Losing your number-two position when switching to HTTPS, 31 months on

In 2022, when the Jack Yan & Associates site went to HTTPS—though some parts of it were on that even in the 2000s—it fell from being second place in Google to below 30th for a search for my name. However, the accepted wisdom was that HTTPS sites outranked HTTP ones on Google. The “experts” all […]

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Online history lesson

  It took a couple of days’ tweaking, but the Wordpress part of Jack Yan & Associates’ website now (nearly) matches the new template on the home page, T&Cs and contact page. This was a tricky one due to the conflicts between the BootstrapMade template and the standard Understrap one for Wordpress. Also debatable is […]

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Time to go to each host and take down the disinformation websites

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 […]

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Which medium makes us happy, where we absorb and we share?

Above: In 1995, the Mercury website was quite flash, and I recall seeing the 1996 Sable on there, as a transparent GIF, and being impressed. Unfortunately, that predates the Internet Archive, so there’s no record of that incarnation of the site. This press photo will have to do to remind me of that moment almost […]

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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. […]

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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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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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Continuing the disinformation battle—because we have to

The disinformation continues, this time on Quora. Here this person defends the indefensible by … agreeing with me? They claimed later to have deleted the post, but that was a lie. The post remains, but my comment has been deleted. They can’t handle someone pointing out their deceptive conduct.     There were a couple […]

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