On Andrew Yang’s run for the Democratic nomination in the US:
If Mastodon ever stops supporting that Javascript, I wrote: ‘Pretty stoked at what Andrew Yang has managed to achieve. Certain forces tried to minimize his coverage, to give him as little legitimacy as possible (sounds familiar). Yet he also normalized the idea of an Asian American presidential candidate, paving the way either for himself in 2024 or for someone else. #YangGang’. Those forces include some of the Democratic activist media.
It’s a damned shame. Yang didn’t vilify Republicans, listened to both sides, and was a pragmatist with solutions. Granted, there were areas his policies fell short, but at least he presented the optimistic side of American politics, something so rarely seen in what we outsiders perceive to be such a negative, murky world. Now Americans (and those of us watching from without) will likely face a shouting-match campaign.
And found on the web: a cellphone with a rotary dial that its creator, Justine Haupt, claims is more practical for her, and where calling is faster than with her modern phone. No apps, no SMS, but if you’re after something to call people, it does the job admirably. Her frequently dialled numbers are stored, so it’s only new numbers where she has to dial. The dial also serves as a volume control. Since I’m getting sick of apps, and I can’t be alone, Haupt may be on to something.
In her words: ‘A truly usable rotary-dial cellphone to replace my flip phone (I don’t use a smart phone). This is a statement against a world of touchscreens, hyperconnectivity, and complacency with big brother watchdogs.’
With the Twitter advertising preference monster continuing to gather preferences on all of us even after opting outāwhich basically makes Twitter FacebookāI decided to switch the MastodonāTwitter Crossposter around.
With Twitter being my main social network, I was quite happy to allow the Crossposter to take my Tweets and turn them into Toots on Mastodon, and Iād check in to the latter regularly to respond to people.
But with this latest discovery, Iām having second thoughts. We all know Twitter censors, and protects bigots, and its latest way to make a quick buck crosses a line.
I know most people have lines that they redraw regularly, especially when it comes to social media and phone apps, but Iām trying to manage mine a little better.
What Iāll miss is the news: I get plenty from Twitter, often breaking items. Iāll have to find an equivalent, or a news bot, on Mastodon. Iāll also miss interactions with real friends Iāve made on the service. It was incredible to get the condolence messages from Twitter. But if Stephen Fry can walk away from time to time, leaving millions there, I can probably take some time out from the 5,200 following me.
Note that I wonāt cease going to Twitter altogether: Iām not going cold turkey. There’s a bunch of us supporting one another through Alzheimer’s in the family, so I still want to be there for them. But if plans go well, then it wonāt be my main social network any more. Twitterās advertising clients will all miss me, because I simply never consented to Twitter compiling info to micro-target me. Mastodon will get my info first.
And if Mastodon, one day, decides to do ads, I actually wonāt mind, as long as they donāt cross that line. If Iāve opted out of personalization, I expect them to respect it. Even Google respects this, and they’re a dodgy bunch. The fact I have an IP address tied to my country, and that Iāve given some personal info about me, is, in my book, enough. Besides, anyone who knows me will know that a lot of the preferences shown in Twitter have no connection with meājust as Facebookās were completely laughable.
PS.: Dlvr.it does not take RSS feeds to send to Mastodon. I’m trying out the Activitypub plug-in for Wordpress instead.
Go a bit further to this link, and there they are, nearly 500 preferences linked to me, compiled even though I had opted out of personalizationāmaking Twitter just as bad as Facebook.
What do I do? Exactly what I did on Facebook: I deselected each and every single one. Twitter doesnāt need this to market to me. Frankly itās enough that it has my IP address and it can geo-target. It doesnāt need any more precision than that. I get to the bottom of the page, having done them all:
And just like Facebook, within hours it has reselected over 400 of them, repopulating preferences and overriding what the user wants.
In fact, some were being reselected within seconds, but I put that down to the fact I was using a cellphone. As of this writing, the second deselections have been done on the desktop.
