It was sad to read of the passing of Ian Crawford, the former TV producer, whom I got to know through Lucire in his post-Crawfords career.
I never pressed Ian about Crawford Productions and preferred to keep things on topic about his Pacific resort. It was out of respect as I had the sense (rightly or wrongly) that he wanted to move on, so other than name-dropping his uncle or his mum, or Terry Stapleton, or the occasional show, I never pushed it. With hindsight, and seeing later videos where Ian enthusiastically recalls his experiences, maybe I should have.
Ninety-one is a fine innings. And there is a rich legacy of great Australian television production. I send my sympathies to Carole, and to Lisa, Tony, Nikki, Chris and Anna, and the entire family.
I often don’t read comments on other sites as a rule, but I stumbled on some below an old interview of mine from 2023, where one person said that what I did was all smoke and mirrors and they had seen behind them. Unless they were using an alias, I did not know this person. And maybe the smoke was down to the haze of their hallucinating drug habit?
There was an Australian designer some years ago who argued in Wikipedia that I was not a notable typeface designer, and that I didn’t do my own work. This one is interesting to ponder: if I was not notable, how did he have any insight into my work practices? Because there’s no un-notable person whose work processes I’ve ever considered. Then you have the next logical problem: given I started in the 1980s, and the first publicly recorded release of my fonts was in U&lc in 1993, then who did this work for me?
Let’s see: in New Zealand there was no one. Was the internet mature enough for me to search for a colleague? No—I didn’t know of any search engines. And while I was on some email lists, including one for QuickDraw GX, any requests for others to do work only to have it be released under someone else’s name would have been met with a polite f-off. The BS claim doesn’t stand up to the simplest scrutiny, so you would not only have to be a moral weakling to make it, but a pretty stupid one at that.
Then there’s the simple fact that I did all the work myself, scanning on a hand-held (really) in black-and-white, doing the traces in CorelTrace, importing into Fontographer 3·5, even doing my own kerning pairs manually as there was no way to automate it on that version of Fontographer. I might still have the floppy disks with the original data.
Those who followed me, including those I mentored in the interests of growing a professional community, had it much, much easier.
You have to wonder what these nobodies have to gain by spreading BS that ultimately hasn’t a huge consequence to the world. A boost to fragile egos? Racism—the fact an immigrant for whom English is a second language beat them despite their own privilege? Looking like a big man among their peers for being a know-it-all?
Last year, the disinformation merchants did it out of stupidity, trying hard to look knowledgeable in the absence of actual grey matter, with “AI” a willing ally. (A tiny handful of dodgy players remain, such as ‘Best Website Ranking Service’, Nexorank, Humaira Yaseen, Grands.Digital among others.)
Other than last year’s Semrush-driven disinformation, I usually don’t find this stuff for years since it’s unimportant. But if this is happening to an everyday person, then the important people have it far, far worse, and right now we’re seeing this play out in the United States, with serious consequences.
There are enough people, then, with incredibly poor judgement, who cannot discern between truth and deception, and that should be a worry to us all. Those politicians who advocate for worse educational outcomes, or worse health outcomes for children, wish to fuel this, because they know a lack of critical thinking, intolerance (which comes hand-in-hand) and raw anger might play into their hands. On Mastodon, as on Twitter a decade before, one risks being in a bubble of right-thinking people that it becomes tempting to predict everything will go the way of humanity. How many pundits got election outcomes wrong, both here and overseas? The reality is murkier than we think.
That utopian vision of a united human race that some of us had when first venturing online was shattered years ago. I and others warned of the signs: the privacy intrusions, the bots, those gaming social media, long before Brexit. While we didn’t necessarily foresee the consequences, it’s a darned shame that we were the ones branded as overreacting.
Yes, of course we should have the right to voice an opinion, but one that is founded on consideration, honesty and truth. Those aren’t the standards by which everyone lives, and this simple social contract is a thing of the past because there seems to be preciously few consequences.
China’s proposed laws about “AI” transparency, requiring netizens to mark clearly what has been generated by large language models, actually make more sense than the free-for-all jumble the occident has found itself in. They’ve spotted the problems and there are consequences for deception. The aim is not so much quelling “AI” but they want to target misinformation. Who guessed that in 2025 that aspects of Beijing’s laws make more sense than the US’s?
This is far from praise for the Great Firewall, but in most aspects of life, antisocial or criminal behaviour has consequences. China is right to extend such ideas into the ’net. The EU and California laws that do similarly are set to come into force in 2026, but neither appears to prescribe a standard as clearly as China’s. Whatever the case, let’s hope the laws get applied.
We have seen more activity—stopped with our WAF rules—from Amazonbot and Alibaba’s scraping. Amazonbot is blocked with a user-agent criterion, and Alibaba is blocked in ranges 47.74.0.0/15, 47.76.0.0/14, 47.80.0.0/13, 8.210.0.0/16 and the AS number 45102. Putting it out there for anyone searching ‘45102 – ALIBABA-CN-NET Alibaba US Technology Co., Ltd.’, as there’s not much about this precise string on the web.
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