Just another day dealing with US tech firms then.
When I signed up to Anchor, there was no mention of Google Podcasts, so I was very surprised to find later that I was syndicated there. Can you remove yourself?
Anchor: ask Google!
Google: ask Anchor!
All that money (Google, not Alphabet, is worth US$320 milliard) and theyāre about as useful as David Seymour at a socialist workersā conference. Actually, about as useful as David Seymour, full stop.
While I saw Vodafoneās Super Wifi commercials, I never thought to act on them, since (mistakenly) I thought it was something to do with cellphones. Might have been the gadgets they used in the commercial.
But, after talking to Raghu, their salesā rep in Pune, a city outside of Mumbai that I know well, he convinced me to upgrade not just my cellular plan (which was from 2012 when a gig of data were a lot) but the home internet to Super Wifi.
This is really a laypersonās post as there isnāt much online about it, at least not from a New Zealand perspective.
The set-up consists of the Vodafone Ultra Hub (a modem that I was already familiar with, since I had mine since 2018), and two TP-Link Deco X20 units, which are for all-home wifi. The idea is that they transmit the wifi signal over the house. Theyāre equipped for wifi 6, which really just tells you the speedāand not 6G was I was told on the phone (a minor slip).
I knew about mesh wifi units since a friend had already told me how she and her partner used them in their home.
Weāre in a 290 mĀ² home so I had a suspicion that the two units would be insufficient, but Vodafoneās protocol is to begin with two.
The Ultra Hub is identical to the old oneāthe copyright notice on the box says 2017āso Iāll be returning it. The two Deco units plug in, one to the Ultra Hub, the other in another part of the house. The theory is that they communicate between each other.
I downloaded the TP-Link app first before plugging in the Deco unitsāin fact I had them the day beforeāand I was fortunate that it could be found at a public APK site, since I do not have Google, and, God willing, never will, on any cellphone of mine.
Itās a remarkably easy to use app, fortunately, with a Speedtest built in.
Iāve always had problems at one end of the house where I have a desktop PC thatās not wifi-enabled, and putting in a PCI-E adapter wouldnāt work due to space restrictions inside the case. My only option to pick up wifi would be a USB 3 adapter, which coincidentally was also made by TP-Link (itās the Archer T9UH).
I disliked the D-Link Powerlink units, which, despite the manufacturerās claims, lost 90 per cent of their speed between the two points. The signal at the modem end would come in at speeds of between 700 and 1,000 Mbit/s, but 40 to 90 Mbit/s at the other end was commonplace. The 1 Gbyte promised by all the marketing was a fantasy.
The previous owner of this house also used Powerlink units, but at different points.
Computer geeks still tell me these are good and I suspect they could work well in smaller homes or ones with newer wiring.
For context, using the old Saturn fibre cable that I had installed in 1999 at the old house, I would easily see over 300 Mbit/s via a cat 5 ethernet cable. Having to live with speeds between a ninth and a third of that in a house with Chorus fibre was tough going, and life proved too busy to get an extra internal cable installed.
I was glad to see the tail end of those powerline units as I was promised that 600 Mbit/s was going to be possible at the end of the house with the mesh.
It wasnāt. In fact, the second unit failed to pick up the first, and I was forced to bring it closer to the first in another room.
Speedtestās first result was 106 Mbit/s down and 58 Mbit/s up, which was an improvement, but not a good one, and far short of the promised levels.
The TP-Link app had a Speedtest result of over 916 Mbit/s no matter where I went. I didnāt realize that it was giving me the results at the point of entry on the first Deco unit.
Therefore, it should show a higher number. When I realized this, I began running Speedtests via speedtest.net, and was disappointed to see, even at the first unit via wifi, results in the 120 Mbit/s region.
I called tech support. The first person didnāt know much, but I explained that Raghu had promised two additional mesh units should my experience not be up to expectation. She said she was only authorized to send one. I decided to take it. She was also authorized to give me unlimited phone data for seven days in case I needed to use the cell as a hotspot.
I called again later and got to speak with a tech, Paul, who had the units at his home, and could tell me more.
