Refreshingly, I’ve noticed that my more recent blog posts haven’t been about Big Tech as often. I haven’t changed my views: the ones I’ve stated earlier still stand, and Google and Facebook in particular continue to be a blight on democracy and even individual mental health.
A lot of the posts were inspired by real-world usage of those websites, if you look back over the last decade. As I use them irregularly, and wish others were in the same boat, then there’s little to report, unless I come across new revelations that I might have a say about.
Google is the search of last resort though it has a great translator; now that the news alerts don’t even work, that’s one fewer contact point with the online advertising monopolist. Facebook is good for monitoring who has breached my privacy by uploading my private data to the platform, and to delete off-Facebook activity (Facebook serves these pages at a ridiculously slow speed, you wonder if you’re on dial-up). Beyond that neither site has much utility.
My Instagram usage is down to once every two months, which means it’s halved since 2020, though I still keep an eye on Lucire’s account, which isn’t automated.
I stay in touch with some friends on email and there’s much to be said about a long-form composition versus a status update. It’s the difference between a home-cooked meal and a fast food snack. And, of course, I have this blog to record things that might pique my interest.
Go back far enough—as this blog’s been around 15 years—and I shared my musings on the media and branding. My blog’s roots were an offshoot of the old Beyond Branding blog, but I wanted to branch into my own space. A lot of my views on branding haven’t changed, so I haven’t reblogged about them. Each time someone introduced another platform, be it Vox or Tumblr, I found a use for it, but ultimately came back here. Just last week I realized that the blog gallery, which came into being because NewTumbl’s moderators started believing in the Republic of Gilead, was really my substitute for Pinterest. It might even be my substitute for Instagram, if I can be bothered getting the photos off my phone.
I must say it’s a relief to have everything on my own domain, and while it’s not “social”, I have to ask myself how much of Instagramming and social media updating ever was. Twitter, yes, to an extent. But oftentimes with Instagram I posted because I got joy from doing so, over trying to please an audience. It’s why I never got that many followers, because it wasn’t a themed account. And if doing what suits me at the time is the motive, then there’s no real detriment to doing so in my own spaces. These posts still get hundreds of viewers each, probably more than what I got on Facebook or Instagram.
I don’t know if this is a trend, since setting up your own space takes far more time than using someone else’s. Paying for it is another burden others may wish to avoid. Nor do I have the latest stats on Facebook engagement, but when I did track it, it was heading south year on year. I do know that the average reach for an organic post continues to fall there, which is hardly a surprise with all the bots. Instagram just seems full of ads.
But in my opinion, fewer contact points with Big Tech is a good thing, and may they get fewer still.
Posts tagged ‘email’
Dear Gmail user: your industry has worn me down
11.06.2021After three messages I decided I would answer one of those Gmail users asking about advertorial. And from now on I’m just going to copy and paste this to anyone else asking, ‘Why won’t you answer me?’
Dear [redacted]:
Sorry, this is why I haven’t answered you (and this is not because of you, but everyone else who has been enquiring about the same thing for years):
http://jackyan.com/blog/2021/06/time-to-stop-entertaining-advertorial-enquiries-from-gmail/
Almost every time I answer one of these emails it leads nowhere, and I’ve answered hundreds over the last few years. What many of them have in common is Gmail. So to save time and energy I’m no longer entertaining link and advertorial requests coming from Gmail.
Even if it were one in twelve I’d be borderline OK (the ratio I had doing phone sales during a recession) but one in hundreds is just not worth it. Your industry has worn me and my colleagues down.Sincerely,
Jack
I really don’t know why, in the 2020s, anyone would use Gmail, given its rather massive problem of allowing more than one person to use an email address. But I guess if you use Google, you’re not too concerned about privacy, with the endless stories on this topic out there. It shouldn’t then matter if someone else with a similar address can read your emails.
Tags: 2020s, 2021, business, email, Gmail, Google, privacy
Posted in business, internet, marketing | No Comments »
Finished replying to my 2005 and 2006 emails
07.06.2021
I’m not exactly proud of this, but last month I finished replying to all my emails from 2005.
That year I was stuck in Auckland for an extra day due to the airport there being fogged in. I said to another traveller, ‘Well, I won’t catch up on emails now till the end of the year.’ He looked at me as though I was kidding. Except I was being unduly optimistic since it took 16 years to finish replying to everyone.
