Above: The latest entry on Autocade, the DS Nº 8. March 8 isn’t etched into my memory as much as October 20—the birthdays of Autocade and Lucire respectively. Autocade, therefore, has just turned 17, and back in 2008, I certainly never expected it to exist as print yearbooks come the mid-2020s. As mentioned, I […]
A very interesting analysis on Crikey by Bernard Keane on the turmoil the occident finds itself in. In the opening paragraphs we find this zinger about what the right wing believes it was to protect the west from. Protecting from whom? Name your favourite other—the Soviet Union. Islam. China. Declining birth rates. Secularism. Immigrants. Globalism. […]
Read More… from If you want a slice of the pie, then compete
For many years (2002–12), we hosted with a US company that gave us a Plesk front end. That meant we did a lot in-house: create PHP and MySql databases, started up hosting environments for new domains, even managed our own email server. That company eventually opened up an Australian branch and my appointed customer manager […]
If you look back at all the tech companies I’ve called out, deep down I did so as a warning. If they show this contempt for the user, then it’s symptomatic of greater problems. Everything from Google switching your ad preferences’ opt-outs back to opt-ins and the stonewalling when it came to deleted blogs, to […]
Read More… from After warnings were ignored, we now arrive in the new tech mainstream
I don’t need to say much now that the world is waking up. So what’s new? This was exactly where Facebook was heading in the 2010s. Appeasement depending on which way the wind is blowing. Principles? Look elsewhere. Zuckerberg’s only principle is safeguarding his wealth. I’ve said for years to simply shut it off. If […]
Read More… from The world is waking up to what Meta has been for a long time
Now isn’t that interesting? After posting about Semrush on their Reddit, where their error is laid bare for all to see, I have now had a blissful 48 hours where there were no new disinformation posts about yours truly pop up on Google searches. So much for Semrush claiming that it could not remove a […]
Read More… from Forty-eight hours without new disinformation—dare we hope for seventy-two?
I’m surprised that people are surprised that this is where Facebook is going. In the words of my friend Richard MacManus, in reference to this interview with Mark Zuckerberg in The Verge: ‘Mark Zuckerberg basically just confirmed that your feeds will soon be full of AI-generated content. Another reason the fediverse needs to exist: so […]
Read More… from “AI”? Facebook’s bot city has already been around for a decade
I’ve indulged these buggers for long enough: over the last few weeks, I began going to the web hosts of the disinformation writers. Hostinger has been excellent, giving the writers three days to prove what they wrote is genuine, and, of course, 100 per cent of them fail. A UK host called 20i has just […]
Read More… from Time to go to each host and take down the disinformation websites
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. […]
The late 1990s were a heady time here in Aotearoa. The web—pre-Google, pre-monopolies—was indeed the great leveller: anyone with the right skills could create something online that competed at a global level. Aotearoa, which had for years felt a little backward in time—TV shows would arrive here two to three years after they aired in […]
Read More… from For the sake of our city, it’s important to take the opportunities to move forward