First, the X20s have two LAN ports on the back. I had read somewhere that these were for the modem-to-unit link exclusively. It turns out that was wrong. You can plug in an ethernet cable and run it straight into your computerārendering my purchase of the TP-Link Archer adapter redundant. Secondly, I should employ a wifi test if I really wanted to see what was going on: I should plug in a device via ethernet into the Deco unit.
The results were then markedly different: between 600 and 700 Mbit/s from the first unit, but still low numbers with the second.
The third unit arrived and this helped somewhat, with 300-plus Mbit/s in a ground floor room when connected via ethernet.
In the meantime, I had got back in touch with Raghu and suggested that a fourth unit might do the trick, and get me at least back to the speeds I had in the late 2010s. Interestingly, he was only authorized to send two, which meant I would be in possession of five such units, all of which I had to pay the courier charges for.
Units four and five arrived. The fourth unit went into the upstairs office and I had a 3 m ethernet cable running from it, on the floor, to the PC. The speeds were still poor: 178 Mbit/s down, 175 Mbit/s up.
One thing TP-Linkās app does not tell you, at least not in diagrammatic form, is how the Deco units are all connected. I discovered through the web interface (tplinkdeco.net in a browser, using the password that you signed up to the app with) that the office one was stretching to get its signal from the first oneāand not the other two in the house. This Reddit page told me what I needed to know: you reboot the unit that you want reconnecting elsewhere. I did that, and it found the third unit in the ādenā (as we call it) and speeds went up to between 200 and 270 Mbit/s both down and up.
Iām still dealing with speeds lower than what I had in 2018 using a 1999 cable but getting into the 200s is a far sight better than being in the double digits. If I have any serious downloading to do, thereās always the option of the laptop and a direct connection from the Ultra Hub, where I can work away at 700ā900 Mbit/s.
Iāll continue to tinker since the laptop managed to get over 300 Mbit/s during the tests, and I believe that that was down to the location of the office Deco unit. However, Iām hampered by the 3 m ethernet cable and Iām going to need 5 m, possibly (no one sells a 4 m). Possibly going to a cat 7 cable might do the trick there, too.
So there you have it, a real-world trial of Vodafone New Zealandās Super Wifi. Not as great as promised but less of a let-down than what powerline modems do in real life. And yes, you can hook ethernet cables from the units to your computer.
Iām not entirely sure I need to block out the email addresses here since theyāre likely to be burner Gmail accounts, but Iāll give these spammers the courtesy they donāt deserve.
As shown below, theyāve been coming for over a year; thereās a chance I may have even received them in 2019.
The text of the latest reads:
Hello,
I hope youāre well!
I am currently working with a number of clients in placing guest blogs/sponsored articles on high-quality sites, such as yours. I recently came across your site and, after having a quick read through some of your more recent posts and articles, I think itād be a great fit for some of the sorts of content campaigns that we frequently work on.
I work with a range of clients across different areas such as fashion, lifestyle, home decor, legal, travel plus loads more. Would you be interested in working together on one of our future/upcoming content campaigns?
Looking forward to hopefully working on a campaign together soon!
First up, I already know they never visited since the latest refers to Lucire as a āblogā in its subject line. Just because you run Wordpress doesnāt mean itās a blog.
A more crazy one recently actually requested we publish something at lucire.net, which is a brochureware site with no posts on itāso I donāt think they are even hunting specifically for Wordpress-driven sites. Anything will do.
Last year, I replied to one of them, thinking they could be a legit enquiry for advertorial. It went nowhere, since, as far as I know, they were just after backlinks, and not prepared to pay what a commercial advertorial purchaser would.
I wouldnāt have been any the wiser if they didnāt keep repeating the messages, and it seems that during the last few weeks theyāve shifted into high gear. And when you know theyāre spam, the innocent experience that you had in 2020 suddenly becomes a supreme waste of time.
I know, all the signs are there: they run Gmail accounts and there are no signature files or details of what company they represent. Gmail, to me, has plenty of spammers, and it is not the service used by professionals. (When 200 people can share the same email address, why would you?) But there was that charitable side of me wondering if the first one was just someone who had shifted to working from home and trying to make a buck. I didnāt really think, since Iām not of this mind myself, that it was spam and that I was a mark.
I now have common phrases from the spams fed in to my filters so these will just go into the trash folder. Iām posting this in case others have received these spams, and wish to do the same.
