It’s pretty bad that Admiral, which detects whether you are using an ad blocker or not, now advises this with Privacy Badger.
   Let me make this very clear: I am not against advertising on websites. I have advertising on our websites.
   I am against tracking by people such as Google. And that is all I am blocking: the tracking part. There is a difference.
   Frankly, if you need to track in order for your ads to work, then there is something deeply wrong with your model. You’re actually doing your clients out of exposure.
   This goes for the ad networks that work with us, too. If you have Privacy Badger installed and both you and I miss out on ads on our sites, then so be it.
   What is so wrong about using the context of the page and delivering ads to suit? Everyone still wins with this model and we don’t feel as violated.
   So I won’t be disabling Privacy Badger, thanks.
   It also means I’ll be happy to charge a premium on advertisers who want to appear on our site because the content is relevant—and because the non-tracked stuff will at least get seen by an engaged public.

Here’s a screenshot from the new members of one of my Facebook groups—actually the only public one I still have. Since Facebook lets spammers join now, we have to block them manually. Their posts don’t make it through to the group as we have safeguards there, too. But I’m not going to let them inflate, falsely, the member count, which in turn will make it harder for posts to reach group members.
   A lot of these bots—they hunt for large groups and their scripts join them—seem to hide under the guise of role-playing for the Pinoy TV series Halik, and they all chat to each other in automated fashion. As Facebook is stupid enough not to recognize the bot activity, you’d think that at least they could see the script at play here, as these accounts are often new, and they set to work joining large groups and pages.
   They don’t recognize them, or, they do recognize them and allow the bot activity to carry on with their blessing. Each one of these blocked accounts was reported, and as usual they were found to be perfectly fine.
   In this screenshot, there were five legitimate accounts. We used to keep the numbers well down because potential members had to answer basic questions, and even some legit people are too lazy to do that. Back then we would see one legit account joining after weeks or months. I think I preferred that, because it kept the spammers and bots away.
   It certainly gives the impression that bots, based on this sample (and others like it since Facebook’s pro-bot policy change arrived with this group), are running at about 50 per cent of the total, which gels with recent research that Instagram is 46 per cent fake (that is, 46 per cent of all accounts are not legit). Nevertheless, I still see far more bots than humans overall: just get yourself into the fake Halik accounts of the Smiths and Montefalcos, and now they’re branching out into other surnames like Montenegro and Buenavista. Thousands, untouched, the only consistent activity on the wasteland that is Facebook.

If someone who has never been authorized to have a role on a Facebook page can have full admin access to it, then it stands to reason that a legitimate owner of a Facebook page cannot do what she needs with it.
   That’s exactly what happened to my friend Holly Jahangiri, who has a Facebook page and an Instagram profile, both of which are connected. She can read her private messages. She can log into both, and she is the admin of both. Facebook has her email address and cellphone number. But she couldn’t schedule a post for either, and that’s when Facebook sent her into a loop—not unlike the one that Google sent me on in 2009, although Google’s forum person was way ruder.
   Facebook kept asking Holly to review her connection and confirm she is admin of her own page—information that they already had. Unless their databases are so shot to hell that even internally they cannot determine this.
   She would love to click ‘Confirm’ but the button was greyed out, saying, ‘You must be an admin of the associated Page’s business in Business Manager to confirm the Instagram account.’ But she is the admin.

   Even if she tried disconnecting her accounts and attempted to reconnect them, so she could review that connection that they asked for, no confirmation email ever arrived. And when she logged into both Facebook and Instagram, on desktop and mobile, the accounts were indeed linked and confirmed in their Account Center.
   It seems a small ask to be able to schedule a post on a page—mind you, Tumblr wouldn’t let me for some time, as every time we got to the scheduled moment, it would alter the day and move it forward into the future—but Holly persisted and decided to send them a message through their Business Support Center. She was lucky: she actually got a response. I never have. Or maybe she was unlucky that they responded.
   Their first piece of advice was to ask Holly to do what she had already done: disconnect and start over. She proved she did it with the screenshot they requested, and that it still didn’t work.
   Then they asked:

… in order for us to assist you better, please provide us with the following:

1. A screen recording in which illustrates the steps up to the section where the issue is showing. Please ensure that it is of the entire screen, including the URL bar at the top of the screen. For screen recordings, we recommend to upload the video on Dropbox and email the link to us. Do ensure the URL link is set to public. As in case we may need to forward your concern to the relevant team, this file will be very useful.

