Earlier this week, I installed Vivaldi browser, and decided to make it my default after reading CEO Jon von Tetzchnerâs blog post about the potentially corrupt practice of suspending his companyâs Adwords campaign after he was critical of Google.
I have resisted browsers made from Chromium because I was never sure how much went back to Google, but seeing von Tetzchnerâs honest blog post about Googleâs alleged misdeed made me think that Vivaldi would likely look after my interests as a netizen.
It wasnât the only reason, mind. Firefox, and before that, Cyberfox (a 64-bit Firefox that had been my default for quite some time) had begun eating memory on my computer. The memory leak would still happen after I got rid of many extensions, and even on safe mode, Firefox took up a lot more space than I expected. Firefox had been having issues with certain ads from some networks for months, too, resulting in script errors.
It didnât take much time for Firefox to chew through 6 Gbyte, freezing other programs that I relied on, and crashing Windows altogether. It happened right after I installed a Crucial SSD that I bought from Atech Computers on Cuba Street, but fortunately I didnât blame it on the new gadget. Logic prevailed and I discovered the culprit, though an upgrade to Universal Media Server didnât help either: 6.7 is poorer than 6.5, confusing video files for JPEGs and forgetting what had been recently played. (Like Windows 10, which regularly forgets settings, modern software seems to have a memory poorer than its users.)
A screen shot of the Windows 10 Task Manager shows just how much memory Firefox ate in around 10 minutes, whereas at this point Vivaldi had been on for quite some time.
It mirrors the experience I once had with Chrome, which handled memory and web pages so poorly that I began calling it the ââAw, snap!â browserâ because of its regular crashes. The same problem that cemented my use of Firefox (and Waterfox and Cyberfox) has now happened to Firefox, forcing me to look for an alternative.
First indications are that Vivaldi is a well made product, with a built-in screen-shooting feature and notes. There are some things that are harder to get to, such as a menu where I can customize which cookies should be blocked (I like living in a YouTube-comment-less world; I feel my IQ is preserved as a result), but overall Iâve managed to get myself the right extensions to mimic what I used to do on Firefox. Iâve also switched off the Google phishing and malware protection setting, for obvious reasons, blocked a bunch of cookies from dodgy big US tech firms (Google among them), and done the ad opt-outs.
It might be marginally quicker, though if I was just interested in speed, Blaze beats Vivaldi and Firefox hands-down, and has a smaller memory footprint. However, a browser is not just for pleasure for me; if it were, then maybe this blog post would have been about another browser altogether. Iâve downloaded Blaze for my phone, and Iâll try it out soon.
I wonder if this is a longer-term change. I remember beginning surfing on Netscape 1, and if I recall correctly, 1·2 had just come out so I actually began browsing in colour. Netscape stayed good till 4·7, and 6 was bloatware and truly awful. I switched to Internet Explorer 5 at this point, before moving to Maxthon (when it had an IE core, but its own interface). Firefox had issues back then with typography, preventing me from switching, but as it matured to v. 3, I went over and wasnât disappointed. Chrome also had typographic issues for a long time.
I invested a lot of time troubleshooting Firefox with the devs over the years, so I donât make this move lightly. But there comes a point when a piece of software becomes impractical to keep. Firefox hadnât changed much on the surface yet when it forces two hard resets a day, you have to make a hard call.
If it werenât for von Tetzchnerâs blog post, I mightnât have made the decision to use his companyâs browser quite so readily. But it is a good product, even at v. 1·11. Vivaldi has obviously invested into making a decent browser from day one, and itâs not just for technologists and power users, which some seem to think. The fact it works better than Firefox should automatically make it appealing to the bulk of users, and if its CEO isnât afraid to call a spade a spade when it comes to Google, the general public should be impressed.
But, as weâve seen, an honourable stand doesnât always mean success: Duck Duck Go hasnât overtaken an increasingly suspect Google, and people still flock to Facebook for social networking despite that platformâs privacy gaffes and unanswered questions about its forced downloads. I only hope that Vivaldi stays the course because the public deserves a product that hasnât come from a morally questionable source.
When I said in January that Facebook’s and Kaspersky’s anti-malware malware (there’s no better term for it, though of course they will deny that it was malware) had it in for McAfee, what did I mean?
