I don’t know if it was the timing of my previous post—or whether this, too, fell into the category of, ‘If you want something done, ask a woman to do it.’ Today I received an email from Elisa at Wix Support announcing that Emerald Sky’s fraudulent post no longer featured my name. Once again, just […]
Read More… from Finally, progress with Wix and their fraudulent client
Anyone getting these errors with Vivaldi? Sometimes I get them after I boot up Vivaldi and it works for a short period. Other times, they occur when the computer is booted up. ‘The code execution cannot proceed because vivaldi_elf.dll was not found. Reinstalling the program may fix this problem.’ ‘Windows cannot access the […]
Read More… from Vivaldi DLL disappears upon start-up; soon restores itself
The tricky thing in 2024 was, obviously, disinformation. More disinformation articles went up about yours truly than anything legitimate like press releases or media interviews. In other words, there was more “AI slop” going online—something mirrored in other parts of the web. As Cybarbie on Mastodon noted: ‘The surveillance people screwed themselves really, since we […]
Not only is Linkedin OK with disinformation, thereby making itself complicit to fraud, it turns out verification isn’t that simple. I’ve said many times that I think most “apps” are just web browsers limited to a single site, but, in the interests of greater visibility, I relented and downloaded the Linkedin app. Like most apps, […]
One of the reasons Keith Adams sold AROnline, a site that he put decades into, was someone alleging he had infringed copyright over a photograph. So he paid up. But for long-term survival, he turned to the team at Great British Car Journey, who had deeper pockets, as AROnline was in danger of closing down. […]
Read More… from Classic Car Catalogue closes over copyright claim
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, […]
In the businesses I’m actually involved in, there aren’t that many unsavoury people. Maybe in the early to mid-2000s I came across some hangers-on in the fashion world. But SEO, wow, there’s a great deal of unscrupulousness. I’ve seen their con-merchant emails since the late 1990s—all the more reason that being grouped as one of […]
Read More… from The new disinformation posts may have stopped, but there’s tidying to do
When you have been on this disinformation-busting journey for nine months, you can work out how Semrush got everything so wrong. Here’s one item, a bunch of SEO tools, and if you read the description, ‘Google SEO Xiaoyan’ is in the copy. Probably deeply questionable, which is why Google offers it for Chrome. […]
Read More… from Here’s probably how Semrush linked concepts—and got it totally wrong
Here’s a company that seems to protect sploggers and disinformation spreaders: Bluehost. One of the disinformation splogs had a Cloudflare account, which hid their real host. I filed a DMCA report, as this splogger was stupid enough to use my photo. These seem to get through the Cloudflare system better than things classified as ‘other’. […]
Read More… from The trials of removing disinformation from Bluehost
Posting on Reddit has elicited something from Semrush, with Vic on their team writing this in response to me. Hi Jack, sorry for any confusion—I’ve been discussing the case with my team internally to make sure we’re all on the same page. Our system aims to predict trends using various signals, but sometimes […]
Read More… from Semrush finally explains how my (unspaced) name wound up in their system