Big Tech isnât afraid of the law, but it is afraid of bad press that could affect its stock price. The Murdoch Press has, refreshingly, stayed on Googleâs case, revealing that there had been another exposure of user data, allowing developers access to private information between 2015 and March 2018.
The company sent a memo warning executives not to disclose this, fearing âregulatory interestâ.
The access was available via Google Plus, which the company says it will permanently close. In 2011 I predicted Plus would be a flop, while tech journalists salivated at the prospect, calling it, among other things, a Facebook killer. A few years later, you couldnât find much support among the tech press, but no one admitting they were wrong.
I had warned regularly on this blog of privacy holes that I had found on Google, with inexplicable mystery parties among my Circles or on Google Buzz, as well as strange entries in my Google account. Iâve talked often about what I discovered with Googleâs ad preferences (something it got away with for up to two years), but Iâve also found YouTube and search history settings turned on without my consent. Murdochs had revealed Google hacked Iphones, which led to a lawsuit. To learn that Google has had a privacy problem, one that it let slip for three years, does not surprise me one bit.
I taught 180 people at tertiary level in 1999â2000.
Gutted that a second has passed away.
Most of them were kids when I taught them. Lost one to a brain bleed in 2015, just lost another to cancer.
Look after yourselves out there, and live life to the full. Tell those whom you love that you do.
Originally published at Drivetribe, but as I own the copyright it only made sense to share it here for readers, too, especially those who might wish to buy a car from abroad and want to do the job themselves. It was originally written for a British audience.
Above: The lengths I went to, to make sure I didn’t wind up buying a car with an automatic transmission: source it from the UK and spend ten months on the process.
I advise strongly that you use a company specializing in the importation. Thatâs where Jake Williams and Dan Hepburn at Online Logistics of Auckland came in
Having identified the model I wanted, I had to trawl through the websites. The UK is well served, and some sites allow you to feed in a postcode and the distance youâre willing (or your friendâs willing) to travel.
However, if you rely on friends, youâll need to catch them at the right time, and both gentlemen had busy weekends that meant waiting.
VAT was the other issue thatâs unfamiliar to New Zealanders. GST is applied on all domestic transactions in New Zealand, but not on export ones. This isnât always the case in the UK, and some sellers wonât know how any of this works.
One of the first cars I spotted was from a seller who had VAT on the purchase price, which logically I should get refunded when the car left the country. I would have to pay the full amount but once I could prove that the car had left the UK, the transaction would be zero-rated and I would get the VAT back. I was told by the manager that in 11 years of business, he had never come across it, and over the weeks of chatting, the vehicle was sold.
Car Giant, in London, was one company that was very clued up and told me that it had sold to New Zealanders before. Theyâre willing to refund VAT on cars that were VAT-qualifying, but charged a small service fee to do so. The accountsâ department was particularly well set up, and its staff very easy to deal with long-distance.
Evans Halshaw, however, proved to be farcical. After having a vehicle moved to the Kettering branch close to Keithâs then-residence after paying the deposit, and having then paid for an AA inspection, the company then refused to sell it to me, and would only deal with Keith.
Although the company was happy to take my deposit, Keith was soon told, âwe will need payment to come from yourself either by debit card or bank transfer as the deal is with yourself not Mr Yan,â by one of its salesâ staff.
I wasnât about to ask Keith to part with any money, If I were to transfer funds to his account, but not have the car belong to me, and if Keith were to then transfer ownership to me without money changing hands, then the New Zealand Customs would smell a rat. It would look like money laundering: NZTA requires there to be a clear chain of ownership, and this wasnât clear. Evans Halshaw were unwilling to put the invoice in my name.
Iâm a British national with a UK addressâagain something a lot of buyers Down Under wonât haveâbut Evans Halshaw began claiming that it was âpolicyâ not to sell to me.
The company was never able to provide a copy of such a policy despite numerous phone calls and emails.
Essentially, for this to work and satisfy Customs on my end, Keith would have to fork out money, and I would have to pay him: a situation that didnât work for either of us.
Phil, a qualified lawyer, offered to head into another branch of Evans Halshaw and do the transaction exactly as they wanted: head there with âchip and PINâ, only for the company to change its tune again: it would not sell to me, or any representative of mine.
The refund from Evans Halshaw never materialized, and I found myself ÂŁ182 out of pocket
In fact, a traditional manual, one with gears you change with a clutch, comprises considerably less than 20 per cent.