Hereās a recent Tweet of mine. Not altogether an accurate one, but when I wrote it I genuinely believed Facebook claimed it had 2 milliard users.
Remember when I said #Facebook probably only had 750 million users? Now, if they claim to have deleted 1Ā·3 milliard bots, and they also claim to have 2 milliard users, then surely my maths was right? https://t.co/3KsC82G9ur
As Don Marti says, the fact Facebook even has to claim this tells us they are fighting a losing battle.
On one of the groups I administer there, Iād say over 99 per cent of the membersā queue are bots. Hereās a typical screen in botland, I mean, Facebook:
These are common patterns and I see them all the time; they all use a variety of responses but they all come out of the same program. āI will seriously abide!ā, āYes broā and āOK broā are pretty common, and there are others.
The thing is, Iāve seen these for years, reported each one as a fake account (since there is no option for āthey are using automated softwareā), and in 99 per cent of cases (no exaggeration; in fact I may be underestimating), Facebook tells me there is no violation of their terms of service.
This can mean only one of two things: Facebook is too stupid to realize that an account that feeds the same things into group questionnaires constantly is a bot or running some sort of software that is not permitted under its own terms; or these accounts exist with Facebookās blessing.
In the queues, legitimate humans are being outnumbered by over 99 to 1, and if this is a representative sample of Facebookās current user base (Iām betting I see more accounts than the average person), then hardly anyone is on site any more. I wouldnāt know, I only check client pages and this queue for the most part.
But if you wish to waste your money advertising to bots on the Facebook platform, then be my guest. Zuckerberg and co. are already getting enough money for doing nothing useful.
I wonder if Iām getting more Twitter fatigue after 14 years. I have built up a fun network there, especially of car people that I made a point of following over the last couple of years. But the cellphone keyboard is such a fidgety, impractical and slow device, Iāve found myself starting to respond, even writing the first few words of a Tweet, then giving up. This has had wonders on my email inbox as the number of messages drops. Iām getting through stuff.
Fortunately for Twitter, Jack Dorsey hasnāt come across as big a dick as the Facebook and Google people, and the man has been doing some good with his money, like donating US$1 milliard to COVID-19 research. Yes, Twitter still has some major problems, especially when it comes to censorship, but when someone says, āI can afford to give that away because Iād still be a rich bastard with the US$2 milliard I have left,ā itās actually a contrast to Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. Unlike the latter, he also hasnāt been publicly lying and calling us ādumb f***sā.
Even so, more often than not I now find myself stopping. Is Tweeting that really worth it? Who cares? So I have a different opinion to that person. I donāt need a global audience for it. If I feel strongly enough, and have the time, thereās always long-form blogging.
Finally, here’s a page explaining just why Google is corrupt.
This is a comment (with my reply, in reverse chronology) from a NewTumbl user, Thewonderfulo, who often posts about the siteās rating system. Iāve no idea if itās official, but it certainly passes itself off as authoritative.
I usually find myself agreeing with them but hereās a prime example where I donātābecause, first, I canāt see anything in the NewTumbl rules that confirms this (excepting one sentence below which Iāll get on to); secondly, NewTumbl has told me of some of their positions personally and I feel theyāve confirmed my position; and thirdly, if bare behinds can be seen in PG-13 films (including in their country), then a single ‘buttcheek’ is even less offensive and couldnāt possibly be M, which is where NewTumbl classifies nudity.
There is one sentence under the O category (āOfficeā, or safe for work): āImages that would be considered sultry or provocative qualify as O provided the people in the photo have both their tops and bottoms covered ā not just hidden from view, but actually wearing clothes.ā Weād then have to argue about how much ācoverageā there is, and here Iād fall back on being alive for nearly five decades and having kept my eyes open about popular culture. Swimwear, for instance, provides acceptable coverage which wouldnāt offend most of us in the occident. From memory thatās the level of skin the post in question was dealing with.
Itās exactly as I said in my last post on NewTumbl. I love the concept, and the people who run the site, but the moderators are in some sort of Handmaidās Tale Gilead. In fact, Iād venture to say that Tumblr wouldnāt consider a buttock to be offensive enough for removal. Given NewTumblās history, as a Tumblr alternative that would be more tolerant, I believe that the moderators really donāt understand the whole picture, and where the lines should be drawn.
