We use Cloudflare, knowing full well that it landed itself in trouble for upholding some unpalatable websites. But here’s the thing: if you’re not a technical person (raising my hand here), you may have no other choice. This is not like Twttr, Google or Microsoft Word where there are alternatives that work largely the same, […]
Read More… from Cloudflare, because we don’t know how to use anything else
I really dig where Strypey is going with this, from Mastodon (shared under CC BY-SA 4.0): A platform that respond to keywords with “AI” slop and advertising is not a search engine; a neutral tool for sifting through an index of web pages. Which is what Goggle Search offered to build its initial reputation and […]
Having published the top 10 car manufacturers for 2023 in Autocade Year of Cars 2025, I felt our readers deserved the 2024 table, and put it on the Autocade World website. There was only one public source that had them at that time: a website called Focus2move, and they seemed to be credible. The page […]
Read More… from Top 10 car manufacturers by sales, 2024—beware the bogus figures
As NixCraft wrote when sharing this: the irony is that it’s from Perplexity. The rest of you can do this, we won’t. We might be one of those little corners of the web still making human-written content. Life skill in 2025: to spot what is real and what is slop. A bit like […]
Read More… from Ninety per cent of the web could be “AI” slop next year
I watched a video by William Gourley (a friend of friends) recently, and here are the suggested videos to its right on YouTube. There is only one that is actually related to what I saw. The rest are completely irrelevant. In the olden days, YouTube would at least attempt to show you related […]
Read More… from Does clickbait work now? YouTube must think so
This was interesting: how the “AI” theftbots (yes, I’m coining that word) affected Autocade’s traffic. We had blocked a bunch of them already—notably the western ones and ByteDance—but there were many others that still got through. This is from Cloudflare, but even their default settings miss a bunch, especially Chinese ones, and they don’t […]
Creative Commons/CC0/Pxhere Anyone else do this? You’re searching for something online and you go to a page where there’s an introduction, then a ‘Contents’ box dividing up the answer into sections. You immediately leave that page because it’s likely to be “AI”-written or the answer you want is buried within, and it’s quicker to […]
The old The new The old The new The Autocade logo has changed, and we’ll be letting you in on why in due course. It hasn’t been done just because of æsthetics, though after 17½ years it was probably time for an update. Meanwhile, on the “AI” scraping front, which […]
Read More… from Autocade gets a new logotype; and we block a lot of “AI” bots
Big Tech lies. Each time I use Google, I get this: The message, ‘Our systems have detected unusual traffic from your computer network. This page checks to see if it’s really you sending the requests, and not a robot’ is a sham. The reality is that Google will force a captcha on you […]
Read More… from Google lies (situation normal), Google users run scrapers, Tencent users attack
Internet Archive Above: An Internet Archive screenshot of one of the scam websites, presumably with the main image missing. From Malwarebytes in March: a Semrush impersonation scam has hit Google ads. While I would never side with bad actors, it is difficult to sympathize with a brand like Semrush after the nine months of […]
Read More… from Two of the web’s worst brands wind up in a scam