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 […]

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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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Big Tech lies: that’s the default position

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. […]

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Testing the occidental search engines with site:, June 2024 edition

I haven’t run one of these tests for a while (for eight months), to track how the occidental search engines were doing with the claimed number of pages for a cross-section of websites. Mojeek and, last time I checked, Bing were actually truthful about these numbers. Bing had missed the mark on this for some […]

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As we grow and chart a new direction, a fresh site for JY&A Media

  JY&A Media has a new website, to tie in with the new direction we have for the business. I think it was evident that when we created the Autocade Yearbook and built our e-commerce shop, Libriz, that things were changing. Whereas JYA Creative and JY&A Fonts work with clients to help realize their branding, […]

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Using “AI”: you need to know when answers are disinformation

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 […]

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XScreenSaver’s privacy policy lays bare Google’s disgraceful conduct

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. […]

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Tech misdeeds are now too numerous

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 […]

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