To think, after chatting directly to NewTumbl I was feeling a bit more chipper about the site, only to have a one-sentence comment and zero willingness to engage by a user who is, I fear, typical of the āstandardsā that are actually being applied by the overenthused American puritans.
Incidentally, speaking of Americans, the sort of divisive talk that they are infamous for is all too present. Have a look at the thread from my earlier post. Frankly, if they have a problem with a buttock on a woman who is actually wearing clothes, while this sort of mudslinging is fine on a family-friendly post, then I wonāt be in a hurry to return. Sorry.
Postscript: Alex, who maintains three spaces on NewTumbl, can still see my “missing” five posts. In addition, NewTumbl has responded and it’s believed there was a bug. More on that here.
This is interesting: talking to Bii on Twitter, who is also a NewTumbl user, I discovered that he canāt see my last five posts on NewTumbl.
I sent him a permalink (using the recommended NewTumbl method) to my last post there, but he gets a 404.
In fact, the newest post he can see is my sixth-to-last. And itās interesting to me that of the last five, three were critical of NewTumblās moderation system.
This reminds me of Google Plus, which used to hide my posts that were regularly critical of Google.
Bii would kindly prefer to give NewTumbl the benefit of the doubt though my thoughts jumped immediately to censorship. The last five posts are all public.
Top: The way my NewTumbl blog is supposed to look, in its top left-hand corner. Above: What Bii sees, with the last five posts hidden. Coincidentally three of them are critical of NewTumbl.
Like I say, my blog posts here have a pretty good audience, and the first one on NewTumbl comes up very high when one searches for that site. You do not want to be playing these games.
To think, I was so supportive of that place.
For the sake of completeness, then, here are the three critical posts, which have been excerpted before.
November 27, 2020 Do the mods here know their own rules?
Had a couple of modelling shots marked M by the moderators here and I cannot understand why. I had them marked O.
Thereās no nudity (M) but they contain sexy or sultry imagery (O). Do the mods here know their own rules?
See for yourself: this was the latest. As this is a US site, maybe I should use The Handmaidās Tale for guidance? I hear itās a big hit over there. This is after a post with the word w*nk (literally written like that, with an asterisk) got marked as M.
November 29, 2020 See you at my blog gallery
That was pretty simple. Iāve put the New Image Gallery plug-in from A WP Life on to my main blog. And since that blog gets an average of 700 views per post (and the viral ones getting six figures), Iām betting that whatever I put there will get more eyeballs than here. For those interested, itās at jackyan.com/blog/2020/11/november-2020-miscellaneous-images/. [Postscript: the galleries can be found at jackyan.com/blog/category/gallery/.] New entries will be added on a monthly basis. Itās not as cool as NewTumbl but Iām going to be interested to see if itās as enjoyable as what Iāve been doing here.
I wanted in all sincerity to see NewTumbl grow but as @alex99a-three and others have seen, some moderating decisions have been questionable. I know first-hand that Wikipedia is a place where true expertise, that of professionals, is not welcomeāfounder Larry Sanger has said as much, which is why he left. The late Aaron Swartz echoed those comments. And here, if professionals are being overruled by people who are not at the same level, then Iām not sure what the point is. I feel Wikipedia has no point, and my own dissatisfaction with it led me to create Autocade, and thereās a sense that, in its very real wish to make sure it could keep up with its growth, NewTumbl is heading down the same path.
I donāt begrudge this siteās founders for adopting the approach they did in post moderation. In fact, I think it was very clever and itās a great way for NewTumbl to punch above its weight. However, in practice the absence of an appealsā system doesnāt work for me any more. I totally get that they havenāt the resources. So maybe I will return when they do.
As @constantpriaprism pointed out, Dean is not really present these days, either, so one big drawcard to NewTumblāits transparencyāis now also missing.
And itās those of us in the F and O spacesāpeople that NewTumbl said they wanted to encourageāwho seem to be bearing the brunt of puritanical moderating. Iām guessing we are being sidelined by people who donāt have the context (e.g. Alex has posted some really innocent stuff) or knowledge outside their countries. Both Alex and I (if I may be so bold as to guess his intent) have been marking as F or O things that were safe for us on prime-time TV when we were younger. I use the same standard with imagery and language.