2. Page URL/ID where you are connecting your Instagram Account to.

   Even though Holly has the knowledge to do a screen recording, she felt this was getting ridiculous, and, like me, she wasn’t prepared to upgrade her Dropbox just to host a video for Facebook. And she had already given them (2).
   She explained things once again but that Facebook kept asking her confirm her Facebook page and Instagram connection—and providing her no means with which to do it. And that the Account Center said the two were connected.
   She did one more screenshot with URL showing. In it, Facebook is still asking her to ‘Confirm Your Facebook Page and Instagram Connection’ but giving her no means to do it.
   Facebook responded by saying they still needed a video. And Holly answered that it wasn’t going to happen.
   Then she received this:

Hello Holly,

Thank you for contacting Facebook Concierge Support. We greatly appreciate your patience while waiting for an update.
   We understand that you are unable to provide the video recording of the actual steps you are taking to show the issue being experienced.
   What we can see is that the [Holly’s page, redacted] is added on a Business Manager account where you have no role. Please be informed that if a Page is connected on a Business Manager account, the Instagram account you are trying to link on that Page must also be owned by the same Business Manager account.
   If you know who are the admins of the Business Manager account that owns the Page, please check with them if the Instagram account – [Holly’s Instagram account, redacted], is also added on that Business Manager. Also ask them to grant you admin access on that Business Manager. Once that is done, you can try again linking the Page and Instagram account.
   Feel free to get in touch with us if you need any further assistance and we will be very happy to assist you further.
   Do not hesitate to find our best support via https://www.facebook.com/business/help for future inquiries. We look forward in making your journey with Facebook a better one.
   Thank you for contacting Facebook Concierge Support. Have a nice day!

Kind regards,

Yoyo

   I would be fuming by now, because Holly is the admin of both, and there was no evidence of hacking. No one else is there as the admin.

   She wrote: ‘So who BUT me would own that business manager account? If it belongs to someone else, how do I undo that and create my own? How do I straighten this out? If it’s something I did incorrectly, then clearly I’m asking you: HOW DO I FIX IT?’
   In classic Big Tech support, it seems Yoyo never read her message. They wrote:

Hi Holly,

Thank you so much for your email.

I can perfectly understand that you are not aware on who is the Admin of the Business Manager. Therefore, what I can do for you is, I will submit and Admin appeal for you by you will need to provide me the with some information and documents as below :

1) A copy of a valid government-issued photo ID, such as a current driver’s license or a passport, of the individual signing the statement. See the different kinds of IDs we accept in the Help Center: https://www.facebook.com/help/159096464162185

2) A signed statement from a person with sufficient knowledge and authority over this matter that includes all of the following:
   a) The Facebook email address or profile URL associated with the Facebook account that you wish to have added as the new admin
   b) A description of requestor relationship to the Business (and authority to request access to the Business, as applicable);
   c) An explanation of your request, and whether there has been a termination of the employment and/or business relationship with the named person(s)/Business, as applicable;
   d) The past three invoices/billing statements on the ad account(s) that the Business owns AND the last 4 digits of the credit card(s) on the account(s);
   • If the BM does not have any ad account, please declare such information in the statement
   e) A declaration that the information you have provided is true and accurate (e.g. “I certify that the information provided is true and accurate”) – your statement must include similar language.

For any other issues, please feel free to initiate a chat support session at the following link:
https://www.facebook.com/business/help
   For any feedback regarding our features within platform, please use the link:
https://www.facebook.com/help/contact/268228883256323
   Thank you for contacting Facebook Concierge Support and have a good day ahead!

Regards,

Yoyo

   If you’ve made it this far, you’ll know why Holly shouldn’t need to provide any of the above. The first paragraph from Yoyo is completely wrong since Holly is aware of who the admin is, but Facebook seems to want to ignore that.
   At this point she was prepared to delete the lot—something I’m prepared to do, too, but haven’t. Apparently gadgets like IFTTT are tied to my account and they run things on Lucire’s Facebook page, which, based on the decision of the majority, is still being used by the team.
   She showed Yoyo another screenshot that confirmed she is the sole admin. And told them that she would not provide any additional documents.
   Their response, inter alia (and by this time, Yoyo was calling Holly ‘Yoyo’):

When it comes to data protection and privacy, Facebook does not reveal any information, the documents mentioned are mandatory since you are not the Admin of the Business Manager in which the Page is connected.
   We are not advising you to close your account for the sake of your business; rather, we are attempting to assist you.
   Please submit the mentioned documents as soon as they are ready so that we can assist you further.