As some of you know, I fell for Facebook’s insistence that I download its malware if I wanted to gain access to the site, and no, I was not phished. This is a “feature” that Facebook and Kaspersky have bragged about.
After you download the program from Kaspersky, that company refuses to tell you how to remove it from your computer. It doesn’t appear in your installed programs’ list. I put a very polite comment at their blog entry on the subject, but it was never approved. They don’t want to help people who were laboured with this unnecessary and invasive software. I once thought highly of Kaspersky, but their willingness to collaborate with Facebook, their opaqueness on this matter, and the earlier (unproven) accusations that they were party to faking malware to harm rival products have made me highly wary of the firm. I’ll never purchase anything from them because of their behaviour, at least till I see some change that they are willing to get with the programme as far as transparency and integrity are concerned.
Thanks to Reddit, I learned how to remove what I could, but the fact remains that after the whole FacebookâKaspersky scan for non-existent malware, McAfee would not work properly any more. This wasn’t due to any other malwareâI had run a very comprehensive series of legitimate malware scans guided by an expert in Germany at Bleeping Computer in the wake of this incident, and confirmed all was well. As far as I could tell, the only noticeable change to my system was what Facebook put on.
I was eventually forced to remove McAfee after 27 years of using their products, in favour of Avira. This is why: whatever was left on the computer kept fighting McAfee to turn itself off (above right, and video below). My Windows computer didn’t like the idea of having no antivirus program. I had attempted to reinstall McAfee once already, which stopped this behaviour for about a week. McAfee Virtual Technician could not resolve it, and I never got very far with McAfee support (as opposed to the incredibly helpful people on their forums). Over a month after Facebook forced its download on me, I was still paying the price of following their instructionsâwhen we should know by now that anything these idiots tell you cannot be of any advantage to the user. Sometimes, when you get their warnings at 3 a.m., you don’t necessarily think as clearly as you would at 3 p.m.
I don’t know how many hours I wasted on this in total, but I know I have saved many users a lot of time. For many days I found a lot of other Facebookers forced to do the same, and gave them some simple advice so that they would not fall into the same trap. Others have come to this blog: I’ve had some decent traffic around the two posts I wrote on the subject.
People really need to know that not only is Facebook messing around with your settings and tracking you, they are putting things on your computer. I’m glad, then, that I will principally remain there for a few messages, and page and group administrationâthe latter very necessary given all the bots and spammers that now plague the website. I’m sure I can’t be alone in spotting numerous spammers per day, spammers which Facebook often does nothing about when reported. That, too, should make us wonder.
A few years ago, I discovered that Google was monitoring and gathering user preferences even after one had opted out. Google would initially put an opt-out cookie that went with your browser when you first opt out, which is exactly what every other ad network doesâbut, then, within 24 hours, it would replace it with its standard cookie and begin tracking you again. It counted on people not returning to their ad preferences page, and the ploy may have worked for some two years before I discovered it, and reported it to the Network Advertising Initiative, who confirmed the error.
The NAI says that Google has remedied that, and I trust that it has. It didnât stop Google from hacking Iphone users the following year, circumventing the âDo not trackâ feature on the Safari browser, till they got busted by the Murdoch Press.
It seems these big Silicon Valley firms think they are a law unto themselves, as is evidenced by their approach to taxation, for instance, and it appears Facebook is now doing the same thing as Google when it comes to getting advertising preferences on you. In their world, user preferences are something to be spat on, not observed.
Facebook has often switched things on in its user preferences that you had switched off earlier, but I donât remember them having touched those settings for a few years. But a leopard doesnât change its spots. Recently, I discovered that Facebook had indeed turned on my advertising preference tracking, under âAds based on my use of websites and appsâ. I had it set to âNoâ; a month ago, I discovered this was set to âYesâ.
I promptly switched it off, but had discovered that Facebook had compiled quite the dossier on me on January 20. Had I agreed to it, this would have been fine; and I use Facebookâs targeting myself from time to time marketing to users that I believe have agreed to be tracked and marketed to.
Above: Facebook compiled a big dossier on my preferences for its ad targeting, though when you open it up, there are entries that bear no resemblance to what I like.
However, there are two worrying points here. The obvious one is Facebook disrespecting user preferences and collecting data on usâand there has been plenty of debate on just where those data go thanks to Mr Snowden. Secondly, for marketers, the data that Facebook has gathered are, to some degree, laughable.
