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. […]
Category: New Zealand
Posts relating to New Zealand.
Recycle time
Thirty-plus years of my files are being recycled. Only a last few years are left to go. I kept them, thinking they might be of some historical use—maybe future entrepreneurs might want to see the efforts I put in to get the country’s first digital font range known, or building up Lucire from nothing. As […]
The trouble with the two-horse-race narrative
Maybe what happened here over a decade ago doesn’t apply in the US today. But then maybe it does: the notion of the two-horse political race. When I stood, some media, notably the foreign-owned newspapers (as they were), were obsessed with it. Which made it tricky for the guy polling third (in real polls, not […]
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From The Lord of the Rings to Border Patrol: how Sweden sees us
My visits to Sweden have been few and far apart, since it is quite a distance to travel from New Zealand: summer 2002, autumn 2003, winter 2010, and summer 2024. There are many interesting observations one can make with so many years in between, seeing how society has changed with brief snapshots from each visit, […]
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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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Google sacks its own team for protesting
I had bookmarked this a while back: the statement by former Google employees who were sacked for not supporting the company’s involvement with the Israeli government and military. Some were not even part of the employees’ sit-in protests. But Google is too weak to be able to handle dissent, and clearly doesn’t support the welfare […]
Finally, a proper right of reply
Finally, my own blog appears up top in one of the Google searches that Semrush claims is happening, but it really isn’t—except maybe by their third-party data supplier’s bots, and me since the misinformation started a few months ago. In fact, the first five slots are truthful, including Scoop’s republication of our release, until […]
To our Sunday colleagues, you should still be on air
Above: Sunday host Miriama Kamo. [Originally published in Lucire] To our colleagues at Television New Zealand’s Sunday, including Lucire alum Mava Moayyed, we bid you godspeed and good luck. Your programme didn’t deserve cancellation. This country needs proper, long-form current affairs, and with Sunday airing its final episode [on Sunday] night, this has come […]
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Getting to each 1,000th model on Autocade—so far
The Tofaş Doğan, the 1,000th model entered into Autocade in 2009. A very quick look at how long it took us to get each 1,000 models on Autocade. 0: March 8, 2008 1,000: December 21, 2009 (1 year, 9 months for first 1,000—Tofaş Doğan was the 1,000th) 2,000: December 30, 2012 (3 years […]
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To those who take technology and make life harder: you’re doing it wrong
I like technology. I don’t hate technology. But I hate what a bunch of idiots have done with technology. You’d be forgiven for thinking I was referring to the mass misinformation-authoring that used my name over the last three months, but, frankly, this level of technological misuse is everywhere in various forms. Take today, when […]
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