   I can hear you screaming, ‘But she is the admin!’
   Any sane, reasonable person could empathize with Holly’s reply:

So, the point is, I AM admin of the business account that any of my own pages/account are connected with unless I somehow orphaned them THIS MORNING after my last email to you, and your request at this point is tantamount to phishing. I’m not playing – I will not be sending you additional ID; you have my email, phone number, address, etc. (I have sent my driver’s license to Facebook, in the past, and I now deeply regret it. I will not be doing it again; I do not believe you safeguarded it in the first place.)
   “We are not advising you to close your account for the sake of your business” – what a joke. My business has never benefited from Facebook in any way, shape, or form. I opened the Business account because Facebook led me to believe I had to have one in order to upgrade and maintain my pages. I HAD an ad account, which I deleted, this morning. Ads I ran in the past were basically sent to EXACTLY the opposite of my target demographics and never led to ONE SINGLE SALE, so that is useless to me.

• As an individual, all purchases I have ever made from other “businesses” on Facebook or Instagram have been scams.
• I report fake and imposter accounts and I am told that they do not violate community standards.
• I have reported actual kiddy porn in the past, to be told that it did not violate community standards.
• I can only conclude, at this point, that Facebook prefers bots and scammers and phishers of men, because – I guess – they don’t cause as many headaches and the numbers look GREAT to advertisers.

   I am now stuck in some sort of hellspace between your business center and your creator studio and ready to delete my personal profile as well as my pages and groups because I cannot figure out how to disconnect them from your “business center” thing.

   In fact, Holly would have added, given the chance (these are her words):

• I have been told by Facebook to download and install their partners’ anti-malware products and run them, despite my having my own premium subscription to Norton; I refused to do so, and was punished by a suspension of indefinite length (ended up being a couple of pleasant weeks away from Facebook);
• I have had my wrist slapped for posting factual COVID info and stats DIRECTLY from the CDC, articles I wrote on Medium.com, and most lately, a link to a Wikipedia article explaining the origins of the classic nursery rhyme, “Humpty-Dumpty”

   In other words, I’m not alone with the endless frustration this site causes. I’m still frustrated and I barely use it, because of all the basics it gets wrong, constantly. And normally I would never take a dig at someone’s name but ‘Yoyo’ describes what Holly went through.
   Holly wound up deleting all her ad and business accounts and reverted back to a personal one. When I read the above, I’d rather have the usual silence than what Facebook thinks passes for ‘support’!

This thread echoes what a lot of us feel in New Zealand when we see intentional misinformation on Twitter, possibly from the US. I answered back to one of these parties over the weekend, as did many, to see us all branded as ‘the left’ (I suppose if your politics are eugenics-led libertarianism, everyone is ‘the left’), while another “journalist” claimed that anyone who did so were part of a government op using taxpayer dollars (to which some of us asked, ‘Where’s my cheque?’). Folks, sometimes you just have to look at the evidence—do I believe the first-hand accounts of people I know plus what I myself observe, or the one single case you’ve hand-picked or the one single out-of-context quote you’ve intentionally misrepresented?

New Zealand being the target of a MASSIVE misinformation op is exhausting, you're constantly seeing and hearing things about your country that conflict with what you're seeing outside, and the people saying them HATE you

— Sascha Stronach is Screaming (@understatesmen) July 12, 2021

Certain geopolitical actors need our lockdown to be a sham, need us to be ruthlessly authoritarian, because if that's not true then it IS possible to humanely and effectively manage covid and that means they're not doing enough.

— Sascha Stronach is Screaming (@understatesmen) July 12, 2021

"A far-right journalist kept sending back food" becomes "they're starving people who won't submit!"

"They're doing follow-up emails after people leave quarantine" becomes "teams of soldiers are hunting down quarantine escapees!"

it's just so EXHAUSTING

— Sascha Stronach is Screaming (@understatesmen) July 12, 2021

If you try to set the record straight, then you're a brainwashed dupe and/or a bad actor bot plant, if you don't then it spreads and they come after you anyway

— Sascha Stronach is Screaming (@understatesmen) July 12, 2021

I am so very tired of NZ being this far-right target, but I know in my heart that covid is gonna be around and be a problem for a long time yet.

— Sascha Stronach is Screaming (@understatesmen) July 12, 2021

   While this explains what the foreign agenda are, it makes you wonder why certain media talking heads in this country, usually ones who work for foreign-owned news outlets, would be just as keen to sell us out. A lack of patriotism, a lack of perspective, a lack of ethics, or just a lack of bollocks?

At the beginning of July I noticed Facebook had changed its reporting options. Gone is the option labelled ‘Fake account’, replaced by ‘Harmful or spam’. It’s a small change that, I believe, is designed to get Facebook off the hook for failing to remove fake accounts: since you can’t report them, then you can’t say they’ve failed to take them down.

