Everyone now sees the rot economy—and we’re beginning to understand what’s behind it

Again, things I’ve been pointing out for over a decade—heck, even over two decades, if you consider early concerns I had over Yahoo!—are now mainstream thought. Ed Zitron’s latest newsletter begins: A great deal of what I write feels like narrating the end of the world—watching as the growth-at-all-costs, hyper-financialized Rot Economy seemingly tarnishes every […]

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January 2025 site: tests on occidental search engines: Bing recovers

After running my latest round of search engine site: tests, I think we can safely say that Bing has recovered in terms of its index size, and it’s no longer down where Alltheweb was in 2002. It actually has tens of millions of results for Microsoft’s own domain, and not a few lakh. This is, […]

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Finally, progress with Wix and their fraudulent client

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 […]

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Vivaldi DLL disappears upon start-up; soon restores itself

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 […]

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Twenty twenty-four, the year of “AI slop”

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 […]

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Why don’t we just stop tracking?

Person peering through Venetian blinds. Photographed by Noëlle Grace.

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, […]

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Classic Car Catalogue closes over copyright claim

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. […]

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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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The new disinformation posts may have stopped, but there’s tidying to do

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 […]

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Here’s probably how Semrush linked concepts—and got it totally wrong

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.     […]

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