Posts relating to the USA.
Beware Substack. I received a newsletter today that I had never heard of, so I unsubscribed—to find that I had allegedly signed up to everything that the user publishes. Not bloody likely. This wasn’t a case of being on someone else’s Substack and accidentally clicking ‘Yes’ to other suggested newsletters. Normally there’d only […]
Read More… from Beware Substack—and TV3 makes terrible design and marketing decisions
As my Typepad blog went into oblivion without any warning from Six Apart, I had better repost the following from my Tumblr, in case it has the same fate. This was an old favourite post of mine. The rise and rise of Joe Patroni George Kennedy’s most famous role. OK, so the last one […]
My dad made quite a few predictions, not because he was psychic (in fact, while he was never vocally against it, like Confucius he wasn’t a fan of it), but because he was a keen observer of people, natural phenomena, and the rise and fall of institutions. Off the top of my head: when Rob […]
Not what usually comes to mind when you say Eric and Ernie. Not many of you have wanted our edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Fair enough: the only thing new is a foreword where we acknowledge the influence of Eileen O’Shaughnessy, George Orwell’s (Eric Blair’s) wife. However, our A Farewell to Arms has drifted out […]
This was interesting: how the “AI” theftbots (yes, I’m coining that word) affected Autocade’s traffic. We had blocked a bunch of them already—notably the western ones and ByteDance—but there were many others that still got through. This is from Cloudflare, but even their default settings miss a bunch, especially Chinese ones, and they don’t […]
The old The new The old The new The Autocade logo has changed, and we’ll be letting you in on why in due course. It hasn’t been done just because of æsthetics, though after 17½ years it was probably time for an update. Meanwhile, on the “AI” scraping front, which […]
Read More… from Autocade gets a new logotype; and we block a lot of “AI” bots
Big Tech lies. Each time I use Google, I get this: The message, ‘Our systems have detected unusual traffic from your computer network. This page checks to see if it’s really you sending the requests, and not a robot’ is a sham. The reality is that Google will force a captcha on you […]
Read More… from Google lies (situation normal), Google users run scrapers, Tencent users attack
Internet Archive Above: An Internet Archive screenshot of one of the scam websites, presumably with the main image missing. From Malwarebytes in March: a Semrush impersonation scam has hit Google ads. While I would never side with bad actors, it is difficult to sympathize with a brand like Semrush after the nine months of […]
Read More… from Two of the web’s worst brands wind up in a scam
Unfortunately, we’ve had to block some individual IP addresses as we suspect they’re guilty of stealing content from Autocade. These aren’t the clearly marked “AI” bots, but individual IP addresses that have hit the site at a far greater frequency than humanly possible, and some have tried to access non-existent pages that could not possibly […]
Read More… from The extra things you now do in online publishing: blocking suspicious bots
Sights on exporting: when we first licensed Lucire to a foreign country, in this case Romania, in 2005. Karen Carreño modelled, photographed by Yann Dandois. Mirella Lapusca and Valentin Lapusca created the Romanian edition. Over the weekend, one of the Lucire crew had to write to a PR company to be included on something […]
Read More… from Did you know that in the last three decades, media have changed?