One friend, like me, specifically sought a manual in 2015, and asked me to scan through websites. In the greater Wellington region, cars matching his other criteria on engine size and price numbered a grand total of two, one in Eastbourne and the other in Upper Hutt. He eventually had to go outside his criteria to buy a manual.
I visited one dealership in Lower Hutt where one of the senior salespeople told me that was what the market demanded, so they followed suit, as he tried to sell me an automatic, Turkish-made car. This claim was, based on my own research, bollocks.
Granted, this research was of a sample of my 2,300 Facebook friends, but of those who responded, it appeared to be evenly divided. Some of the comments were along the lines of, ‘I wanted a manual, but I had no choice, so I bought an automatic.’
If I didn’t have a second car (since sold to a friend who also preferred manuals), I could have found myself looking at doing the sameâjust because I needed wheels in a hurry. Or I could have bought a car that did not meet all my needs, one that was “near enough”. But if you are spending a five-figure sum, and you intend to hold on to the car for the next decade, is this such a wise thing to do? A car is an investment for me, not a fashion item.
That earlier Renault took me four months to find in a market that wasn’t so heavily biased against manuals in the mid-2000s, and this time out, I wound up searching for eight. Most people don’t have that luxury.
The most evident explanation for the overwhelming numbers of automatics is that so many used cars are sourced from Japan, but it’s really not what all people want.
I’ve nothing against the half of the population who prefer automatics, but they are just not my sort of thing. These days, the most advanced automatics are more economical than manuals, but generally, you still get a few more mpg from a car you shift yourself. I enjoy driving, and automatics blunt that enjoyment for me, but I’m sure others don’t mind them as much.
In future blog posts I’ll touch on this subject again, and I’ll be penning a story for Classic Car Weekly in the UK on the whole saga of buying a new car. Who knew that, despite being armed with money, it would be such an uphill task to find someone to give it to?
It also suggests that if someone wishes to specialize in manuals, they would be tapping in to a large, unserved chunk of the New Zealand market.
General Motors’ fine in 1995 for 470,000 cars using defeat devices against EPA testing: US$11 million. Volkswagen’s fine in 2016 for 580,000 cars using defeat devices against EPA testing: potentially US$40,000 million (or $40 billion, as the Americans say). The local companies get off far easier in the US. In fact, GM can even get a US$49,500 million bail-out from Uncle Sam. I realize there’s a difference between a settlement and a claim, but I wonder if Volkswagen’s going get away with paying less than a figure in the milliards.
When Facebook says it cares about security, I laugh. Every day I see bots, spammers and click-farm workers plague the site, and despite reporting them, Facebook lets them stay. It will make a statement saying it would no longer kick off drag queens and kings, then proceed to kick off drag queens and kings. So when I was blocked last night from using Facebook on my Windows 10 computer, after using a website with a Facebook messaging plug-in, with the claim that there was malware on the system, I knew something was fishy.
Like Googleâs false malware accusationsâso serious that people have lost websites over themâI knew to take this one with a massive grain of salt. However, I didnât have a choice: in order to get in to the site, I had to download a Kaspersky malware program, and let it run. The program never appeared in my installed list in Windows. I let it run overnight, for seven hours, whereupon it was frozen at 62 per cent. Restarting the computer, I was back to square one.
Above: Doing things the Facebook way. Listening to them was bound to end in tears.
Above: There’s no sign of Kaspersky in Windows’ installed programs’ list.
Above: While the Kaspersky scan proceeded, McAfee was knocked out and could not be switched on. Coincidence?
Unlike most people, I have options open to me, so I began to go on to Facebook using several different methods. A VirtualBox containing XP on the same computer was fine, if incredibly slow while Kaspersky was doing its thing. (Think about Windows XP on a 386.) Lubuntu was fine as well, as was Mac OS X. I Tweeted the McAfee community link, and thought it odd that it did not appear in Facebook (I have my Twitter set up to post there). I then tried to paste the link into Facebook manually, whereupon, in Lubuntu and Mac OS, I was told that my computer was now infected with either a virus or malware. Unlike Windows, I had the option of telling them they were in error, and I was able to continue using the machines.
This really sounds like Facebook and Kaspersky have it in for McAfee and, possibly, rival products, if the scan knocks out your choice of antivirus and anti-malware program, and if the mere mention of mcafee.com inside Facebook results in a warning box saying your computer is infected.
Above: On a Mac, I couldn’t even tell people about the post on mcafee.com. The second I did, Facebook said my computer was infected. The same thing happened on Lubuntu. Facebook accuses you of infection on the mere mention of mcafee.com.