As I reviewed and deleted I discovered things in there that I had no interest in whatsoever. In the time that Facebook had gathered data on me, it had supposedly built up a profile on me that was made up of over 1,000 points (above is the summary, though I have expanded this out to have a good read). I found, in my profile, that I was supposedly into search engine marketing, Westpac, dentistry, NASSCOM (not sure what this is), radar, cosmetology, unmanned aerial vehicles, ClickZ, Marabou (chocolate), miniskirts, high-heeled footwear (yes, I can understand that publishing a fashion magazine might have added these), National Basketball Association, the Houston Astres (who?), Leicester City FC, TNA Knockout, the Australia national rugby union team (fortunately, the All Blacks were accurately recorded), World Tag Team Championship (WWE), and the Authority (professional wrestling); I discovered that Facebook thinks Occupy Wall Street is a âReligious Centerâ. Now, some of these will have come from websites I may have browsed at, but that doesnât necessarily equate to my liking these things: what if you had browsed an article about the arrest of a child molester? Donât ask me where the Aussie rugby and wrestling come from, as I donât visit their sites or even news articles about either.
I spent considerable time deleting all of them, doing myself and Facebook a favour. Naturally, I switched off the tracking.
Above: My ad preference tracking is switched off. End of story? Unfortunately, not: Facebook doesn’t care what you’ve put in here.
I do think it is positive that Facebook reveals this, as it could have kept our preferences hidden, as it has done for years. It is only right that consumers are given a choice.
However, where are the ethics to continue doing it after a user has switched it off?
Because thatâs exactly what Facebook does, and, like Google, you canât pretend to me that these are all accidents. These are companies that believe they can do whatever they like, and intentionally have created systems to do so.
Interestingly, when I approached the US DMA about this data-gathering on January 22, I received no response, unlike the NAI, which got back to me after I furnished proof of Googleâs activities. At that point I had not told them who was doing it, I simply asked them what its position was, with its code of conduct, if a member were to gather data on a person even after that person had opted out.
Within two days, Facebook had built up a new profile about me, of just over 100 items. I checked with the DAA, which has a website where you can see if the opt-out cookies are present, and it confirmed that Facebookâs was. It seems, then, that Facebook does not honour its own opt-out cookie, exactly the same as Google. Whether it uses this data or not is immaterial: it shouldn’t be gathering them for the duration of the time I choose to be opted out. I havenât approached the DAA yet, but I will do after I get everything together.
The items, incidentally, were still laughable; even more so, because of the smaller number. By the 24th, I was apparently a fan of Bandcamp and the company Excite (remember them?), but to my recollection I had not visited any site about either. And the next day there were a few dozen data points, where apparently I liked B movies, Berlin (the band), the immune system, the MG ZR, Frank de Boer, Gracia Baur, sandals, Presbyterianism, the Mandarin language, and Trinidad and Tobago. Again, where this all came from, I have little clue.
Top: Within two days, Facebook had a number of points about me, despite my having chosen to have its advertising-preference tracking switched off. It’s Google all over again. Above: The DAA confirms that Facebook’s opt-out cookie is present, although as I’ve discovered, it makes no difference.
And so on. Every few days Iâd go in there, have a peek, and have a laugh, and noted that my tracking preference was still set to âOffâ.
I have accused Facebook of arrogance and this is yet another example. Iâve also accused them of incompetence.
Youâll have got to this point wondering why I still use it if I dislike the tracking. For a start, I shouldnât have to put up with user preferences being ignored, if the setting has been provided, and if Facebook itself has been notified (I have contacted them). And as long as I have an account, which, unfortunately I need to administer business pages and groups, the tracking will continue, even if I do not use any features for my personal Timeline. (In fact, I hardly do any more; to the point where Facebook always has, in my feed, a top post showing me what I did x years ago when I log in; reminding me, âGosh, didnât we have it good together?â liked a jilted lover.) By my own choice, I use Facebookâs messaging a lot (but not its app) and some very close friends contact me exclusively through that, and Iâm going to have to continue there, too, because there is some utility. I also realize the irony of having a “like” button on this blog.
