More from the slimmed-down archives. Here’s a little item from 1991, when I was 19. St Luke’s Church in Wadestown, Wellington was holding a 1960s-themed dance and I designed and hand-lettered the tickets. You can see I was into Swiss modernism even then. The large type was drawn from memory: I didn’t go back […]
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. […]
A positive report from one blind reader
Feeling positive about this feedback from a blind Mastodon user, Robert Kingett, when he checked out Lucire and Autocade online. I know lots of internal pages need proper alt text, but his cursory report is very good, and encourages us to do better. I generally hear positive things about the use of alt […]
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 […]
Enforcing long-held laws: Google is a monopolist, violating Sherman Act s. 2
Congratulations to the US Department of Justice on its first scalp in its antitrust lawsuit against Google, filed in 2020. Judge Mehta in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia agreed with the plaintiffs in United States et al v. Google LLC that Google had acted illegally to maintain a monopoly […]
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If Semrush won’t help fight disinformation, maybe their host will
With the hundreds of disinformation posts about me out there, I began contacting hosts. Medium, I’ve noted elsewhere, has been great. Quora has also removed disinformation. Hostinger gives its clients three days to prove their side of the story, after which the page gets nuked since so far, none of their clients have been able […]
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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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Why ad tracking is bad: it puts democracy in jeopardy
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 […]
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Autocade reaches 38 million page views
Autocade made it comfortably to 38 million page views today, the counter showing 10,362,605. Add the 27,647,011 on the old server, that’s 38,009,616 (as expected yesterday when it was sitting just shy of the 38 million mark). Currently there are 5,059 entries on the site, and we got to the latest million in just under […]