This is simply not right, but we have been seeing signs in the latter part of the 2010s that Twitter is as bad as Facebook, with its love of bots, bigotry and its mass censorship. Now itās as devoted to selling its users as the rest of Big Tech. The net result is Iāll begin limiting my time on Twitter because its privacy intrusion has gone too far. It cannot be trusted. It will probably become a work tool as Facebook has, where I do little of my own stuff, and only serve my clients; or I simply have automated content.
I suppose you can always say, āWell, at least itās not as bad as ā¦ā and on that note, I checked in to Facebook to see if I could post a question on why advertising preferences were not editable.
Eventually I found four others had managed, after wading through Facebookās many layers of pages before getting to one where you could pose a question, to ask the same.
Except none of them are clickable to a question-and-answer page. They all take you to a Facebook Business advertising queriesā page.
Therefore, I asked the question even though it had already been asked. I doubt Iāll hear back, as I noticed that on the same visit, Facebook had censored two of my earlier responses.
Why? They reveal that Facebookās platform is buggy, that I was unable to do some things on pages that it claimed I was able to do.
All I can say is that this is petty. Facebook: for the last 15 years your platform has been buggy. Everyone knows this. Covering up a couple of comments made in your own forums, comments that are truthful and actually helpful to others who encounter the same thing, doesnāt make your platform any less buggy. But this is the Zuckerberg way: all-too-precious, wimpy against criticism, with a self-belief that not publishing something will make it go away. I mean, itās worked against equally wimpy governments. It is a page out of the Google playbook, too: its forums are full of cultist believers who ask, āHow dare you question our god?ā when you post about bugs. However, it alienates users.
Itās probably why the old Getsatisfaction Facebook forum was closed down, because it revealed so many bugs about the system.
Iām hoping the 2020s will see some sort of mass rejection of these Big Tech social-tracking platforms, but I thought that would happen years ago. I was wrong. There are still good people on them but there are also good people on Mastodon and elsewhere.
PS.: Here we are, four hours later, after I unticked all the preferences. At least 300 of them have been reselected by Twitter. So it is like Facebook. Once again, we have to say to a US Big Tech firm: stop lying. Your claims about your settings are bogus.
P.PS.: Day two, still fighting Twitter, which reticked a lot (but not all) of the preferences. Still in the hundreds.
Surprisingly, Vivaldi hadnāt notified me of any updates for monthsāI was on v. 2.05, and had no idea that they were up to 2.10. Having upgraded manually, I noticed its handling of type had deteriorated. Here is one paragraph in Lucire:
My font settings had also changed.
Coincidentally, I downloaded Opera GX last night to have a go, and it displays type in the way Iām used to:
Since both are Chromium-based, and Opera is sensitive about privacy as Vivaldi is, I decided to make the change and see if I like the new browser better. I was used to Operas of old being independent, not Chromium-based, but the good news is I could use the same plug-ins.
Iām missing Vivaldiās easy screenshot process and its clipping (Opera GX has something similar but introduces an extra step of saving the file) but so far the browsers arenāt too different in terms of everyday functionality. Opera GXās extensionsā window isnāt as well organized and I have to scroll to tinker with the settings of anything later in the alphabet.
The unchangeable dark theme takes a bit of getting used to (but it matches my laptop, so thereās that), and thereās a GX home page thatās superfluous for me.
I donāt need the built-in ad blocker out of principle, but I do have certain anti-tracking plug-ins (e.g. Privacy Badger) that I was able to install from the Opera shop without incompatibility.
Hard-core gamers may like the CPU limiter and RAM limiter, to make sure the browser doesnāt eat up capacity for their games. Itās not something I need concern myself about, but I can see it being handy. I remember when old Chrome (many years ago) and Firefox (more recently) began eating memory like crazy with my settings (no idea why), and this would have been useful.
But as someone who reads online a lot, itās important that type is properly handled. I donāt know what Vivaldi has done to its type rendering, and thatās probably the biggest thing that tipped me in favour of change.