Today I replied to the last one from 2006, and fortunately, the AOL address appears to be current.
I feel like I’m Ringo Starr in that early Simpsons episode who insisted on replying to all his Beatles fan mail personally, even though it was now the 1990s.
I never had the quantity he had, but the pattern wasn’t particularly healthy: new emails would come in, I’d have to reply to those, and non-urgent ones got pushed up the inbox.
These old emails were actually very nice and courteous ones, so they weren’t of subjects or by writers whom I was trying to avoid.
The writer of the first one had since retired but I still tracked him down to apologize, as I have done with the second who, as far as I can tell, remains active.
I felt that at the least they deserved the courtesy of a reply, even if my timing was lousy.
Why am I blogging about this? Probably to tell others not to follow my example. And to get off social media, which I’m sure eventually played a part in further delays. Why poke about on some tiny phone keyboard when you can structure your day better with a desktop machine and type more efficiently?
I have some fond memories of dial-up and not being constantly connected because you planned the emails you needed to send out. Your imagination could be fuelled by your offline time. We have to make the decision to get offline and take responsibility for how we spend our time. I suspect that is what I am rediscovering these days, including reading paper books more than I used to. I’m sure there’s a resurgence of printed matter lying in wait as people tire of the division and mindlessness of some of the most popular websites on our planet right now. And it’ll be the trendy young people, those who see from our example what a waste of time these sites are, who’ll drive it.
Tags: 2000s, 2005, 2006, 2021, business, email, internet, online, time management, youth
Posted in business, culture, internet, technology | No Comments »
Recovering mailboxes and tables of contents in Eudora after an extraordinarily massive crash
12.09.2020I’ve used Eudora for around 25 years as my email client and in the early days, when the inbox got too big, I had it crash every now and then, necessitating the program to rebuild the table of contents. From memory I’ve lost some emails back then, too, and had to ask friends to re-send. But, by and large, it’s been largely stable, and since Windows 7 I don’t recall it crashing so badly that I would be up shit creek. Till last night.
Normally, Eudora has back-ups for its in- and outboxes (which it renames with 001 and 002 suffixes) so in the case of a lost ’box, you can rename the old ones and hopefully not lose too much. But what if a crash was so severe it would take out not only the in- and outboxes, but also the content of the back-ups, as well as your third-quarter email folder? That’s exactly what happened.
I haven’t gone back into Windows to find out what caused the series of crashes but it seems to have begun with RuntimeBroker.exe and ntdll.dll. I’m not even going to pretend I know what all this means:
So what do you do when you’re up shit creek and renaming mailboxes (which I’ve had to do when we had a fuse blow) doesn’t work?
The most recent back-up I had was from September 5, and a lot happens in email-land for me over the course of six days. But it was the most recent, and it had to be the starting-point. So, first up, I retrieved them from Windows Backup and put them into a temporary folder (you can’t put them into the original folder).
The third-quarter ’box’s contents were still there, but the table of contents had been corrupted, but it had six days’ worth of changes to it. I renamed this to Q3 In (2), closed Eudora, and placed the backed-up third-quarter mailbox and table into the Eudora folder.
Then it’s the laborious process of seeing how they differ. The best thing to do—and why Eudora remains superior to so many later programs—is to line up the mailbox windows side by side, size them the same, sort them both by date, and begin going through screen by screen. If the first email and the last email are identical, chances are the ones in the middle are identical, so you’re only looking for the emails in the corrupted table that are newer. You then have to shift them one by one into the backed up one. I deleted the identical ones from the corrupted mailbox and by the end of the exercise I had over 4,200 emails in the trash.
The status (read, replied) is gone after the transfers but it’s a tiny price to pay for completeness.
Above: The remnants of the exercise, after discarding trash and duplicate emails from the corrupted third-quarter mailbox.
Then the inbox. Same story: there was a 001 ’box that had survived the crash but none of the tables of contents were usable.
In this case, it’s fortunate we use Zoho as our email service. I went into the trash folder, where all checked emails wind up after POP3 access, and transferred everything from the 5th to the present day into the inbox. Fortunately, from there it’s not difficult to do a fresh POP3 access. Again, I closed Eudora, put the backed-up inbox into the main Eudora folder, and simply checked my emails. You do lose once more the status of the emails—you won’t know if you’ve replied to them—but at least you have an inbound record.