   Except, if you choose ‘Harmful or spam’, Facebook does acknowledge that your report is for a fake account:

   Of course they’re harmful. Harmful to us regular people who have to pay more and more money to reach our human supporters since the fakes command an increasing amount of fans on our pages, for instance. It isn’t harmful for Facebook’s revenue or Zuckerberg’s wealth. So it really depends how you define harmful; one would imagine that a competent court would define it from a consumer’s point of view.
   Their new group policy, where Facebook has also given up against the bot epidemic, letting fake accounts join public groups, is a disaster. As you can see, the majority of new members to one group I oversee—and where I usually get tips to new bot accounts—are fakes. They’ve used scripts to join. It’s a bit of a giveaway when there are brand-new accounts joining groups before they’ve even made friends. The legit names have been pixellated; the fakes I’ve left for you to see.

   It’s not as bad as, say, giving up on the people who elected you to run the country and letting COVID-19 do whatever it wants, killing citizens in the process. But it comes from the same dark place of putting people second and lining your pockets first—Mark Zuckerberg does it, Robert Mugabe did it, etc. Distract and plunder.
   In The Guardian:

Boris Johnson will revoke hundreds of Covid regulations and make England the most unrestricted society in Europe from 19 July despite saying new cases could soar to 50,000 a day before masks and social distancing are ditched.

   In fact, one Tweeter jokingly showed his interpretation of the UK’s COVID alert levels:

   On this, let our own Prof Michael Baker have the last word. Also in The Guardian, which I shared three days ago on Mastodon:

   Baker said public health professionals were “disturbed” by the UK’s return to allowing Covid to circulate unchecked, and that the phrase “living with it” was a “meaningless slogan” that failed to communicate the consequences of millions of infections, or the alternative options for managing the virus.
   “We often absorb a lot of our rhetoric from Europe and North America, which have really managed the pandemic very badly,” he said. “I don’t think we should necessarily follow or accept Boris Johnson and co saying: “Oh, we have to learn to live with virus.’
   “We always have to be a bit sceptical about learning lessons from countries that have failed very badly.”

   We really need to be confident of our own position on this. There are too many, especially those propelled by foreign forces with their friends in the foreign-owned media, advocating that we follow other Anglophone countries—probably because they lack either intelligence, imagination, pride, or empathy. I’ve spent a good part of my career saying, ‘Why should we follow when we can lead?’

Andrea Berlese

If you’re around my age with a similar interest in model cars, this mural, Re-collection, by Leon Keer on a block of flats in Grenoble, France, will appeal.
   Leon has Tweets with the before and after, and one about the process.

‘Re-Collection’ my latest mural @GStreetartfest Grenoble France, photos before and after #streetart #3Dstreetart #mural #grenoblestreetart pic.twitter.com/4bao3tB36C

— Leon Keer (@leonkeer) July 6, 2021

Mural ‘Re-Collection’ progress @GStreetartfest Grenoble France #streetart #3Dstreetart #3Dmural pic.twitter.com/RW3CCat2rR

— Leon Keer (@leonkeer) July 7, 2021

   It’s sad that Lesney (Matchbox) went down the fantasy route to compete with Hot Wheels, whereas the 1970s Corgi and Majorette castings that are represented here are so much better, in my opinion. I had a good childhood; I certainly couldn’t complain about the model collection that my parents and grandparents indulged. And what great work from Leon to bring back this sense of nostalgia.

Here are July 2021’s images—aides-mémoires, photos of interest, and miscellaneous items. I append to this gallery through the month.

 
Sources
Star Trek: 1999 reposted from Alex on NewTumbl. Didn’t Star Trek and Space: 1999 share a producer?
   Publicity shot for French actress Manon Azem, from Section de recherches.
   Charlie Chaplin got there first with this meme. Reposted from Twitter.
   I realize the history page in Lucire KSA for July 2021 suggests that you need a four-letter surname to work for Lucire.
   The 1981 Morris Ital two-door—sold only as a low-spec 1·3 for export. Reposted from the Car Factoids on Twitter.
   Ford Capri 1300 double-page spread, reposted from the Car Factoids on Twitter.
   Alexa Breit photographed by Felix Graf, reposted from Instagram.
   South America relief map, reposted from Twitter.
   From the Alarm für Cobra 11: die Autobahnpolizei episode ‘Abflug’, to air July 29, 2021. RTL publicity photo.
   Lucire’s Festival de Cannes coverage can be found here. Photo courtesy L’Oréal Paris.