To confirm this lack of knowledge, I read one comment which absolutely highlighted that one moderator had no idea what they were doing, advancing what I felt was a particularly weak argument. In that case, a newspaper front page was taken down and marked as M. You have to ask yourself: if a word appears (censored) on a newspaper front page, then itās probably not M; and if a word is used on prime-time television without bleeping, then itās also probably not M. There are other words which may be adult in nature but are commonly used that even Mary Whitehouse would be fine with, but you just know that with the lack of knowledge that some display here, youāre going to have it taken off the site and marked out of range.
Iāve done my share of rating posts here and I like to think Iāve taken an even-handed, free-speech approach based on decades of experience and life in different countries.
If this is to be an adult siteāand I know the majority of posts lean that wayāthen good luck to it. I will be back as @vergangene-automarken has some excellent stuff, as do the regulars whom I follow, but for now I really want to see what itās like doing the same thing in my own space. See you there.
Earlier today Strangers, the 1978 TV series created by Murray Smith, came to mind. Smith created and wrote many episodes of one of my favourite TV series, The Paradise Club (which to this day has no DVD release due to the music rights), and penned an entertaining miniseries Frederick Forsyth Presents (the first time that I noticed one Elizabeth Hurley) and a novel I bought when I first spotted it, The Devilās Juggler. He also wrote one of my favourite Dempsey and Makepeace episodes, āWheel Manā, which had quite a few of the hallmarks of some of his other work, including fairly likeable underworld figures, which came into play with The Paradise Club.
Yet thereās precious little about Smith online. His Wikipedia entry is essentially a version of his IMDB credits with some embellishments, for instance. It doesnāt even record his real name.
Donāt worry, itās not another dig at Wikipedia, but once again itās a reflection of how things arenāt permanent on the web, a subject Iāve touched on before after reading a blog entry from my friend Richard MacManus. And that we humans do have to rely on our own memories over whatās on the ānet still: the World Wide Web is not the solution to storing all human knowledge, or, at least, not the solution to accessing it.
Itās easy to refer to the disappearance of Geocities and the like, and the Internet Archive can only save so much. And in this case, I remember clearly searching for Murray Smith on Altavista in the 1990s, because I was interested in what he was up to. (He died in 2003.) I came across a legal prospectus of something he was proposing to do, and because it was a legal document, it gave his actual name.
Murray Smith was his screen name, and I gather from an article in The Independent quoting Smith and his friend Frederick Forsyth, he went by Murray, but the family name was definitely Murray-Smith. Back in those days, there was a good chance that if it was online, it was real: it took too much effort to make a website for anyone to bother doing fake news. My gut says it was George David Murray-Smith or something along those lines, but thereās no record of that prospectus online any more, or of the company that he and Forsyth set up together to make Frederick Forsyth Presents, which I assume from some online entries was IFS Productions Ltd. Some websites’ claim that his name was Charles Maurice Smith is incorrect.
Looking today, there are a couple of UK gazette entries for George David Murray Smith (no hyphen) in the armed forces, including the SAS in the 1970s, which suggest I am right.
Even in the age of the web, the advantage still lies with those of us who have good memories who can recall facts that are lost. Iāve often suggested on this blog that we cannot fully trust technology, and that thereās no guarantee that even the official bodies, like the UK Companiesā Office, will have complete, accessible records. The computer is a leveller, but not a complete one.
If I was on Facebook for personal stuff, Iām certain I could repeat those days where I found over 200 bots per day, but these days Iām only reporting the ones that hit groups or client pages.
However, Iād say over 90 per cent of the applicants to one of the groups are bots or at least accounts running automated scripts to get into groups to hide their other activity, or to bombard those groups with spam. Facebook has improved its ratio of getting rid of them, but it still leaves roughly half untouched. In other words, if you are running Facebook bots, youāll have a one in two chance that Facebookās own people will give you a pass because they canāt tell what bot activity looks like. Little has changed since 2014.
Two Facebook accounts using the same software, it seems, getting caught on a group page. Both were reported, only one was taken down, despite them using the same techniques.