The outbox was a very sad case, and unfortunately the news is not good. Here, the table of contents was complete but the mailboxes (all of them) were blank. Therefore, clicking on the table of contents’ entries actually deleted them because the mailbox was corrupted. Strangely, all showed the correct sizes.
There’s no easy way here. You can’t take sent emails from Zoho and put them into your inbox expecting Eudora to be able to download them. The only solution I found was to forward each one, one by one, to myself from within Zoho. Then I placed them into either my third-quarter outbox or the active outbox. My own name appears in the recipient column, and the dates are wrong, but, again, if completeness is the aim, then it’s a small price to pay. Sadly, of the three recovered ’boxes and tables of contents, it’s the least elegant.
I imagine I could edit each email as a text file within the outbox and allow the table of contents to generate new entries, then recompile them into a new table, but after you’ve spent hours doing the first two ’boxes, you’re not keen on such a technical solution after 3 a.m. And there’s also no guarantee that the table would generate properly anyway.
Windows was the culprit here, as Eudora has always been very stable, and crashes like this are exceedingly rare, if you keep your in- and outboxes to reasonable sizes. I’ve never seen the back-ups get wiped out as well. A good case study in favour of regular back-ups, and maybe I might need even more frequent ones.
Tags: 2020, bugs, email, Eudora, Microsoft Windows, office, software, Zoho
Posted in business, New Zealand, technology | 1 Comment »
Nissan’s own documents show Carlos Ghosn’s arrest was a boardroom coup
22.06.2020
I said it a long time ago: that the Carlos Ghosn arrest was part of a boardroom coup, and that the media were used by Hiroto Saikawa and co. (which I said on Twitter at the time). It was pretty evident to me given how quickly the press conferences were set up, how rapidly there was “evidence” of wrongdoing, and, most of all, the body language and demeanour of Mr Saikawa.
Last week emerged evidence that would give me—and, more importantly, Carlos Ghosn, who has since had the freedom to make the same allegation that he was set up—cause to utter ‘I told you so.’
I read about it in The National, but I believe Bloomberg was the source. The headline is accurate: ‘Nissan emails reveal plot to dethrone Carlos Ghosn’; summed up by ‘The plan to take down the former chairman stemmed from opposition to deeper ties between the Japanese company and France’s Renault’.
One highlight:
the documents and recollections of people familiar with what transpired show that a powerful group of insiders viewed his detention and prosecution as an opportunity to revamp the global automaker’s relationship with top shareholder Renault on terms more favourable to Nissan.
A chain of email correspondence dating back to February 2018, corroborated by people who asked not to be identified discussing sensitive information, paints a picture of a methodical campaign to remove a powerful executive.
Another:
Days before Mr Ghosn’s arrest, Mr Nada sought to broaden the allegations against Mr Ghosn, telling Mr Saikawa that Nissan should push for more serious breach-of-trust charges, according to correspondence at the time and people familiar with the discussions. There was concern that the initial allegations of underreporting compensation would be harder to explain to the public, the people said.
The effort should be “supported by media campaign for insurance of destroying CG reputation hard enough,” Mr Nada wrote, using Mr Ghosn’s initials, as he had done several times in internal communications stretching back years.
Finally:
The correspondence also for the first time gives more detail into how Nissan may have orchestrated [board member] Mr Kelly’s arrest by bringing him to Japan from the US for a board meeting.
Nissan’s continuing official position, that Ghosn and Kelly are guilty until proved innocent, has never rang correctly. Unless you’re backed by plenty of people, that isn’t the typical statement you should be making, especially if it’s about your own alleged dirty laundry. You talk instead about cooperating with authorities. In this atmosphere, with Nissan, the Japanese media duped into reporting it based on powerful Nissan executives, and the hostage justice system doing its regular thing, Ghosn probably had every right to believe he would not get a fair trial. If only one of those things were in play, and not all three, he might not have reached the same conclusion.
Tags: 2010s, 2018, 2019, 2020, Bloomberg, Carlos Ghosn, corporate culture, coup, crime, deception, email, Hiroto Saikawa, Japan, law, media, Nissan, Renault, Renault Nissan Mitsubishi
Posted in business, cars, culture, France, globalization, leadership, media | No Comments »
Why I don’t sign up to new online ad networks in a hurry
26.02.2020In the early days, banner advertising was pretty simple. By the turn of the century, we dealt with a couple of firms, Burst Media and Gorilla Nation, and we had a few buy direct. Money was good.