After 13 years, it was time to facelift the Lucire licensing website.
   It’s a very familiar template, similar to what we used for JY&A Consulting a few months back. The home page copy we already had from a flier that we created late last year that Susan Ninan and I worked on; and the ‘About’ page’s text was mostly carried over (though it still needs 13 years of updates).
   I am surprised the old site still netted us enquiries but it was looking extremely dated. The 2008 design was positively archæological in internet terms. However, I’m not sure if the new one is particularly interesting, because the web design convention is to do something very simple at the moment.
   The old one was created with consideration for those who didn’t have mouse wheels, whereas these days it seems to be all right, even fashionable, to scroll away.
   Hopefully everything is more fit for purpose though, and the links are more useful. We’ve kept the code very light.
   And if you do want to license an international fashion magazine with an independent, authentic and engaged firm, you know where to come.

Above: The old and the new Lucire licensing sites—to my eyes, the old appears more creative, even in 2021.

I haven’t done one of these since February, where I look at the COVID-19 positivity rates of selected countries. The arrows indicate the direction of change since that post. Happily, I imagine with the vaccine roll-outs, we are seeing drops, though there is a new wave in Taiwan, contributing to a rise; other territories showing rises are Brazil, India, Germany, and South Korea.

Brazil 34·67% ↑
Sweden 10·06% ↓
India 7·43% ↑
Spain 7·20% ↓
USA 6·84% ↓
France 6·21% ↓
Italy 5·98% ↓
Germany 5·85% ↑
Russia 3·68% ↓
UK 2·26% ↓
KSA 2·23% ↓
South Korea 1·48% ↑
Taiwan 0·67% ↑
Singapore 0·47% ↓
Australia 0·15% ↓
New Zealand 0·12% ↓
Hong Kong 0·07% ↓

   This is also a good time to remind people of a Toot that was liked and shared quite a few times on Mastodon. For me, it’s a record.

   As Umair Haque put it (original emphases):

Its creators — researchers — pledged to make it open source, available to manufacture and develop anywhere. After all, this was a global pandemic. And yet — with some helpful intervention from Bill Gates — the Oxford vaccine was privatized. Given exclusively to AstraZeneca, Britain’s key pharmaceutical corporation.
   So instead of vaccinating the world — or at least helping the world get vaccinated — Britain engaged in the stupid, selfish game of vaccine nationalism. It kept its newly privatised vaccine for itself. It prevented even Europe from having the Oxford vaccine. What was being selfish about a vaccine going to do? Breed vaccine resistance.
   In India, meanwhile, there weren’t enough vaccines available. So Covid mutated and mutated, until new mutations could “escape” the vaccine, by altering the shape of the “spike protein.” If all that sounds like gibberish to you, don’t worry — the point is simple. By keeping its vaccine to itself, all Britain did was ensure that variants resistant to it would breed at light speed, in the world’s worst hit countries — like India.

   You can read the rest of his post here. Don’t point the blame for delta at India. It’s been British policy since day one to use the UK as a COVID-19 mutation petri dish. And now it wants to export this tactic to other places. Their friends are getting rich off this. Reminds me a bit of what happened in Zimbabwe when Mugabe and his cronies took everything while tanking the country.

When you see the utter dog’s dinner the British government has made of COVID-19, namely turning their country into a petri dish for mutations while they plunder the place with impunity, you have to wonder why many there still prefer these current Tories, when even Max Hastings and Sir Nicholas Soames don’t. Is it because Labour has no direction? That they don’t like Sir Phony Blair? The latest balls-up is this, by the Cabinet’s own Karl Pilkington, (now former) health secretary Matt Hancock:

I jokingly Tweeted (italics added): ‘Terrible casting in the Hancock’s Half-Hour remake. I can deal with the sidekick now being a woman called Sydney James but you never saw scenes like this with Tony and the original Sid.’ Not many liked the post so I assume I am getting a bit on the old side for the mainstream to get these references. And I thought I was doing so well matching the grey from the original titles and the Clarendon type.
   The answer of why Boris Johnson still appears to be their preferred prime minister, how he can constantly fall upwards (reference below), appears to lie in Hancock, too, specifically Tony Hancock.

   For those of us old enough to remember Tony Hancock’s sitcoms (note: I saw them as repeats), he played a version of himself, but one who was poorer, more outspoken and exaggerated. (Surely as he was voted Britain’s greatest comedian this side of the 21st century, enough of you must know what I am talking about.) But most of all, he lived in a world of self-delusion, that he was the cleverest man around and if only the right people would just see his genius. This is part of the same British comedy tradition as Alan Partridge and David Brent. As I said in a Toot on Mastodon tonight (inter alia): ‘Audiences sympathize with failures, and none have failed as much as this PM.’