There are websites such as CBS News in the US that no longer let us here in New Zealand view them. US Auto Trader is another one. Itās a damned shame, because I feel itās a stab at the heart of what made the internet greatāthe fact that we could be in touch with each other across borders. These two US websites, and there are plenty more, are enacting the āfortress Americaā policy, and Iāve never believed that isolationism is a good thing.
Letās start with the Auto Trader one. As someone who found his car on the UK Auto Trader website, it seems daft for the US to limit itself to its own nationās buyers. What if someone abroad really would like an American classic? Then again, I accept that classic cars are few and far between on that site, and if photos from the US are anything to go by, the siteās probably full of Hyundai Sonatas and Toyota Camrys anyway.
I went to the CBS website because of a Twitter link containing an interesting headline. Since weāre blocked from seeing that site, then I logically fed the same headline into a search engine and found it in two places. The first was Microsoft News, which I imagine is fine for CBS since they probably still get paid a licence for it. The second, however, was an illegal content mill that had stolen the article.
I opted for the former to (a) do the right thing and (b) avoid the sort of pop-ups and other annoying ads that content mills often host, but what if the Microsoft version was unavailable? These geo-restrictions actually encourage piracy and does the original publisher out of income, and I canāt see that as a good thing.
Some blamed the GDPR coming into force in the EU, so it appears CBSāwhich apparently is against Donald Trump talking isolationism yet practises itādecided to lump ānot Americaā into one group and include us in it. But so what if GDPR is in force? Itās asking you to have more reasonable protections for privacyāyou know, the sort of thing your websites probably had 15 years ago by default?
I still donāt think itās that hard to ask users to hop over to Aboutads.info and opt out of ad tracking on each of their browsers. We havenāt anything as sophisticated as some websites, which put their controls front and centre, but we at least provide links; and we ourselves donāt collect intrusive data. Yes, some ad networks we use do (which you can opt out of), but weād never ask them for it. The way things are configured, I donāt even know your IP address when you feed in a comment.
Ours isnāt a perfect solution but at least we donāt isolateāwe welcome all walks of life, regardless of where you hail from. Just like the pioneers of the web, such as Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Make the internet great again.
Yesterday, 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.
If you decide not to act accordingly, we will immediately delete your page.
Yours,
Facebook Security Team
The āfromā address is secure@facebook.com01259.com, which should already scream āFake!ā but my eyes werenāt 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, itās on Facebook, but itās actually a Facebook page, which anyone can set up. This is the āaboutā section from that page. If you click on their link, thatās 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 thatās 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 (itās still there, as it has been since September). Thereās also a second one along the same lines, also from September.
Hereās 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. Iād call this an implicit endorsement of criminal activity.
Itās not unlike Google Plus, which used to delete my posts critical of Google itselfāeven though these are real warnings.
Please do not be taken in by this identity theft scamāand Iām 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.
Iāve discovered that the newer the Instagram, the buggier it is. Weāve already seen that it canāt cope with video if you use Android 7 (a great way to reduce video bandwidth), and, earlier this year, filters do not work.
I downgraded to version 59 till, last week, Instagram began deleting direct messages as its way to force me to upgrade. Neither versions 119 or 120 are stable, and are about as reliable as one of Boris Johnsonās marriages, although they have fixed the filter problem.
Neither version has an alignment grid to aid you to adjust an image so itās square, even though Instagramās own documentation says it remains present. Presently, only Tyler Henry and other psychics can see the grid:
I imagine this is Googleās way of saving on bandwidth and it is utterly successful for them as nothing is ever transmitted.
The ZIPping process took probably 15ā20 minutes a go.
A comparable service like Wetransfer or Smash just, well, transfers, in less than the time Google Drive takes to archive a bunch of files.
I also notice that Google Drive frequently only sends me a single image when the sender intends to send a whole bunch. Thereās no age discrimination here: both an older friend and colleague and a young interviewee both had this happen in October when trying to send to me. It is, I suspect, all to do with an interface that hasnāt been tested, or is buggy.
