“AI” bots drive Wikipedia traffic up 50 per cent—as we already witnessed in 2023

Another thing I experienced before others: “AI” scraping causing a substantial increase in bandwidth, notably at Autocade in 2023. In Wikipedia’s case, this happened last year, as the “AI” bots sent their bandwidth up 50 per cent. Casey Newton writes:   Post by @caseynewton View on Mastodon The bots steal, do not give attribution, and […]

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Wrapping up the year of disinformation?

I thought Emerald Sky Group had removed its disinformation post, falsely claiming to be working with me and having my endorsement. It’s a blatant attempt to trade off my reputation, even though I’ve spotted articles where their lads are bragging about how good they are. Well, you can’t be that good if you need to […]

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Keep your corner of the ’net clean

There is a lot of disinformation when it comes to politics—and now you know why it was important for me to get rid of the disinformation about me. No, it’s not because anything written about me could have affected an election. But it is about a medium that takes effort to stay clean and usable, […]

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Copyright trolling: another fishy mob to block

After four months, we received another notice from Copytrack—it must be our 14th. As usual, I went back through our digital files and sent them our licence info. But this time, I got rather fed up, since we’ve successfully proved our position 100 per cent of the time, and I think we should be whitelisted. […]

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

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 […]

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Kissing that Disqus advertising money goodbye (webmasters beware)

I’m going to have to write off what Disqus owes us. No response to this thread, and no response to a DM I sent at their request. Please DM us your account name and site shortname and we will be happy to look into this for you. — DisqusSupport (@DisqusSupport) July 8, 2022 I assume […]

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They’re brainwashed by the cult of Boris, so the next Tory leader will be an ideologue

Sean O’Grady puts into his opinion piece what so many of us have said. He does it far better than I could. They backed Johnson through the Dominic Cummings scandal, through the resignations of two ethics advisers, through the scandal of a party donor paying for the decoration of his flat, through the mishandling of […]

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A dodgy 2000s’ UK spam list is still doing the rounds in 2022, pretending to be legit

  During February, I received spam from Novuna in the UK, the finance company that’s a subsidiary of Mitsubishi. It wasn’t personally addressed, it was just a general message. I complained via their complaints’ email, only to have the message bounce back as it wasn’t working. However, they did respond on Twitter, unlike less caring […]

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Amazon: as dodgy as the rest of them

Jane Pendry in the UK Tweeted this in response to a Tweet about Amazon, and I had to reply: Refuse to use them. They breached my data and have a policy of blaming the customer. — Jane Pendry (@senseabilityUK) November 26, 2021 Agreed. They claim I let someone into my Associates' account as their reason […]

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Lucire’s Instagram account is gone, for no reason

Lucire’s Instagram is toast (hopefully temporarily, but you never know), since they unilaterally allege without evidence that there was unusual activity. This is utter shite, but it’s just another day in Facebookland where actual spam is tolerated, and legitimate activity is penalized.    I’ve sent through the information they requested with a review promised in […]

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