2021: Gmail’s advertorial spammers, Facebook bots, and Twitter fatigue

I’m not entirely sure I need to block out the email addresses here since they’re likely to be burner Gmail accounts, but I’ll give these spammers the courtesy they don’t deserve.    As shown below, they’ve been coming for over a year; there’s a chance I may have even received them in 2019.     […]

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How is your ad network different from this?

No point beating around the bush when it comes to yet another advertising network knocking on our door. This was a quick reply I just fired off, and I might as well put it on this blog so there’s another place I can copy it from, since I’m likely to call on it again and […]

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A sure way to lose customers: upload their private information to Facebook

I’m still blocked from seeing my advertising preferences on Facebook on the desktop, the only place where you can edit them, something that has plagued them for years and which they’re unlikely to fix. I commonly say that Facebook’s databases are ‘shot to hell,’ which I’ve believed for many years, and this is another example […]

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The Mediawiki page-count bug: what’s caused it?

Either something is interfering with Mediawiki or I’ve reached the limit with the software after 4,300-odd entries on Autocade. Which is highly unlikely as the same software runs Wikipedia.    For the first time ever I noticed this in the footer: This is how a page with no views looks. Once it nets a few […]

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