Tech musings from a non-tech: search engines and the nightmare of AWS

A great quote from Penn Jillette in Cracked: Einstein comes up with this idea E = mc² — a profound, powerful, mind-blowing idea — and he has to work forever to make people understand that and to share that reality. Woodward and Bernstein are pretty sure the president of the United States committed crimes, and […]

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Meta is grabbing your content for its ‘generative AI’—hopefully this opt-out form works

Meta (including Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and presumably Whatsapp) is taking user content for its ‘generative AI’. I don’t remember signing up for this, but then I stopped using these sites regularly. Allegedly you can opt out of this. I opted out of ad preference collection there and it made no difference, but in case it […]

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States of play for Facebook, Linkedin and OnlyKlans

Over a decade ago, I watched as Facebook intentionally broke organic reach and Lucire’s plummeted 90 per cent overnight. It was clear what Zuckerberg’s grift was: to get us to pay to boost posts. But there was already, back then, plenty of reasons you shouldn’t: it was buggy as heck. Fast forward to 2014 and […]

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We’re past the sort of digital marketing that some seek: the mid-’20s are about integrated marcom again

When I first started working, there was a profession called corporate identity. It wasn’t called branding. I noticed the vernacular change in the 1990s, more so in the early 2000s when even Wally Olins started using it more to describe what Wolff Olins did. You just have to follow the market. We’re at a point […]

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If you take out Tiktok, then why not Meta, too?

The Hon Debbie Ngarewa-Packer MP was right when she questioned our government’s decision to ban Tiktok from parliamentary devices. If it’s about foreigners getting hold of data, then why not ban Facebook and Instagram? Last I looked, Tiktok had not, unlike Facebook, been party to any genocides. Parliamentary Services says at least Meta is American […]

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I’ve left the data farms but occasionally revisit the Matrix

Warner Bros.   Even though Twitter is now in its MySpaceX era, I won’t shut my account. I have scripts that run through it, and I don’t wish for some schmuck to come in later and claim my username. Mastodon has taken off this week, my Twitter notifications are at a low, and as I […]

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Farewell to Drivetribe—and a reminder to keep your own copies

Not much of my old Drivetribe channel left now   Sadly, I was late to the demise of Drivetribe—though as some on Reddit point out, the brand still exists on other channels. But as for hosting the content themselves, that ended in January, and we content creators had till then to get our stuff off. […]

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Instagram scammers are next-level lazy (and greedy)

This was somewhat disappointing.    This chap contacts me, seemingly wanting permission to repost our Instagram images. His personal info has been removed. Hello there, We have reviewed your page and we truly loved your work!    We’d like to repost your pictures on our profile. Our account is [redacted] and we have over 200.000 […]

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Even if they don’t delete you, people are deactivating their Instagram accounts

I probably should have included this in yesterday’s blog post. When Lucire first lost its Instagram account, I searched for Instagram deactivate on Twitter. Sure enough, there were others in the same boat. However, on subsequent searches, these were far more frequent:    I’m not being selective here—indeed there was an earlier search that had […]

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For once, the US media were on Facebook’s case (they’ve more cohones than their government)

For once, you didn’t need me to point out the unethical happenings of Facebook, Inc. when the mainstream media actually cared.    First we had the Murdoch Press run ‘The Facebook Files’ in The Wall Street Journal, which I heard about from the incomparable and insightful Bob Hoffman on the 26th ult. The WSJ begins: […]

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