Remember Tumblr, the platform owned by Verizon that I left? I left because of Verizon’s policies, of placing their corporate agenda ahead of the users. I went to NewTumbl instead—a site that Tumblr users might not know about, since Verizon has ensured that searches for its competitor come up empty. I was […]
Read More… from Verizon’s continued hypocrisy borne of pettiness
I’m not saying I can’t be conned—because by my own admission, I have been—but sometimes when you’re very sure of your position, scammers’ lies don’t work. Here’s a fascinating one that came in today, a lot more aggressive than the usual request for helping someone move millions of dollars of bullion out of the […]
Read More… from The porn blackmail scam—ignore it if you receive it
I know we all get these emails from time to time, but they still annoy me. If ‘Peter’ had visited this blog, he would know that every single post since 2006 has been my own, unpaid, unsponsored thoughts. Why would I change that now? You may say it’s a fair question, and […]
Read More… from I don’t do paid blog posts here (so don’t ask)
I wasn’t able to find anything about this online, and I wonder if anyone was already doing it. If not, maybe someone should. Could the big players, e.g. Amazon and Apple, not provide the public with a fake email address and password (or a series of them) that we can feed in to phishing […]
Read More… from Could the fight against phishing be shifted?
Some interesting bugs out there on Facebook that my friends are telling me about. One has been removed from all her groups, including one that I run (we never touched her account), another cannot comment any more (an increasingly common bug now), while Felicity Frockaccino, well known on the drag scene locally and in Sydney, […]
Read More… from Facebook’s still deleting drag accounts and keeping bots
Now that I’ve figured out that Facebook only works on alternate days (or at least evenings, since it gave up the ghost again for the early afternoon), I’m back into my usual swing of things. It’s not so much that I spend that much time on social networks, but getting to the bottom of things […]
Sometimes you wonder if the big players on Silicon Valley exist in a parallel universe. Google, of course, is a firm that makes little sense to me: one that usually says one thing and does another, in almost every encounter I have had with it. And you know they can’t be that smart if, […]
Instagram bans are like Facebook blackouts or Google blacklists: no matter what the company says your time-out is, it’s considerably longer. Day 1 was Sunday, when I noticed that the likes I made via Ink 361 didn’t stick. I went back to Iconosquare (Statigram) and this message flashed up: The wisdom online is […]
Read More… from Even on Instagram, they prefer bots to legitimate users
PS.: As of 11.28 a.m. GMT, eight hours after the post below, Facebook has put its normal reporting options back.—JY Facebook appears to be giving up on the bot fight. As of today, you can no longer mark an account as a fake one: the closest option is to say that it is using a […]
Read More… from Found a Facebook bot? Facebook wants you to leave it as reporting option vanishes
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 hours—even though you are trying to help […]
Read More… from How many Facebook bots do you see in an evening? I count over 250