The Royal New Zealand Ballet generously put its Hansel & Gretel performance from November 2019 online for free this weekend, choosing Facebook as its medium. That, naturally, attracts scam artists, putting in false links in order to charge credit cards. Many Kiwis were duped. The RNZB reported many, and so have I. All six of […]
Read More… from Are you a scam artist? Facebook loves you, and protects you
Andrew R. Tester/Creative Commons It’s pretty hard to deactivate one’s Facebook. When I ceased posting in 2017 and reduced my activity to client stuff and group management, I made sure that I had no more Facebook sign-ons left. But it turns out that Lucire’s Twitter-to-Facebook page script relies on my account. I did look […]
Read More… from Social media sheeple don’t know they’re sheeple
With the Twitter advertising preference monster continuing to gather preferences on all of us even after opting out—which basically makes Twitter Facebook—I decided to switch the Mastodon–Twitter Crossposter around. With Twitter being my main social network, I was quite happy to allow the Crossposter to take my Tweets and turn them into Toots on […]
Read More… from Mastodon before Twitter: time to change my main social network
As with most platforms, I selected, on Twitter, that I didn’t want my advertising to be personalized. I don’t mind them making a buck, but I do mind them tracking my preferences, just as I did with Google and Facebook. Google lied about its advertising preferences from 2009 to 2011 till yours truly busted […]
Read More… from Twitter also tracks your preferences, even after you opt out of ad customization
Don’t believe everything you read on the internet, e.g.: Anyone alive during this period will be wondering, ‘Where’s Altavista?’ Just on visitor numbers, as opposed to visits per month, they were doing 19 million daily in 1996, 80 million daily in 1997. Goodness knows how many searches we were doing per day. Yet […]
Martin Wolf, writing in the Financial Times, touches on a few points that resonate with my readings over the years. He believes capitalism, as a system, is not a bad one, but it is bad when it is ‘rigged’; and that Aristotle was indeed right (as history has since proved) that a sizeable middle […]
What does Tesla do to whistleblowers? They tell the cops you’re an active shooter. Apparently, this case about a gentleman called Martin Tripp emerged in 2018 but only today were the police documents released, and are worth reading. Above: Two of the pages from the Storey County Sheriff’s Office over the false […]
Read More… from Tesla or SpaceX doesn’t like you? They’ll say you’re an active shooter
How quickly an opinion can change. I have been on Tumblr for 12 years, signing up in 2007, with my first post in January 2008. For most of that time I have sung its praises, saying it was one of the good guys in amongst all the Big Tech platforms (Google, Facebook) that […]
Read More… from Tumblr is now where Verizon’s corporate agenda rule
European Union—www.europarl.europa.eu/downloadcentre/en/visual-identity, Public Domain; link I’m reading more about this EU copyright directive that was voted in last month. Without doing a full analysis, I can say that we won’t go after anyone who links to our publications. We presently don’t care if you use a brief snippet of our content and link […]
Read More… from EU copyright: as far as we’re concerned, link away
Above: Flowers at the Islamic Centre in Kilbirnie, Wellington on Monday. On 9-11, I wrote an editorial in Lucire immediately. It was clear to me what I needed to write, and the editorial got quite a few readers at the time. Today is March 20, five days after a terrorist attack on our country, […]
Read More… from In the wake of terrorism in your own country