This is the pattern today if we choose to say yes to anyone representing an ad network.
I get an email, with, ‘Hey, we’ve got some great fill rates and CPMs!’
I quiz them, tell them that in the past we’ve been disappointed. Basically, because each ad network has a payment threshold (and in Burst’s case they deduct money as a fee for paying you money), the more ad networks we serve in each ad spot’s rotation, the longer it takes to reach each network’s threshold. And some networks don’t even serve ads that we can see.
They say that that won’t happen, so I do the paperwork and we put the codes in.
Invariably we either see crap ads (gambling and click-bait, or worse: pop-ups, pop-unders, interstitials and entire page takeovers for either) or we see no ads, at least none that’ll pay.
Because we give people a chance we leave the codes there for a while, and that delays the payment thresholds just as predicted.
At the end of the day, it’s ‘Thanks, but no thanks,’ because no one really seems to honour their commitments when it comes to online advertising. With certain companies having monopoly or duopoly powers in this market, it’s led to depressed prices and a very high threshold for any new players—and that’s a bad thing for publishers. What a pity their home country lacks the bollocks to do something about it.
Every now and then they will feed through an advertisement from Google because of a contractual arrangement they have, and the ad isn’t clickable—because I guess no one at Google has figured out that that’s important. (Remember, this is the same company that didn’t know what significant American building is located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC on Google Earth, and the way to deal with whistleblowers is allegedly to call the cops on them.)
We deal with one Scots firm and one Israeli firm these days, in the hope that not having American ad networks so dependent on, or affected by, a company with questionable ethics might help things just a little.
Tags: 2020, advertising, email, Google, monopoly, online advertising, publishing, USA
Posted in business, internet, marketing, media, publishing, USA | No Comments »
Netflix spams, Amazon doesn’t care
07.02.2020It 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 years. I used to have filters for all sorts of permutations of my real address, back in the days when we had a “catch-all” email. My address definitely wound up on a South African spammers’ list in the late 1990s or early 2000s, and to this day I get South African spam from some respectable looking companies that took an unethical shortcut in compiling their targets. There’s a third where the spammer has confused the ‘company’ and ‘first name’ fields that began doing the rounds during the 2010s. All so easy to spot. If they claimed I signed up to their list, and don’t know my first and last names, then there’s a massive clue right there.
This all begs the question of why a company with the size and reputation of Netflix feels the need to resort to such lists. Here’s the fourth one this Gregorian calendar year as they up their frequency of spam:
Netflix spam, shown actual size.
There’s a thread online where one netizen was told by Netflix that someone else had signed them up, which is incredibly unlikely, and more likely an excuse to cover one’s dodgy behaviour.
These began in November 2019 for me. The ‘This message was mailed to […] by Netflix because you created a Netflix account’ is untrue, and if it were true, how come there is no email confirmation of this account creation in any of my emails from 2019? Surely if you created one, Netflix would confirm your address at the very least? And if they don’t, then that’s pretty poor business practice.
This isn’t a phishing attempt, as the links all go to Netflix and it’s come from Netflix’s account with Amazon, who doesn’t seem to do much about it. If you’d like to see a similar one, someone has posted it online at samplespam.com/messages/2019-07-20/V801I2196eM554074 but where they have a header line with ‘00948.EMAIL.REMARKETING_GLOBAL_SERIES_CORE_2_DAY_4.-0005.-5.en.UA’, mine has ‘00948.EMAIL.REMARKETING_GLOBAL_SERIES_CORE_2_DAY_4.-0005.-5.en.US’. (Netflix thinks I live in the US.)
There’s no reply on Twitter. Nor was there any reply from this email that I sent to privacy@netflix.com last November:
The people they claim are in charge of privacy don’t care about privacy.
I shan’t subscribe to Netflix any time soon because of Internet 101. If they don’t care about your privacy now, they’re probably not going to care about it after you’re a customer. In the 2020s, with people more sensitive about it, it’s foolhardy for Netflix to go against the trend. Right now, their email marketing has all the subtlety of a cheap scammer’s—just with nicer presentation.
Tags: 2019, 2020, Amazon, email, marketing, Netflix, spam, USA
Posted in business, internet, marketing, USA | No Comments »
Replacing Po.st with Addtoany, outside of Wordpress
17.01.2020Some of you will have noticed that Po.st went out of business, so all the Po.st sharing links disappeared from our websites.
