Amazon: as dodgy as the rest of them

28.11.2021/21.26

Jane Pendry in the UK Tweeted this in response to a Tweet about Amazon, and I had to reply: Refuse to use them. They breached my data and have a policy of blaming the customer. — Jane Pendry (@senseabilityUK) November 26, 2021 Agreed. They claim I let someone into my Associates' account as their reason […]

Nostalgia: Money for Nothing

06.09.2021/09.20

Money for Nothing—image from Amazon Prime, where, as of yesterday, you can watch a presumably cleaner copy than what’s on YouTube. As a young lad, I enjoyed the Screen One TV movie Money for Nothing (1993), which aired on the BBC in the UK and TV1 here. Not to be confused with the John […]

This was the natural outcome of greed, in the forms of monopoly power and sensationalist media

11.01.2021/23.58

I did indeed write in the wake of January 6, and the lengthy op–ed appears in Lucire, quoting Emily Ratajkowski, Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden. I didn’t take any pleasure in what happened Stateside and Ratajkowski actually inspired the post after a Twitter contact of mine quoted her. This was after President Donald Trump was […]

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

03.01.2021/13.03

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 […]

The US, where big business (and others) can lie with impunity

31.12.2020/22.39

One thing about not posting to NewTumbl is I’ve nowhere convenient to put quotations I’ve found. Maybe they have to go here as well. Back when I started this blog in 2006—15 years ago, since it was in January—I did make some very short posts, so it’s not out of keeping. (I realize the timestamp […]

Netflix spams, Amazon doesn’t care

07.02.2020/08.24

It pays to have some ground rules when dealing with the internet. A very big one that I’m sure that you all observe is: don’t do business with spammers. If a Nigerian prince tells you he has $5 million for you, ignore him. There are tainted email lists that have been going around for […]

Why you shouldn’t build projects on Google Cloud (or, why are we still having these conversations?)

01.07.2018/11.46

This story on Medium, about Google Cloud, is all too familiar to me (hat tip to Donkey). It mirrors my experiences with Google in 2009 and 2013. A company monitoring solar plants and wind turbines had Google pull their account twice. The Googlebot falsely claimed there was suspicious activity, with Google threatening to delete […]

The path of least resistance: we humans aren’t discerning enough sometimes

04.02.2018/11.38

I came across a thread at Tedium where Christopher Marlow mentions Pandora Mail as an email client that took Eudora as a starting-point, and moved the game forward (e.g. building in Unicode support). As some of you know, I’ve been searching for an email client to use instead of Eudora (here’s something I wrote […]

It took a little longer, but Autocade reaches 12 million views

03.01.2018/11.21

It’s a little disappointing to note that Autocade has taken slightly longer to reach 12 million page views: it ticked over to its new milestone earlier today. I really had hoped that we’d get there before 2017 was out, but it was not to be. Part of it might have been the slower rate […]

Drivetribe will be a mecca for motorheads—Autocade readers welcome

22.11.2016/13.38

Now that the first episode of The Grand Tour has aired, and we’re nearing the official launch of Drivetribe (November 28), we’re beginning to see just how good an investment £160 million was for Amazon when it picked up the cast of The Goodies, I mean, Top Gear (sorry, I get those BBC shows mixed […]