Eventually, the entire system froze, and while I could still move the mouse about, I couldnât access the task bar or go to other programs.
I was forced to do a hard reboot.
But youâre asking now: was I ever infected? No. Itâs Google all over again. Peter, the very knowledgeable McAfee support tech who came to my aid many years ago, was present again and put me on to two other programs after this restart. Getsusp analysed my system for malware, and, you guessed it, found nothing. Malware Bytes did the same, and found some PUPs (potentially unwanted programs), all of which I knew about, and I had intentionally installed. Theyâve been present for years. In other words, two other malware scanners told me my system was clean. Malware Bytes did, however, restore McAfee as the correct antivirus program, exactly as Peter had predicted.
He also suggested a system restore, which sadly failed, with Windows giving the reason that an antivirus program was running. Having restored this system once before (after some bad advice from Microsoft), I knew it couldnât be McAfee. The only difference on this computer: I had had Kaspersky doing its Facebook scan. It appears that Facebook and Kaspersky donât want you restoring your system.
I had fixed the newer issues, but the original one remained: I couldnât get on to Facebook. The Kaspersky scan never finishes, incidentallyâyouâre stuck on 62, 73 or 98 per centâand while not having a personal Facebook is no great loss, I have businesses that have presences there.
I stumbled across a Reddit thread where others had been forced to download antivirus programs by Facebook, and, fortunately, a woman there had found where hers resided. In my case, it was at C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Temp\FBScanner_331840299. Deleting this, and all cookies mentioning Facebook and Kaspersky, restored my access.
What to do if you ever come across this? My advice is to, first, run Malware Bytes, but ensure you run the free version, and do not opt for the trials. Once youâre satisfied your computer is clean, head into your cookies and delete all the Facebook ones, and any from the antivirus provider it recommends.This second Reddit thread may be helpful, too. I donât know if this will work completely, but anything is preferable to following Facebookâs instructions and wasting your time. I really need to stop following instructions from these big firmsâyouâd think after all these years, Iâd know better.
PS.: I found this video from last July which suggests the malware accusations have nothing to do with your computer set-up:
In addition, I cannot paste any links in Facebook. The situation began deteriorating after I regained access. Initially, I could paste and like a few things, but that facility eventually disappeared. Regardless of platform, I get the same error I did on the Mac yesterday (see screen shot above). Liking things results in the below error, and the wisdom there is to wait it out till Facebook staff get back to work on Monday.
P.PS.: Holly Jahangiri confronted the same issue as I did a few days later. She was smarter than me: she didn’t download the anti-malware malware. Have a read of her post here: other than that one difference, it’s almost play for play what happened to me for four days. She’s also rightly frustrated, as I am, by Facebook’s inaction when it’s legitimately needed.
P.P.P.PS.: I’m beginning to hear that deleting cookies will not work (April 26). Facebook seems intent on having you download their suspicious junk. In those cases, people have switched to another browser.
P.P.P.P.PS.:Andrew McPherson was hit with this more recently, with Facebook blocking the cookie-deleting method in some cases, and advises, ‘If you get this, you will need to change your Facebook password to something very long (a phrase will do), delete and clear your browsers cache and history, then delete your browser, then renew your IP address to a different number and then reinstall your browsers.’ If you cannot change your IP address but are using a router, then he suggests refreshing the address on that. Basically, Facebook is making it harder and harder for us to work around their bug. Once again, if you sign on using a different account using the same “infected” computer, there are no problemsâwhich means the finger of blame should remain squarely pointed at Facebook.
P.P.P.P.P.P.PS.: January 28, 2017: David has come up with a great solution in the comments (no. 103). You can fool Facebook into thinking you are using a Mac by changing the user-agent. He suggests a Chrome Extension. I have Modify Headers for Firefox, which might work, too.
P.P.P.P.P.P.P.P.PS.: October 24: Don Dalton found that he was able to replace his Chrome profile with an older one to bypass Facebook’s block. Have a read of his comment here.
P.P.P.P.P.P.P.P.P.PS.: February 18, 2018: over the last few weeks, Mac users have been getting hit hard with this fake warning, and are being offered Windows software to download (which, of course will not work). Some have reported that changing browsers gets them around this. Downloading the equivalent anti-malware program from the same provider (e.g. Eset) does nothing, since the one user I know of who has done this came up with a clean Macâbecause, as we already know, the warnings are fake.
P.P.P.P.P.P.P.P.P.P.PS.: February 18, 2018: let’s see if Wesley Shields, security engineer at Facebook, will tell us what’s going on. He’s been asking for more staff to join his malware detection team.
