‘No more black spots’ is music to the white supremacist

  A message I sent to the former Vodafone New Zealand: Everything is OK except the messages you’re promoting! I know you’ve already heard the feedback that you share your name with a white supremacist organization, and you shrugged it off. OK, maybe we can put this down to a marketing company that didn’t do […]

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The tech’s been captured by the bad actors and we haven’t caught up

Dr Sean Munger’s blog post today about an east Asian model’s face being used by scammers is excellent, and his final paragraph is spot on. I won’t spoil it, as it’s worth your time getting there, but I will provide his Mastodon post on it.     I responded to Sean with: ‘I must have […]

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The original (and shortest-lived) look to this website in 2002

When I said this was the third template for this site yesterday, I was wrong. There was one more at the very start, thanks to the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive, making 2023’s new look the fourth. In September 2002, very soon after I acquired the jackyan.com domain around the time of my 30th […]

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Autocade reaches 31 million page views

  It took four months but Autocade’s finally at 31 million page views, having made it to 3,352,136 this morning (April 2). That smaller number is the page views since the program was reinstalled last year. Add that to the last recorded total before the reinstallation of 27,647,011, and you have 30,999,147. At c. 10,000 […]

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The golden age of Pontiac illustrations

The gargantuan full-size 1971–6 Pontiacs (Laurentian, Catalina, Parisienne, Bonneville, Grand Ville and Grand Safari) went up on Autocade last week, and they reminded me of the golden era of Pontiac illustrations. That era didn’t stretch into the 1970s that much: you saw them for the 1967s through to the 1971s, before photography took over. I […]

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Why we’ve dropped Disqus, and the shenanigans of the online ad world

When I first signed up to Disqus, there was the option to have no ads. But with Lucire we allowed them, because I figured, why not? Disqus’s rules were pretty clear: you’d earn money on the ads shown, and once you got to US$100, they’d pay out. The trouble is those ads made so little […]

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Is Microsoft trying to stem its losses from Bing?

If Appledystopia is right in its 2020 article, Microsoft loses US$1·5 milliard per annum on Bing. So maybe that explains why it’s worsened so much. Microsoft might well be finding ways to cut its losses, and servers cost money. Pity that none of the Bing clones are saying anything, not even Duck Duck Go’s usually […]

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What saying yes to SEO “guest posts” looks like

  Here are a few screenshots from a magazine I loved, but sadly, it seems they’ve responded to those SEO emails, and grabbed the US$50 per post. I don’t blame them, since Google has destroyed the online advertising ecosystem, and they have to make ends meet somehow. I was in contact with them some years […]

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The expectation of invisibility

I rewatched Princess of Chaos, the TV drama centred around my friend, Bevan Chuang. I’m proud to have stood by her at the time, because, well, that’s what you do for your friends. I’m not here to revisit any of the happenings that the TV movie deals with—Bevan says it brings her closure so that […]

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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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