An excellent reminder from Don Marti on just why ad tracking is bad on the web: The tracking is not there to identify the individual (the data doesn’t have to be accurate) but to enable getting the highest-priced ad onto the cheapest possible site Cross-context tracking puts higher value and lower value sites into competition […]
Read More… from Why ad tracking is bad: it puts democracy in jeopardy
The disinformation continues, this time on Quora. Here this person defends the indefensible by … agreeing with me? They claimed later to have deleted the post, but that was a lie. The post remains, but my comment has been deleted. They can’t handle someone pointing out their deceptive conduct. There were a couple […]
Read More… from Continuing the disinformation battle—because we have to
If we take everything Big Tech says as a lie, then we wouldn’t be far off what is happening, rendering my recording of the examples I encounter in daily life unnecessary. We know they lie, and it would actually become more unusual to record the times they tell the truth or follow through with something. […]
I haven’t run one of these tests for a while (for eight months), to track how the occidental search engines were doing with the claimed number of pages for a cross-section of websites. Mojeek and, last time I checked, Bing were actually truthful about these numbers. Bing had missed the mark on this for some […]
Read More… from Testing the occidental search engines with site:, June 2024 edition
From me, link removed. Guess what year? There is one thing Google does not seem to do very well any more: search. That’s an exaggeration, but I have been really surprised at things that it has failed to find of late. For example: stuff on this blog. It is not to do with age: Google […]
Read More… from Google’s had issues with PHP pages for a long, long time
After saying that I wouldn’t blog about these, along comes one that is too priceless to ignore. XScreenSaver has been on the Google Play store but was facing deletion unless it included a privacy policy. Since it collected no data, its creators didn’t feel it was necessary, but as Google insisted, they wrote a cracker. […]
Read More… from XScreenSaver’s privacy policy lays bare Google’s disgraceful conduct
I was led to believe that SRWare Iron was Chromium with more privacy, but this morning’s experience testing it was a bit disturbing. Let’s take a fairly common search, like Amazon seller. SRWare’s default search engine is Bing, or at least its own search takes you to Bing. And Bing puts in its first result […]
Read More… from Strange behaviour on SRWare Iron, and Bing ranks phishing site first
Jon Henshaw shared his ‘Small matters’ post recently, and it makes for good reading. One highlight: While the Small Web still exists, most people spend increasingly more time on the Big Web [sites controlled by mega-corporations], and that’s a problem because the walled gardens and algorithms keep us from seeing and experiencing the many extraordinary […]
Maybe I have very rotten timing but out of curiosity, I tried out the Duck Duck Go image search tonight for something that I thought would yield a lot of results. You know I wouldn’t give Google praise freely, but to its credit: I thought: maybe DDG had problems with its […]
I had bookmarked this a while back: the statement by former Google employees who were sacked for not supporting the company’s involvement with the Israeli government and military. Some were not even part of the employees’ sit-in protests. But Google is too weak to be able to handle dissent, and clearly doesn’t support the welfare […]