In other words, Iâve minimized my activity with the site where I realistically can, and right now I donât care if I can no longer like, post, share or comment, which was becoming a very, very regular bug with Facebook anyway. (Itâs now getting more commonplace, as other friends begin getting the same symptoms with increasing frequency; it seems I hit the point before they did.)
Like with Google, whose privacy gaffes saw me minimize my contact with them, Iâve de-Facebooked where I can; and I accept I can go further (e.g. regular logging out and cookie-blocking). Iâll see where things go after I contact the DAA.
Deloitte has published a report on the increasing corruption in Australia and New Zealand, which Fairfax’s Stuff website reported on today.
Its opening paragraph: ‘An increase in bribery and corruption tarnishing New Zealand’s ethical image may be due to an influx of migrants from countries where such practices are normal.’
The problem: I’m struggling to find any such link in Deloitte’s report.
The article paraphrases Deloitte’s Ian Tuke perhaps to justify that opening paragraph: ‘Tuke said one working theory explaining the rise was the influx of migrants from countries such as China, which are in the red zone on Transparency International’s index of perceived corruption,’ but otherwise, the report makes no such connection.
The real culprit, based on my own reading of the report, is the lack of knowledge by Australians and New Zealanders over what is acceptable under our laws.
Yet again I see the Chinese become a far bigger target of blame than the source suggests, when we should be cleaning our own doorstep first.
The Deloitte report acknowledges that there is indeed a high level of corruption in China, Indonesia, India and other countries, making this a big warning for those of us who choose to extend our businesses there. It’s not migration to New Zealand that’s an issue: it’s our choosing to go into these countries with our own operations.
It would be foolhardy, however, for an article in the business section to tell Kiwis to stop exporting.
But equally foolhardy is shifting the blame for a problem that New Zealand really needs to tackleâand which we are more than capable of tackling.
The fact is: if we Kiwis were so clean, weâd uphold our own standards, regardless of what foreign practices were. Our political leaders also wouldn’t confuse the issue with, say, what happened at Oravida.
When faced with a choice of paying a kickback or not in the mid-2000s when dealing in eastern Europe, our people chose to stay cleanâand we lost a lot of money in the process.
To me they did the right thing, and I credit less my own intervention and more the culture we had instilled.
Hong Kong cleaned up its act in the 1970s with the ICAC, and I have said for decades (since the Labour asset sales of the 1980s) that New Zealand would do well in following such an example. Why havenât we?
Perhaps if we stopped shifting the blame and followed the recommendations in the Deloitte report, including shifting corporate cultures and instigating more rigorous checks, we can restore our top ranking in those Transparency International reports. But this has to be our choice, not a case where we are blaming migrants, for which there is little support in this very reasonable report.
I’ve gone into the reasons I support ânet neutrality elsewhere, but it was nice to hear about this on the wireless:
even though we still don’t know the specifics, as the FCC has kept this to itself for now. (We do know that Google has written a letter to the FCC, and that ‘an entire core part of the document was removed with respect to broadband subscriber access service,’ according to dissenting commissioner Ajit Pai.)
While I knew Comcast had spent tens of crore lobbying against ânet neutrality, the rest may surprise you. According to SumofUs.org (emphasis added):
Just six months ago, we were facing staggering odds. Big corporations like US cable TV giant Comcast had spent more than $750 million lobbying for a corporate-controlled Internet. Google, the biggest lobby in the industry, was refusing to speak up. The FCC chair Tom Wheeler, a former Big Cable lobbyist, was hostile to Net Neutrality.
You’d think that Google would want to keep its squeaky-clean good-guy image up, but not speaking up seems to support Julian Assange’s allegations that the firm is a âprivatized NSAâ, becoming increasingly militarized. Gordon Kelly in Forbes goes so far as saying that Microsoft and Google have swapped places, with Google now the old-school establishment firm trying to defend the good old days.
This highlights even more the importance to keep the ânet neutral, away from some of these larger firms whose mandate is, at best, uncertain and, at worst, unethical. When you think about innovations, including some of the websites we use today regularly, many were started by the little guy, and I’d like to see more of what independent minds come up with. (Facebook was one; Duck Duck Go was another.) Keeping the internet neutral in the US for all playersâand that includes New Zealanders selling their wares thereâis a good thing.
