The crunch time media face is nothing new

07.03.2024/21.32

Talking Points Memo showed the amounts programmatic advertising brought in to them over the last eight years. (The above graphic is from their card preview on Mastodon.) I’ve never been convinced of programmatic since no one in the ad business could ever explain it in plain language. I say just figure out what’s on […]

Beware AI; the dangers of Google ads; and the beauty of Radio.garden

03.01.2023/12.19

Hat tip to Stefan Engeseth on this one: an excellent podcast with author, historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari. Among the topics he covers, as detailed in the summary in Linkedin’s The Next Big Idea: • AI is the first technology that can take power away from us • if we are not careful, AI […]

Google’s advertising business is a negligence lawsuit waiting to be actioned

09.12.2022/02.55

Apparently the New Zealand government says Big Tech will pay a ‘fair price’ for local news content under new legislation. Forget the newcomers like Stuff and The New Zealand Herald. The Fairfax Press, as the former was, was still running ‘The internet is scary’ stories at the turn of the century. What will Big Tech […]

Google collects more enemies—we haven’t been critical enough of it

05.09.2017/12.43

My complaints about Google over the years—and the battles I’ve had with them between 2009 and 2014—are a matter of record on this blog. It appears that Google has been making enemies who are much more important than me, and in this blog post I don’t mean the European Union, who found that the big […]

Does Google advertising continue to track you after opting out?

03.07.2014/04.38

Consistently, for the last several weeks, the ads I would see on YouTube have been for Hyundai. I didn’t think much of it, other than Hyundai going through an advertising blitz. After uncovering Google’s outright deceptions regarding its former Ads Preferences Manager, where the company promised not to track people when they opted out—but […]

How brands fool us

13.04.2013/00.37

The Google experience over the last week—and I can say ‘week’ because there were still a few browsers showing blocks yesterday—reminds me of how brands can be resilient. First, I know it’s hard for most people to believe that Google is so incompetent—or even downright corrupt, when it came to its bypassing Safari users’ […]

Google, hacks, privacy breaches, and ad codes: there’s a pattern emerging here

11.04.2013/10.08

In all my recent posts, I’ve stopped short of saying that Google hacked us, but that the code inserted had Google’s name all over it. But if Google was party to or had profited from hacking, then it wouldn’t be the first time, right? Remember when Google hacked the Safari browser to track […]

Google can’t ﬁnd any more problematic pages, yet continues blacklisting

08.04.2013/11.00

Google continues to throw up big red flags to anyone visiting Lucire’s website today, although its own Webmaster Tools page reveals that it has not found any problems since Saturday: Given that we had sewn up the server on Saturday, and deleted every instance of the hack, then Webmaster Tools’ inability to find dodgy […]

Google clears our ad server of any malicious code, but continues to block our sites

06.04.2013/23.46

All of the sites that carry advertising from our ad server (ads.jyanet.com) were blacklisted by Google yesterday, including this one. In fact, Google still blacklists them, despite Google and Stop Badware clearing the server of any problems. Here’s the kicker: the code that was injected by hackers appears to be Google Adsense code. If […]

Someone’s doing something right inside Google

01.04.2011/23.45

The troubles with Google that I’ve faced—privacy breaches, Ads Preferences Manager not honouring its claims, ﬁghting for six months on behalf of a friend over a deleted Blogger blog, Chrome being buggy (but not nearly as badly as IE9), phantom entries in my Google dashboard, unanswered messages—would suggest, to anyone studying business or a graduate […]