The new disinformation posts may have stopped, but there’s tidying to do

In the businesses I’m actually involved in, there aren’t that many unsavoury people. Maybe in the early to mid-2000s I came across some hangers-on in the fashion world. But SEO, wow, there’s a great deal of unscrupulousness. I’ve seen their con-merchant emails since the late 1990s—all the more reason that being grouped as one of […]

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Fake news fuelling riots? The warnings were there as bots industrialize disinformation

For anyone who has followed my battles with bot-written and bot-based junk this year, this should come as no surprise:     The UK riots were fuelled by the same kind of website, with the same raison d’être. This one was in Pakistan, where, sadly, some of the disinformation sites about me have come from. […]

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Using once-legitimate sites to host SEO spam

The web is full of bollocks these days, thanks to Google rewarding junk. Here’s The European Business Review, which looks like a legit publication.     Not that you can tell from its website:     As their latest print cover is on “AI”, then maybe it is only fitting that their website is stuffed […]

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“AI” is drivel

This is from Perplexity, showing how convincingly these bots with their large language models spit out utter drivel:     And not everyone will have the actual knowledge to call them out on it:     “AI” is only useful when you already know the answer, because it does get it wrong and you need […]

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Semrush, LLMs (or “AIs”), and Google: a three-headed misinformation hydra?

It turns out that Semrush is likely responsible for the misinformation regarding my name. When Shahid Jafar first encountered the fake topic of a new Google algorithm named for me—and apparently created by me—he mentioned he had seen 8,000 references to it. I couldn’t, but it turns out—thanks to another blog post that has incorporated […]

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This weekend’s milestones at Lucire and Autocade

Autocade’s 4,800th model: the Toyota Urban Cruiser Hyryder.   Stuff that has happened: Lucire has turned 26. Not a huge celebration given we did the quarter-century last year. Looking back, we did it quite well. When we had our 20th and 21st, we intended to mark them through those years, but never really did. It […]

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Twenty years ago, Lucire and United Nations Environment Programme teamed up for a first

  Twenty years ago, the United Nations Environment Programme and Lucire announced their partnership. I look back at how the arrangement came about in 2002–3. At the time, it was unheard of for a mainstream fashion title to make this sort of a commitment to sustainability, but I felt we couldn’t afford not to. Even […]

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Stop worshipping people based on wealth

  Salon is on to something. I know from first-hand experience that those who hold political office are not always the smartest. When you run against others for the same job, it doesn’t take long to spot the less intelligent, some buoyed by privilege, others by an unshakeable belief in their invincibility. Its headline: ‘Is […]

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What succeeds my Meizu M6 Note?

  My Meizu M6 Note has had to be retired, due to an expanding battery, something which I probably shouldn’t have tolerated for so long (it began happening months ago). I only made the call to stop using it last week after the volume buttons could no longer function, and I probably should have stopped […]

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COVID-19 infections as a percentage of tests done, June 28

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 […]

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