And if you needed a reminder, here is perhaps the most widely seen argument for ânet neutrality of them all in 2014:
Last month, I Tweeted Facebook, asking them to raise the reporting limit for bots. Right now, you can report around 40 bot accounts before a warning box comes up asking you to slow down. If you do another 10, you are barred from reporting any more for 24 hoursâeven though you are trying to help Facebook clean up its act.
I said that the rate of increase in bot accounts was exponential, and that raising the limit to 200 immediately might be useful.
Tonight, the 200 barrier has been broken. In other words, in one evening, not counting click farms (which are also hitting our groups like crazy, with a growing number from Morocco, Algeria, Mauritania and Tunisia daily), I came across 277 bot accounts on Facebook. All because I have a few groups and I was checking to see who was joining.
And here I was, thinking that over the last few weeks, when I was seeing a maximum of six daily, that Facebook had this problem under control.
Obviously, the bot nets found a way through whatever defences Facebook had.
I won’t republish the list of 277 here. There might be slightly fewer as there could be doubling-up in my listâyou can lose your place at night copying and pasting. If you do want to have a peek at what bot accounts look like, the second part of the list at my Tumblr blog will give you an idea. And if you’d like to report them, you’re most welcome toâthough since it’s neither your job nor mine, I wonder why we should bother. Facebook loves to brag about its numbers of how many people it has using the site. If in order to fool advertisers it shows a quarter-on-quarter increase by counting the bots, then maybe we should let it be, and eventually let the site fall over (and let’s face it, the frequency of that happening has increased, too).
All of which point to a website that is becoming less and less useful as a marketing toolâno wonder the likes of Ello saw an increase in usage in the last few weeks.
Many people will remember this video, which exposed Facebook using click farms to inflate customers’ likes (I would have used Veritasium’s original, but YouTube won’t show embedding codes at the moment):
I won’t repeat what they exposed, as the video does a far better job. Essentially, they are building up fake profiles with group activity, to look like legitimate profiles when they become members of various pages. However, I am noticing that the problem is getting worse. Despite getting busted, Facebook is making sure that engagement on its fan pages gets worse, so you have to pay for promotion.
One group I run, which has over 10,000 members, mostly in Germany, is getting a lot of these fake likers, principally from Morocco. Each day we’ve had over a dozen. Two, so far, even claim that they work for Facebook on their profiles (here’s one). (Facebook was contacted for comment, and, as usual, I have heard nothing back.) Now, you can claim these people are putting fake employers down, and that’s a reasonable conclusion. But even if they aren’t working for Facebook, they are working for a click farm, which can’t be any good for the website. In addition, Facebook is doing nothing to delete these click-farm profiles. [PS.: Despite being allowed to remain for years, Facebook deleted these accounts after this blog post was written.]
There are similar characteristics: there are lots of photos, but few that could be regarded as profile photos. The majority have random imagery. As with a lot of fake profiles, they are multilingual: these guys never, ever post a status in German, yet a lot (over 90 per cent) of their groups are German. The latest one I saw claimed to be based in Netherlands and did not have a single friend with a Dutch name. One had over 1,000 likes, which is not unreasonable, eitherâyet you could group them by industry! It was very obvious that they were being paid. I was fooled with the first few, but not after you get six in a nightâand they have only increased in number since.
They are harder to spot than the obvious fakes which use a stock photo for the profile, or the ones from China which all have joined the same poker game, or those that have only joined groups beginning with the letter A.
I realize these folks have to make a buck. But we, as Facebook customers, have to understand the effects. It means Facebook campaigns are becoming increasingly poor value, and, at some pointâmaybe even nowâit will not be worth paying a cent to the company to reach potential fans if there are other means.
PS.: One was accidentally let through and posted an irrelevant video, so they could be spammers getting extra hits for their clients.âJY
Consistently, for the last several weeks, the ads I would see on YouTube have been for Hyundai. I didnât think much of it, other than Hyundai going through an advertising blitz.
After uncovering Googleâs outright deceptions regarding its former Ads Preferences Manager, where the company promised not to track people when they opted outâbut began tracking people within 24 hours after they opted outâI have been careful about the cookies on my system, especially from Googleâs subsidiary, Doubleclick. Not only did I opt out of Google ads, after opting out, I blocked the Doubleclick cookie, which, logically, should mean that Google should not know my advertising preferences. All googleadservices.com cookies are also blocked. The fact that car advertising was creeping in was coincidental, I thought.
