Rod Hilton, on how terrible Google is getting. This isn’t down to the web being worse, as Marissa Mayer laughably claims. This is down to Google focusing on its surveillance capitalism-based ad business, which earns most of its revenues, over search. It hasn’t been a search-centred company for decades. And I thought its […]
Category: culture
Posts relating to culture, multiculturalism and cultural impact.
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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Miscellaneous images from the US
A bit of a clear-out of a downloads’ folder on my computer. This has been sitting there since 2016 and I’ve no idea of its origins, but let’s say that Americans do understand irony and whomever claimed otherwise was wrong. This was from The New York Times in the early 2000s. Dave Barboza […]
You can’t contract yourself out of breaking the law, Google—that’s not how it works
Google has updated its privacy policy, giving itself carte blanche to take publicly available data to use for its large language models and “AI”. I don’t think whomever wrote the update has any comprehension of the law. Or that they do, but think they can get away with it. Maybe in their own country they […]
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Swedish privacy watchdog: stop using Google Analytics
This is good advice from Sweden’s privacy watchdog. Most countries should follow suit with their citizens’ data. IMY, the watchdog, noted (my italics for house style): ‘IMY issues an administrative fine of 12 million SEK against Tele2 and 300,000 SEK against CDON, which has not taken the same extensive protective measures as Coop […]
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The sun sets even more on Twitter
Some folks don’t seem to be happy that Twitter is now a walled garden, where you have to be logged in to see Tweets. This is a good thing, isn’t it? Tweets will vanish from the search engines, and Elon Musk’s desire to build a right-wing disinformation network to further his own beliefs (and those […]
The captivating case of Brian MacKinnon
On a whim, I decided to look up the case of Brian Lachlan MacKinnon, who went back to his high school 15 years after he graduated and posed as a 16-year-old pupil. I saw it on BBC Scotland’s Public Eye at the time (around 1995), though I think I had also heard of the […]
Nissan, get ready to pay up: Carlos Ghosn’s after US$1 milliard
Good on Carlos Ghosn for filing his lawsuit against Nissan Motor Co. and others, including Hari Nada, as reported in Automotive News. Things you won’t have heard since Ghosn fled to Lebanon: In 2020, a UN panel found that Ghosn’s detention in a Japanese jail for more than 100 days was neither necessary nor reasonable […]
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Company founders, talk about your businesses and the great work they do
When I launched Lucire into print in 2004, it brought with it some unwelcome elements. On the plus side, it raised the company’s profile and no doubt that helped sales. No one had ever taken a website into print before, with the exception of Yahoo Internet Life, as far as I know. Certainly no one […]
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The state of play of the internet
From Zero Janitor on Tumblr (and found as an image on Mastodon): Sums up the state of play on the internet nicely. I can’t believe how badly the Reddit situation has been handled, but will leave that to others. A lot has already been written about it, and here’s a good piece in […]