Hi Wesley, Iâve seen a lot of people being told their machines have malware, but they run scans and they are clean. Happened to me in 2016. Is this something that your department has created? Iâd like to learn more, but of course tagging Facebook doesnât net a reply.
P.P.P.P.P.P.P.P.P.P.PS.: February 23, 2018: finally, a journalist has taken this seriously! Louise Matsakis, a writer for Wired covering the security and social media beats, has looked into the latest round of Facebook malware warnings being forced on Mac users. Facebook is still lying, in my opinion, claiming there could really have been malware (lie number one), but the company’s probably so used to saying one thing and doing another by now. Louise is right to seize upon the fact that no one knows what data are sent to Facebook during the scan. It’s a fine article, and I highly recommend it.
In response to a friend’s Facebook post applauding the possibility that Kim Dotcom would get extradited, two days ago. It’s unedited, other than the inclusion of a link and a note, and I apologize for the grammatical errors.
Surely this remains the only case in the history of humankind where copyright is a multi-jurisdictional criminal matter? And if getting rich off copyrighted material is a crime, then YouTube has a longer history of letting this happen and rewarding users for it. The principal difference that I can see is that YouTube (through its parent Google) dodges paying New Zealand tax,* which seems to be a position our government is comfortable with. Iâm not saying I like Dotcomâwho I think is only out for himself and yes, he comes across as a dickâbut fairâs fair. Nor am I saying I support copyright infringement, but under New Zealand law thatâs a civil matter that should be fought by the infringed, not by governments. (In the US there is a criminal provision but the guy hasnât ever been there nor was his company based there.)
When I read the prosecutionâs case it falls down at some basic hurdles. They say the defendants infringed. But they donât say what they infringed. Youâve got to have this, especially if youâre going to prosecute this as a crime. The guy has a right to know exactly whatâs at issue. And Megaupload stored stuff, they werenât the infringers. Even if they knew about it, thereâs no crime knowing about criminal copyright infringement. If the US position holds true, then when we go to YouTube to view a full-length movie or TV programme that someone has uploaded in order to make money for themselves, it would actually make us criminals. Iâm not comfortable with this.
I see an appalling double standard when it comes to how this bloke is dealt with, e.g. he is dissed for spending money funding a political party but Colin Craig gets a pass for doing the same thing at exactly the same time. He is dissed for showing us how our government monitors us by bringing in Glenn Greenwald yet we all applaud Greenwald when he does it overseas. I find it interesting how he went from Public Enemy No. 1 when he was first arrested, to admired underdog for quite a lengthy period when Kiwis realized copyright law was on his side, and now heâs back to Public Enemy No. 1 again after exposing the flaws in our security services and trying to do us a favour with the flop that was âthe moment of truthâ. Guess we really hate it when a foreign-born New Zealand resident tells us how things should be, but we love telling foreigners about gun laws, imperialism and inequality.
If the guy is to go to prison, then let it be for an actual crime.
* PS.: Yes, itâs technically legal to run things through a Bermuda tax haven and pay yourselves back for stuff.
With Google and Ford announcing they will team up to make self-driving cars, I have some concerns.
Iâm not in Luddite position on the idea of self-driving cars. Potentially, they can be far safer than what we have today. I see so many godawful drivers out thereâNew Zealand has a very high road toll based on our small population, and itâs not hard to see whyâand the self-driving car canât be a bad thing. Active safety, active cruise control, and other features all point to be a better future on our roads.
However, is Google the right firm? You donât need to look too far (especially on this blog) to find some Google misdeed, a company that happily does dodgy things till it gets busted.
Imagine the future.
âą The car has no brakes until you sign up to Google Plus, then log in.
âą You cannot enter the car till you load a Google Play app on to your phone. You have to agree to a bunch of settings which you don’t even read, but essentially you’ve let them monitor you.
âą If you have a car accident in a Google car, thereâs no phone number for anyone to call. You have to sign up to the support forums where youâre told by Google volunteers that itâs your fault for misusing the software. Or they just ignore you. You spend several years trying to get your case heard.
âą Google listens to all your in-car conversations so it can deliver targeted advertising to you, until you opt out of this feature in your Google Account settings.
âą Google hacks your devices while you are near the car, even if you have Do Not Track or other privacy settings turned on. They continue doing this till the Murdoch Press writes an article about it or they get reported to an industry association.
âą Doubleclick targeted advertising appears in the carâs central LCD screen.
