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
I alluded to this earlier this year when we redid JY&A’s links’ directory, but Joan Westenberg confirms it with some real stats. Once upon a time, the web seemed limitless, but now ‘we’re trapped in digital zoos built by tech giants. Google. Facebook. Amazon. Apple. Microsoft. They’ve carved up the web into their private empires, […]
Read More… from How to deal with the shrinking, independent, human web
How very interesting to see that the disinformation posts about me have stopped going up since I called out Semrush on their own subreddit. For four days I’ve not found any new ones on Google. The timing tells me that Semrush can, contrary to its response, adjust keywords, especially after learning the sheer hell their […]
Read More… from Forgetting humanity: the desperation of tech
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?
If you peel away the technobabble of what Semrush said to me on Reddit, basically their algorithm messed up when it included an unspaced version of my name. It wasn’t trending. It was just an extrapolation made by an algorithm that, unfortunately, had a very negative consequence for me. But it also didn’t help […]
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 […]
Read More… from Which medium makes us happy, where we absorb and we share?
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. […]
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 […]
Read More… from Enforcing long-held laws: Google is a monopolist, violating Sherman Act s. 2
Jon Henshaw shared his ‘Small matters’ post recently, and it makes for good reading. One highlight: While the Small Web still exists, most people spend increasingly more time on the Big Web [sites controlled by mega-corporations], and that’s a problem because the walled gardens and algorithms keep us from seeing and experiencing the many extraordinary […]
I had bookmarked this a while back: the statement by former Google employees who were sacked for not supporting the company’s involvement with the Israeli government and military. Some were not even part of the employees’ sit-in protests. But Google is too weak to be able to handle dissent, and clearly doesn’t support the welfare […]