Posts relating to the USA.
An excellent reminder from Don Marti on just why ad tracking is bad on the web: The tracking is not there to identify the individual (the data doesn’t have to be accurate) but to enable getting the highest-priced ad onto the cheapest possible site Cross-context tracking puts higher value and lower value sites into competition […]
Read More… from Why ad tracking is bad: it puts democracy in jeopardy
If we take everything Big Tech says as a lie, then we wouldn’t be far off what is happening, rendering my recording of the examples I encounter in daily life unnecessary. We know they lie, and it would actually become more unusual to record the times they tell the truth or follow through with something. […]
You need your wits about you more often than not, especially when Bing tells you MIT went online in 1881 Having come up blank in regular web searches on Mojeek, Google and Bing, I resorted to LLM-driven bots to see if they would help. I wanted to know if anyone predated Lucire into turning […]
Read More… from Using “AI”: you need to know when answers are disinformation
After saying that I wouldn’t blog about these, along comes one that is too priceless to ignore. XScreenSaver has been on the Google Play store but was facing deletion unless it included a privacy policy. Since it collected no data, its creators didn’t feel it was necessary, but as Google insisted, they wrote a cracker. […]
Read More… from XScreenSaver’s privacy policy lays bare Google’s disgraceful conduct
You don’t need me keeping score: misdeeds in the tech industry, from Adobe using user content for its “AI” tools to Elon Musk being a Nazi, are a daily occurrence now, and plenty of others are writing about them. At the top end, it seems such a poisonous area to be in, especially with so […]
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 […]
Extra plug for my friend Randy Scobey, who has written a memoir. Since Randy and I met through blogging in 2006, it seems fitting to mention this on my blog. What I wrote in Lucire about his book is heartfelt. If you want to read a first-hand account on the stigma felt by the […]
Read More… from My friend Randy writes a book; our ‘Written by humans’ graphic; Hart’s is economical
This girl group appears in three Glen A. Larson productions that I can think of, and probably appears in more. Switch, Knight Rider and Cover Up are the three I know of. Their fashions and hairstyles, plus those of the audience, would place this in the first part of the 1970s—by the time they […]
Read More… from Which other Glen A. Larson production did this girl group appear in?
The truth-tellers are starting to emerge on the web, combatting the misinformation that Semrush users have been uploading for the last few months. The best written is from Crestify Studio in New Jersey, where its president Allen Wang has been a great ally. They were innocently and very briefly caught up in the misinformation but, […]
Read More… from The allies who are helping fight back against misinformation
It was about time I had a look at the occidental search engines again, using a site:jackyan.com search to see how they fared. The previous test for this site was in May 2023. I knew Google was still terrible, and I knew Bing had improved since the days of having 10 results for the domain. […]
Read More… from Testing occidental search engines on site: again: Mojeek, Bing more normal