The replacement: addtoany.com offers a similar service without the hassle of header codes. Just customize at their website, grab the code, and insert it where you want it. It’s now on the main Lucire website, Autocade (at least on the desktop version), and this blog (desktop as well). Strangely, the plug-in for Wordpress didn’t work for us, and the HTML code with Javascript is far more practical.
There are fewer customization options but it’s a remarkably quick and handy way to replace the old code.
Despite providing a sharing gadget, I wonder how much I’ll use one. It’s been seven days since I last Instagrammed and I don’t miss it. Granted, something major happened in my life but organic sharing had been dwindling through 2019, and if their algorithms aren’t providing you with the dopamine hit that you seek, and you’re unlikely to pay for it like a junkie (which is what Facebook wants you to do), then you have to wonder what the point is. It might, like Facebook, just become one of those things one uses for work—and that’s not something I could have predicted even a year ago.
I see Twitter is introducing features where responses can be limited by the user. The logical outcome of this is Tweets that are directed at limited audience members only, maybe even one-to-one. That looks remarkably like email. And these days I seem to be more productive there than I am on any social network.
With a fresh browser to kick off the year, I surfed to the popular page listing at Autocade. Unsurprisingly, there is some grandfathering going on: the first pages added in 2008 have had more views than the latest pages. That much is logical.
But if there’s a model line page in the top 10 that wasn’t first authored in 2008, that would be, at least to me, interesting. That honour goes to the 2010-authored page on the Opel Astra J, at over 21,000 views.
Once upon a time, the Nissan Bluebird (910) page was top among the individual model lines, thanks to a link from Wikipedia. It’s since slipped to third, after the Ford Fiesta Mk VII and Nissan Sunny (B14). The Toyota Corolla (E100) page, once in second place, is now fourth, followed by the E120. The Ford Taunus TC, Taunus 80 and Cortina Mk III are sixth, seventh and ninth respectively—all 2008 pages. The Opel Astra J, coming in at eighth, is an anomaly among the top 10. (The Renault Mégane II finishes the top 10.)
Something’s driving interest in this model, and I’m very happy it is.
Tags: 2020, Autocade, car, email, Facebook, GM, history, Instagram, JY&A Media, Lucire, Opel, publishing, social media, software, website
Posted in cars, design, internet, media, publishing | 1 Comment »
Warning about Facebook “copyright” phishing scam—which Facebook itself covers for
13.12.2019Yesterday, I received an email purporting to be from Facebook, with the body reading:
Hi,
We are obliged to inform you that your page has been flagged because of unusual and illegal activity, therefore your page might be permanently deleted.
In order to avoid such actions from our side, you need to fill the forms following the link below.
https://www.facebook.com/notes/page-copyright/appeal-a-page-policy-violation/110429970444163/
If you decide not to act accordingly, we will immediately delete your page.
Yours,
Facebook Security Team
The ‘from’ address is secure@facebook.com01259.com, which should already scream ‘Fake!’ but my eyes weren’t drawn to that. Nor was it drawn to the fact the email came from AWS, not Facebook. I clicked on the link, because it was hosted at Facebook.
I arrived at this page:
Yes, it’s on Facebook, but it’s actually a Facebook page, which anyone can set up. This is the ‘about’ section from that page. If you click on their link, that’s when you get suckered in, as you have to fill out information about your own page. Beyond this, you have to log in again, and that’s when their fun starts.
After I learned of the scam, I sent out warnings on Twitter and on my public page at Facebook. I then reported the page to Facebook (it’s still there, as it has been since September). There’s also a second one along the same lines, also from September.
Here’s the real kicker: my Facebook post has actually disappeared. Facebook has deleted a warning to other Facebook users about parties using their platform illegally for phishing and identity theft. I’d call this an implicit endorsement of criminal activity.
It’s not unlike Google Plus, which used to delete my posts critical of Google itself—even though these are real warnings.
Please do not be taken in by this identity theft scam—and I’m very surprised that Facebook would actually allow it to happen.
Then again, remember Facebook used to force “malware scanner” downloads on us, so it seems to adopt the same tactics dodgy hackers do.
Tags: 2019, copyright, cover-up, email, Facebook, hacking, identity theft, privacy, scam
Posted in internet | No Comments »