It still surprises me that “the defaults” in life have the hold that they do. I tried a lot of computer programs when I was younger and found WordPerfect the best word processor, and to this day I use it. In the early 1990s, it was the default. However, it got there through fair competition […]
Read More… from Variety is the spice of life, so get away from the defaults
Big Tech lies. Each time I use Google, I get this: The message, ‘Our systems have detected unusual traffic from your computer network. This page checks to see if it’s really you sending the requests, and not a robot’ is a sham. The reality is that Google will force a captcha on you […]
Read More… from Google lies (situation normal), Google users run scrapers, Tencent users attack
Abdelkader Boudih, a.k.a. Seuros, shows how dodgy Amazon is. In July, his Amazon Web Services account was terminated and 10 years of his data were gone. ‘No warning. No grace period. No recovery options. Just complete digital annihilation.’ What Amazon then did over 20 days was gaslight him, with humans acting like chatbots. We’ve seen […]
Read More… from Amazon Web Services: where 10 years of your work can just vanish
Happily, Curlie is back in action: I was able to log in without issue yesterday, and everything is back to normal. We definitely need human-curated indices on the web, sorting the human from the machine-written. Curlie (and its forerunner, the Open Directory Project) had forbidden content mills early on: sites that churned out only content […]
Read More… from This weekend: Curlie is back; ignorance must be bliss
Every once in a while I try this Über thing everyone’s talking about. I’ve never been able to get the “app” to work but you can theoretically use the website. Except I believe Über is no longer doing rides and is now principally a puzzle website. Trying to get one for my partner from a […]
Read More… from Über gives up rides, website now specializes in puzzles
If you watch one in-depth interview this week, it should be this one: Jon Stewart interviewing Carole Cadwalladr, on broligarchs, “AI”, and a techno-authoritarian surveillance state. And no, not a single component of that title is alarmist. We have been watching the world head to this point right through the 2010s, except now it’s accelerating […]
Read More… from When referring to ‘a techno-authoritarian surveillance state’ is not alarmist
I know, if you search, you’re bound to find an opinion that matches yours, and pretty quickly, too. Bhagwad Park (in either Ontario or Florida—I assume one of the addresses on his site hasn’t been updated) happens to agree with me about AWS, except he breaks things down far better, being an expert on web […]
I haven’t commented on US politics much lately, primarily because there are others who do it far better. If you want excellent insight without being weighed down in detail, read what Richard Murphy in the UK has to say on, say, US tariffs, or the madness of austerity economics. His blog Funding the Future has […]
Got to love the irrepressible Bob Hoffman. In his March 23 newsletter, he notes that Adlook studied target segments from popular data providers, and asked the people in those segments about themselves. I won’t spoil Bob’s entire list but the top two are: 47 per cent of the people who the data said were women […]
I’ve been saying this for many years, certainly for at least five, but the most ready example I can find on my blog was from August 2024: we have seen repeatedly how dishonest Big Tech conduct, which is often left unchecked, festers into something appalling, whether it’s anticompetitive conduct or the genocide of Rohingya Muslims […]
Read More… from I’m no longer alone in calling for Big Tech to face bans