I thought Iād also grab some screenshots on how automated activity is actually preferred on Facebook, too. Iāve mentioned this here before but hereās an illustrated example from Lucireās page.
First up, an automated addition that has come via IFTTT, which picks up the Tweets (also automated) and turns them into Facebook posts. This looks pretty good, and thereās even a preview image taken from the page.
Letās say I want to tag the company involved and remove the signature line. Facebook now lets me do this without starting a new line for the tagged business, so thatās an improvement on where we were half a year ago, where it was impossible using the new look.
So far so goodāat least till I hit āsaveā and the preview image vanishes.
I usually get the logo only when I feed in a post from scratch directly on to Facebook (assuming Facebook doesn’t corrupt the link and turn it into a 404). In other words, automated, or bot, activity gives you a better result than doing things directly on the site.
I realize I could add some lines into the code to force the Facebook scraper to seek out the biggest image, but then weāre going into territory beyond that of the average user, and frankly Iām not skilled enough to do it in PHP. And why doesnāt Facebook require that of the bot when it picked up the page to begin with?
Thatās enough for todayāI only wanted to illustrate that earlier example as I didnāt do it properly earlier in the year, and give a fresh bot warning. They’re still out there, and I’m betting most pages and groups have inflated numbers where non-humans are messing up their reachāand that’s just fine for Facebook knowing that people will have to pay to get around it.
Speaking of Twitter doing weird things, I checked out some of Lucireās settings on there today, something I haven’t looked at for a long time.
I do not ever recall telling them I was in Malaysiaāit’s not a country we’ve even had a correspondent ināand Estonian and Welsh were never marked as languages. I’m not even that sure about Romanian since our edition there shut in the 2000s and the Twitter account dates from 2009. Given yesterday’s post, I should be able to be more certain: I didn’t put in Malaysia, and I didn’t put in Romanian.
I will give them one compliment: the advertising preferences were a damned sight more accurate than anything I saw on Facebook (back when Facebook let me see them). I still deleted them though.
Here are the images that have piqued my interest for December 2020. For November’s gallery, click here (all gallery posts are here). And for why I started this, here’s my earlier post on this blog, and also here and here on NewTumbl.
I was absolutely shocked to learn this is how Gmail works.
If I read this correctly, #Google lets more than one person use a single email address (in this case, over 200!)? How daft! Why would they do that? pic.twitter.com/KtTO6PnDEI
As youāll read in the thread, this has been confirmed by other Gmail users.
That should rule out ever using Gmail for secure communications. Not that you should be using a service like that for anything important, but the fact is Gmail has become ubiquitous, and I believe a lot of people donāt know any better.
Just imagine being able to receive some emails meant for your rival by signing up to an address that varies from it by a full stop or period.
Secondly, we’ve noticed a large amount of spam where we can trace (via Spamcop) the origins back to Gmail. Oftentimes they have Gmail reply addresses, as in the case of 419 scams (where they may use another ISP or email service with a “sacrificial” address to send them). Why would you risk being among that lot?
Add this to the massive list of shortcomings already detailed here and elsewhere and you have a totally unreliable platform that doesnāt really give a toss. They didnāt care when they removed my friendās blog in 2009 and then obstructed any attempt to get it back, until a product manager became involved. They didnāt care when their website blacklisting service libelled clean sites in 2013, telling people not to visit them or link to them. And they donāt care now.
There really is no reason to use Gmail. Youāll risk your emails going to someone else with a similar address, and youāll be among the company of unethical actors. I can truly say that if Gmail werenāt this ubiquitous, and used by so many friends, Iād just set up a rule on our server and block the lot.
Earlier today Strangers, the 1978 TV series created by Murray Smith, came to mind. Smith created and wrote many episodes of one of my favourite TV series, The Paradise Club (which to this day has no DVD release due to the music rights), and penned an entertaining miniseries Frederick Forsyth Presents (the first time that I noticed one Elizabeth Hurley) and a novel I bought when I first spotted it, The Devilās Juggler. He also wrote one of my favourite Dempsey and Makepeace episodes, āWheel Manā, which had quite a few of the hallmarks of some of his other work, including fairly likeable underworld figures, which came into play with The Paradise Club.