Today, Holden advertised its Colorado on my YouTube visit, and I got suspicious.
I know Google Plus tracks usâopting out of having your searches monitored also does nothing, incidentallyâand the minute I removed all Google cookies, my automotive advertising on YouTube ceased. The first ad was Corona beer, and the second and third were Air New Zealand. Other videosâand I watched 10 to testâhad no ads. No more Hyundais.
So Google, despite all the opt-out mechanisms, and despite my being very careful about what cookies are being allowed on my system, may still be tracking my advertising preferences. It wouldnât be the first time Google has been caught illegally and deceptively monitoring users after opt-outs or who have tighter browser privacy settings (using the Google Plus One button, which is how I suspect they are doing it). As I uncover more, Iâll update this blog.
The contributors or editors of Wikipedia are often quick to make changes after errors are pointed out. A recent funny one was for the suburb of Cannons Creek, in Porirua, when Wikipedia told a friend’s son:
Cannons Creek is a suburb of Porirua City approximately 22km north of Wellington in New Zealand. The citizens attempted to expel a demon but the exorcism backïŹred, rendering the town uninhabitable for the last ïŹfteen years.
This was changed within hours of my Tweeting about it, so a contributor must have spotted the vandalism to the page.
My earlier one about second-generation Hyundai Sonatas being classified as first-generation ones in the Wikimedia Commons was also remedied, which is good. I imagine someone will eventually see that the new Hyundai i10 cannot be both longer and shorter than its predecessor.
However, I still hold a poor impression of Wikipedia because of an incident some years ago that suggested that certain people in the hierarchy gamed the system.
The accusations of a senior editorâwho accused me of defamation and tried to force me to remove a blog post with links about Wikipediaâs faultsâdid not stand up to any scrutiny. The lesson is: if you want to abuse me with legal arguments on email for five days, you’d better get your facts straight when you’re talking to a guy with a law degree. (She got her wish though, because of Six Apart closing down Vox, which is where I had blogged this.)
It highlighted a certain arrogance among some of the people high up there. I hope she is not representative of senior Wikipedia editors but the amount of errors that I findâvery serious, factual ones on things I know aboutâis ridiculous. Her behaviour suggested that facts won’t get in the way of power trips.
One major error that has steadfastly remained for years is Wikipediaâs insistence that the Ford CE14 platform was used for a variety of US Ford cars in the 1980s. This work of fiction has made its way all over the internet, including to the IMCDB,* a Ford Tempo fan site, and elsewhere.
The correct fact is that CE14 was the 1990 European Ford Escort. Wikipedia states that it was used for the 1980 US Ford Escort and its derivatives (Mercury Lynx, Ford EXP, Mercury LN7) and the Ford Tempo and Mercury Topaz.
This is incredibly easy to debunk for anyone who has followed the Ford Motor Company over the years, or read a book or a magazine article about it. First: Ford’s alphanumeric codes were not in existence when these US cars were being developed. Secondly, the Tempo and Topaz are not in the C segment at Ford, but the CD segment; but, in any case, they did not have an alphanumeric code. Thirdly, the E in CE14 stands for Europe, which, the last time I checked, is not in the US. Fourthly, the numbers are more or less sequential as the projects are lined up at Ford. If 7 is Probe, 11 (if I recall correctly) was the 1990 Ford Laser, then how on earth could 14 be for a car that came out in 1980? (You can point out that CD162 was released before CD132, but there is another story behind that.)
The user who created the original, error-filled, unreferenced page has been awarded stars by their peers at Wikipedia. Well done. Wikipedia proponents will argue that I should go and correct this myself, but I wonder why I should. I’ve read how Wikipedia works, and a friend who tried to get false information corrected about his wife corrected confirms this. Senior editors check their facts online, and to heck with print references. What they will see is a lot of references to CE14 that back up the error (even though the error began with them), probably accuse and then block the new contributor of vandalism, and the status quo will be preserved. After all, Jimmy Walesâthe man most regularly credited as founding Wikipediaâhas his own birthday incorrectly stated on the website. It’s what Stephen Colbert called ‘Wikiality’: if enough people believe something to be true, then to heck with the truth. The Guardian cites some research at PARC:
Chi’s team discovered that the way the site operated had changed significantly from the early days, when it ran an open-door policy that allowed in anyone with the time and energy to dedicate to the project. Today, they discovered, a stable group of high-level editors has become increasingly responsible for controlling the encyclopedia, while casual contributors and editors are falling away. Wikipedia â often touted as the bastion of open knowledge online â has become, in Chi’s words, “a more exclusive place”.
