One annoying thing about switching the majority of our sites to HTTPS is losing our positions in the search engines. We were always told that HTTPS would lead to rises in search-engine ranking, and that being a mere HTTP would lead to Google downgrading you. The reality, as I’ve witnessed since we completed our server […]
Read More… from Switch to HTTPS, lose your number one and two search-engine ranking
We’re probably far enough along from the event for people not to know which one I am referring to, as I’ve no wish to embarrass the organizers. Earlier in 2021, we saw a weekend event that would take place at the ‘Johnsonville Community Hub’. No address was given other than that. Both Duck Duck […]
Read More… from Don’t put your events on just Facebook—they won’t be seen
Promoting DuckDuckGo: ‘Glancing back’ in Lucire KSA, June 2021. For some time now, in every print issue of Lucire, and Lucire KSA, there is a mention of search engine DuckDuckGo. But I wasn’t sure how long we had been doing this, till I checked tonight. We started referencing DuckDuckGo in 2012, on our history page, […]
Read More… from Nine years of promoting DuckDuckGo in Lucire
You know the US tech giants have way too much power, unencumbered by their own government and their own country’s laws, when they think they can strong-arm another nation. From Reuter: Alphabet Inc’s Google said on Friday it would block its search engine in Australia if the government proceeds with a new code that […]
Read More… from Like communist dictatorships, Google and Facebook threaten Australia
Hernán Piñera/Creative Commons/CC BY-SA 2.0 My friend Richard MacManus wrote a great blog post in February on the passing of Clive James, and made this poignant observation: ‘Because far from preserving our culture, the Web is at best forgetting it and at worst erasing it. As it turns out, a website is much more vulnerable […]
With my last two cellphones, I’ve not used the default browser. I usually opted for Firefox, and in December 2018, I believe that’s what I did on my then-new Meizu M6 Note. I don’t recall it being too problematic, but the type on some sites displayed a tad small, so I sampled a few […]
Read More… from Finding an Android browser that works without fuss is harder than you think
Megan McArdle’s excellent op–ed in The Washington Post, ‘A farewell to free journalism’, has been bookmarked on my phone for months. It’s a very good summary of where things are for digital media, and how the advent of Google and Facebook along with the democratization of the internet have reduced online advertising income to a […]
Read More… from Why paywalls are getting more prevalent; and The Guardian Weekly rethought
Zain Ali The EU gets it when it comes to fines. Rather than the paltry US$17 million certain US states’ attorneys-general stung Google with some years ago for hacking Iphones, they’ve now fined the search engine giant €4,340 million, on top of its earlier fine of €2,420 million over anticompetitive behaviour. That US$17 […]
Read More… from The EU lands Google with another fine—but will Google change?
US Department of Defense Keen to be seen as the establishment, and that means working with the military–industrial complex, Google is making software to help the Pentagon analyse drone footage, and not everyone’s happy with this development. The World Economic Forum’s ‘This is the future of the internet’ makes for interesting reading. It’s […]
Anthony Quintano/Creative Commons We’ve had years of Google and Facebook acting like arses, but it’s disappointing to see Twitter give us more and more causes for concern. In 2017, we saw them change their terms and conditions so speaking power to truth is no longer a requirement. You can’t help but think that the […]
Read More… from Twitter’s shadow-banning: not just in the US, as Kiwis get caught up, too