Basically: Google Drive does not work for either the sender or the recipient.
This morning a friend and colleague tried to send me more files using this godawful service, and this time, Google Drive at least gave me a sign-on prompt. Even though I was already signed on. Not that that does anything: you never, ever log in. However, for once, the files he tried to send me actually did come down in the background.
I should note that for these Google Drive exercises, I use a fresh browser (Opera) with no plug-ins or blocked cookies: this is the browser I use where I allow tracking and all the invasiveness Google likes to do to people. Now that it has begun grabbing Americansā medical records in 21 states without patient consent in something called ‘Project Nightingale’ (thank you, Murdoch Press, for consistently having the guts to report on Google), weāre in a new era of intrusiveness. (Iām waiting for the time when most Americans wonāt care that Google, a monopoly, has their medical records, after the initial outcry. No one seems to care about the surveillance US Big Tech does on us, which puts the KGB and Stasi to shame.)
Looking at Googleās own help forums, it doesnāt matter what browser you use: even Chrome doesnāt work with Drive downloads in some cases.
The lesson is: stop using Google Drive for file transfers, as Smash does a better job.
Or, better yet, stop using Google. Get a Google-free phone, maybe even one from Huawei.
Meanwhile, I see WordPress’s Jetpack plug-in did this to my blog today without any intervention from me. I imagine it did an automatic update, which it was not set to do.
Thereās untested software all over the place, ignoring your settings because it thinks it knows better. News flash, folks, your programs donāt know better.
A great way for one tech company to get rid of criticisms of another tech company for a few hours, I guess, harming its ranking in the process. Google itself has done it before.
Farewell, Jetpack. Other than the stats and the phone-friendly skin, I never needed you. I’m sure there are alternatives that don’t wipe out my entire blog.
Facebookās advertising preferences are getting more useless by the day. Even a company as dodgy as Google has managed to keep its preference page working.
Over the years Iāve been telling people that they can delete their interests from Facebook if theyāre uncomfortable with the targeting, since Facebook gathers these interests even when you have opted out of targeted ads. Now, you canāt. If youāre on the desktop, Facebook just wonāt show them to you. You can have this window open for hours for nothing to appear (and yes, I have tried regularly).
Maybe you donāt have any, Jack? You just said you deleted them. Fact: I do have them, except they are only visible on the cellphoneāand as usual theyāre not that accurate. However, on the cellphone, these cannot be deleted or edited in any way.
I also have a set of different ones if I export my Facebook data, but that’s another story.
And remember when I said I opted out of alcohol ads, yet I still see plenty, especially from Heineken, which has even uploaded my email and private information to Facebook without my permission, and refuses to respond? (I may have to get the Privacy Commissioner to intervene again.) Facebook does say that opting out doesnāt necessarily work. In which case, you have to wonder why on earth the feature is thereāregardless of what you toggle, Facebook does what it wants. Even Google doesnāt get this bad.
Remember: Facebook offers you features, but they donāt necessarily work.
And advertisers: Facebookās audience estimates, by their own admission, have no bearing on the real population, and there is no third-party auditing. Even if you tailor your promotions, thereās no guarantee theyāre even reaching the people you want. My interests are certainly incorrectānot that I can do anything about it so you donāt waste your money. Now multiply that by hundreds of millions of users.
I had a call from a nice gentleman working for Google called Shabhaz today. No, he wasnāt about to tell me that I wasnāt on the āfirst page of Googleā: he worked for Google My Business, where they want to verify businesses and suck them into the ecosystem, complete with dashboard and social features.
Iāve always ignored the postcards that come and the one time my curiosity was piqued, the blasted site didnāt work anyway. I canāt remember the specifics now, but I recall my usual reaction: āWhat Google says and what Google does are entirely different things.ā You come to expect it from US Big Tech.
I suppose if you ignore it for enough years, the Big G phones you.