One of the measures the Parc team looked at was how often a user’s edit succeeds in sticking. “We found that if you were an elite editor, the chance of your edit being reverted was something in the order of 1% â and that’s been very consistent over time from around 2003 or 2004,” he says.
Meanwhile, for those who did not invest vast amounts of time in editing, the experience was very different. “For editors that make between two and nine edits a month, the percentage of their edits being reverted had gone from 5% in 2004 all the way up to about 15% by October 2008. And the ‘onesies’ â people who only make one edit a month â their edits are now being reverted at a 25% rate,” Chi explains.
In other words, a change by a casual editor is more likely than ever to be overturned, while changes by the elite are rarely questioned. “To power users it feels like Wikipedia operates in the way it always has â but for the newcomers or the occasional users, they feel like the resistance in the community has definitely changed.”
The late Aaron Swartz, whom I have admired, was quoted in the article:
“I used to be one of the top editors ⊠now I contribute things here and there where I see something wrong.” The reason, he explains, is that the site feels more insular and exclusive than in the past. “In general, the biggest problem I have with the editors is their attitude,” he says. “They say: ‘We’re not going to explain how we make decisions, we basically talk amongst ourselves.’
It appears to be why Larry Sanger, the other guy who founded Wikipedia, left. This very behaviour was something he forecast a decade ago that appears to hold true today (original emphases):
But there are myriad abuses and problems that never make it to mediation, let alone arbitration. A few of the project’s participants can be, not to put a nice word on it, pretty nasty. And this is tolerated. So, for any person who can and wants to work politely with well-meaning, rational, reasonably well-informed peopleâwhich is to say, to be sure, most people working on Wikipediaâthe constant fighting can be so off-putting as to drive them away from the project. This explains why I am gone; it also explains why many others, including some extremely knowledgeable and helpful people, have left the project.
The root problem: anti-elitism, or lack of respect for expertise. There is a deeper problemâor I, at least, regard it as a problemâwhich explains both of the above-elaborated problems. Namely, as a community, Wikipedia lacks the habit or tradition of respect for expertise. As a community, far from being elitist (which would, in this context, mean excluding the unwashed masses), it is anti-elitist (which, in this context, means that expertise is not accorded any special respect, and snubs and disrespect of expertise is tolerated). This is one of my failures: a policy that I attempted to institute in Wikipedia’s first year, but for which I did not muster adequate support, was the policy of respecting and deferring politely to experts. (Those who were there will, I hope, remember that I tried very hard.)
I need not recount the history of how this nascent policy eventually withered and died. Ultimately, it became very clear that the most active and influential members of the project–beginning with Jimmy Wales, who hired me to start a free encyclopedia project and who now manages Wikipedia and Wikimediaâwere decidedly anti-elitist in the above-described sense.
Consequently, nearly everyone with much expertise but little patience will avoid editing Wikipedia, because they willâat least if they are editing articles on articles that are subject to any sort of controversyâbe forced to defend their edits on article discussion pages against attacks by nonexperts. This is not perhaps so bad in itself. But if the expert should have the gall to complain to the community about the problem, he or she will be shouted down (at worst) or politely asked to “work with” persons who have proven themselves to be unreasonable (at best).
I do not doubt for a second that Wikipedia was started with the best of intentions. It was a really good resource a decade ago, when it attracted the best minds to the project. It does, I am sure, attract some incredibly talented people who are generous and knowledgeable. I am told the science pages are some of the best written out there because those ones have been held up to the original Wikipedia standards. But many pages seem to reflect the great social experiment of the internet: email was great before spammers, and YouTube is great without comments. Democratization does not always mean that the masses will improve things, especially in the realm of specialist knowledge.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a very long-winded way of explaining why I took the word wiki off the home page of Autocade 12 hours ago. I started it allowing public edits, using the same software as Wikipedia, and these days, only specialists can edit the site. The word wiki, ignoring its etymology, is now too closely associated with Wikipedia, and that brand is just too tainted these days for my liking.