âą All routes that the Google cars choose go past advertisers’ brick-and-mortar stores.
âą Google Street View is updated a lot more, which sounds great, till you realize it’s been updated with images from your latest journey.
âą Unless you opt out, Google actually drives you to the store which has the goods you mentioned in a private Gmail message, even though you don’t need the product and it just came up casually in conversation.
âą When US state attorneys-general sue Google over wasted time with the cars driving you to these stores, the penalty is roughly four hours of the companyâs earnings.
Autonomous cars are part of our future. But I’ll opt for the tech of a firm I trust more, thank you. And right now, I even trust Volkswagen more than Google.
Iâve done this a few times now: looked through my yearâs Tumblr posts to get an alternative feel for the Zeitgeist. Tumblr is where I put the less relevant junk that comes by my digital meanderings. But as I scrolled down to January 2015 in the archive, Iâm not that certain the posts really reflected the world as we knew it. Nor was there much to laugh at, which was the original reason I started doing these at the close of 2009.
January, of course, was the month of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, which saw 11 murdered, including the famed cartoonist Wolinski, whose work I enjoyed over the years. Facebook was still going through a massive bot (first-world) problem, being overrun by fake accounts that had to be reported constantly. The anti-vax movement was large enough to prompt a cartoonist to do an idiotâs guide to how vaccines work. In other words, it was a pretty depressing way to end the lunar year and start the solar one.
February: Hannah Davis made it on to the cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition by pulling her knickers down as far as socially acceptable (or unacceptable, depending on your point of view), while 50 Shades of Grey hit the cinemas, with one person commenting, âSeriously, this book raises every red flag warning signal I learned during my Military Police training. Grey is a ****ing psycho.â Mission: Impossibleâs second man with the rubber mask, Leonard Nimoy, he of the TV movie Baffled, passed away. Apparently he did some science fiction series, too.
CitroĂ«n celebrated the 60th anniversary of the DS, generally regarded as one of the greatest car designs of the 20th century, while Alarm fĂŒr Cobra 11 returned for another half-season in March. In April, one Tweeter refused to do any Bruce Jenner jokes: âthere are kids & adults confused/bullied/dying over their gender identity,’ said an American photographer called Spike. The devastating Nepalese earthquakes were also in April, again nothing to be joked about. There was this moment of levity:
And the Fairfax Press published a photograph of President Xi of China, although the caption reads âSouth Koreaâs President Park Geun Hyeâ. Wrong country, wrong gender. When reposted on Weibo, this was my most viral post of the year.
In May, we published a first-hand account of the Nepal âquakes in Lucire, by Kayla Newhouse. It was a month for motorheads with For the Love of Cars back on Channel 4. Facebook hackers, meanwhile, started targeting Japanese, and later Korean, accounts, taking them over and turning them into bots.
In June, rumours swirled over the death of Channel 4 newsreader Jon Snow, whereupon I made this image:
Microsoft rolled out the bug-filled Windows 10, which worked differently every day.
In December, it wasnât quite âStar Wars, nothing but Star Warsâ. There was, after all, Trump, Trump and more Trump, the only potential presidential candidate getting air time outside the US. Observing the primaries, 9Gag noted that the movie Idiocracy âstarted out as a comedy and is turning into a documentaryâ. Michael Welton wrote, meanwhile, in Counterpunch, âThe only way we might fathom the post 9/11 American world of governmental deceit and a raw market approach to political problem solving is to assume that moral principle has been banished because the only criteria for action is whether the ends of success and profitability have been achieved. Thatâs all. Thatâs it. And since morality is the foundation of legal systems, adhering to law is abandoned as well.â The New Zealand flag referendum didnât make it into my Tumblr; but if it had, I wonder if we would be arguing whether the first-placed alternative by Kyle Lockwood is black and blue, or gold and whiteâa reference to another argument that had internauts wasting bandwidth back in February.
Itâs not an inaccurate snapshot of 2015, but itâs also a pretty depressing one. France tasted terror attacks much like other cities, but the west noticed for a change; there were serious natural disasters; and bonkers politicians got more air time than credible ones. Those moments of levityâmy humorous Jon Snow image and feigned ignorance, for instanceâwere few and far between. It was that much harder to laugh at the year, which stresses just how much we need to do now and in 2016 to get things on a more sensible path. Can we educate and communicate sufficiently to do it, through every channel we have? Or are social media so fragmented now that youâll only really talk into an echo chamber? And if so, how do we unite behind a set of common values and get around this?