I proceeded to tell Shabhaz all the reasons I hated (actually, thatās not strong enough a word) his firm, but kept repeating, āIām not angry at you, only at your employer.ā And words to the effect of, āA man has to make a living, so I donāt have a problem that you work for them, but this is a firm with highly dubious ethics.ā
He did say, āIf I had that experience, Iād hate them, too,ā and I had to correct him and expand on the stories: āItās not just about my experienceāitās all the things Google does that violate our privacy, not just mine, but everyoneās.ā
Nevertheless, you canāt stay angry at a guy who has had nothing to do with his bossesā incompetence, greed, avarice and tax avoidance, and is only trying to collect a pay cheque, so I agreed to help him out.
Of course, it didnāt work as planned, as updating the address leads to this:
The house has only been there since 1972, and Google Earth has it, but then we all know that Google Earth operates in some kind of parallel universeāparallel to even Google My Business, it seems. One day, I suspect Google will catch up with houses built in the 1970s.
But seriously, with three businesses all linked to my email address (Heaven knows how) I wonder if anyone has ever got any business through Google My Business.
Iāve been on Linkedin longer than most people I know and Iāve never received any work enquiries from it.
And Iāve yet to have anyone tell me that they found my business through Google, so Iām tempted to delete the listings for Jack Yan & Associates and Lucire from the My Business dashboard.
The thing is, I donāt want to read your reviews about my businesses on Google. I donāt want to risk getting piled on by unethical actors, which totally can happen in this day and age. If you want to reach us, thereās a good contact form with all the addresses on our sites.
So whatās the prognosis out there? Since I actually donāt use the site except as a last resort, and have little desire to, your experience far outweighs mine.
On a related note, this also made me wonder about competence.
Iāve never given my permission to be in the Yellow Pages. And the fact that Lucire does screen printing is news to me. Who makes up this bullshit and tries to pass it off as authoritative?
A Tweet to them is so far unanswered, so I may get in touch with them to have this listing removed. This one I can answer: since Iāve never been in the Yellow Pages, I can say, hand on heart, that Iāve never had any business from them. By the looks of it, theyāll never send me anything relevant anyway.
In summary, today’s thought about Google:
With any other business that screws people over this badly and this often, weād avoid it as much as we could. Instead, most go to Google, pull their trousers down, and bend over.
Thanks to my friend Bill Shepherd, I’ve now subscribed to The Ad Contrarian newsletter. Bob Hoffman is one of the few who gets it when it comes to how insignificant the FTC’s Facebook fine is.
Five (American) billion (American) dollars sounds like a lot to you and me, but considering Facebook’s stock rose on the news, they’ve more than covered the fine on the rise alone.
Bob writes: ‘The travesty of this settlement guarantees that no tech company CEO will take consumer privacy or data security seriously. Nothing will change till someone either has to pay personally or go to jail. Paying insignificant fines with corporate money is now an officially established cost of doing business in techland andāwho knows?āa jolly good way to boost share prices.’
There’s something very messed up about this scenario, particularly as some of the US’s authorities are constantly being shown up by the EU (over Google’s monopoly actions) and the UK’s Damian Collins, MP (over the questions being asked of Facebookāunlike US politicians’, his aren’t toothless).
The US SEC, meanwhile, has released its report on Facebook, showing that Facebook knew what was happening with Cambridge Analytica in 2015ā16, and that the company willingly sold user data to the firm. SEC’s Stephanie Avakian noted, ‘As alleged in our complaint, Facebook presented the risk of misuse of user data as hypothetical when they knew user data had in fact been misused.’ You can read the entire action as filed by the SEC here.
Woah this was 12 days before US elections. Facebook employees knew stuff was going on but their DC office appears to have frozen them. Consumers were deceived and harmed through their personal data likely in order to protect Facebook's reputation and share price. pic.twitter.com/rTpSYptVPG
As I have been hashtagging, #Facebooklies. This is standard practice for the firm, as has been evidenced countless times for over a decade. The settlement: US$100 million. Pocket change.