* Since I approached the IMCDB, which actually has people dedicated to accuracy, many of its CE14 references were removed.âJY
In an age of social media, you would think it was the most stupid thing to try to shut down the biggest online community you have.
Ikea has done just that, on IP grounds, against Ikea Hackers, by getting their legal department to send Jules Yap, its founder, a cease-and-desist letter after her site had been going for eight years. In that time she had sent customers to Ikea, after they were inspired by the new ideas her community had on doing new things with Ikea furniture.
There are arguments that Ikea could have been liable for any injuries sustained from the “hacks”, but that’s daft. Are we really that litigious as a society, prepared to blame someone for something we ourselves freely chose to do? Ikea has instructions on how to build their furniture, and it’s your own choice if you are prepared to go against them.
And eight years is an awfully long time to bring a case against someone for trade mark usage, rendering this claim particularly weak.
There are other Ikea-hacking websites and Facebook pages as wellâso it’s even dumber that Ikea would go after one with such a huge community, a website that has an Alexa ranking currently in the 20,000s (in lay terms: it has a huge audience, potentially bigger than that of Ikea’s corporate site itself in Jules’s country, Malaysia). Jules says that she has to take down the ads as part of her settlement for being able to retain the siteâads that simply paid for her hosting, which she might not be able to afford to do any more. (Some fans have offered to host for free or provide new domain names.)
The Ikea Hackers logo doesn’t look remotely like the Ikea one, which would readily imply there was no endorsement by the Swedish company.
Therefore, Ikea’s statement, on its Facebook, holds very little water.
Vi Àr glada för det engagemang som finns för IKEA och att det finns communities runt om i vÀrlden som Àlskar vÄra produkter lika mycket som vi gör.
Vi kÀnner ett stort ansvar mot vÄra kunder och att de alltid kan lita pÄ IKEA. Det Àr viktigt för oss att vÀrna om hur IKEA namnet och varumÀrket anvÀnds för att kunna behÄlla trovÀrdigheten i varumÀrket. Vi vill inte skapa förvirring för vÄra kunder om nÀr IKEA stÄr bakom och nÀr vi inte gör det. NÀr andra företag anvÀnder IKEA namnet i kommersiellt syfte, skapar det förvirring och rÀttigheter gÄr förlorade.
DÀrför har Inter IKEA Systems, som Àger rÀttigheterna till IKEA varumÀrket, kommit överens med IKEA Hackers om att siten frÄn slutet av juni 2014 fortsÀtter som en fan-baserad blog utan kommersiella inslag.
Essentially, it uses the standard arguments of confusion, safeguarding its trade mark, andâthe Google translation followsââWhen other companies use the IKEA name for commercial purposes, it creates confusion and rights are lost.’
This can be fought, but Jules elected not to, and her lawyer advised against it. It’s a pity, because I don’t think she received the best advice.
On Ikea’s Swedish Facebook page, some are on the attack. I wrote:
I would hardly call her activity âcommercialâ in that the ads merely paid for her web hosting. I doubt very much Jules profited. But I will tell you who did: Ikea. She introduced customers to you.
While your actions are not unprecedented, it seems to fly in the face of how one builds the social aspects of a modern brand.
The negative PR you have received from this far outweighs the brand equity she had helped you build. It was a short-sighted decision on the part of your legal department and has sullied the Ikea brand in my mind.
In 2004, the last year that the INGKA Holding group filed accounts, the company reported profits of âŹ1.4 billion on sales of âŹ12.8 billion, a margin of nearly 11 percent. Because INGKA Holding is owned by the nonprofit INGKA Foundation, none of this profit is taxed. The foundation’s nonprofit status also means that the Kamprad family cannot reap these profits directly, but the Kamprads do collect a portion of IKEA sales profits through the franchising relationship between INGKA Holding and Inter IKEA Systems.
The tax haven secret trust the companies use is legal, says Ikea, which is why it pays 3·5 per cent tax. I have little doubt that the complex structure takes advantage of laws without breaking them, and Kamprad was famous for departing Sweden for Switzerland because of his home country’s high taxes. The cease-and-desist letter probably is legal, too. And they show you what mentality must exist within the organization: forget the Swedishness and the charitable aspects, it’s all about the euros.
When I said in January that 
