Beware AI; the dangers of Google ads; and the beauty of Radio.garden

Hat tip to Stefan Engeseth on this one: an excellent podcast with author, historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari. Among the topics he covers, as detailed in the summary in Linkedin’s The Next Big Idea: • AI is the first technology that can take power away from us • if we are not careful, AI […]

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Bing is definitely very broken, and it’s hurting Duck Duck Go

The last few days have been about ‘How awesome is Mojeek?’ and ‘How shit is Bing?’ I’m finding great search results from Mojeek, and as a site search for Lucire, it’s absolutely brilliant. Blows Duck Duck Go (Bing with privacy) away, even back when DDG had a reasonably comprehensive index of our pages (before the […]

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Bing Webmaster Tools: how to make sure you vanish from a search engine completely

With my personal site and company site—both once numbers one and two for a search for my name—having disappeared from Bing and others since we switched to HTTPS, I decided I would relent and sign up to Bing Webmaster Tools. Surely, like Google Webmaster Tools, this would make sure that a site was spidered and […]

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It’s not hard writing clear terms and conditions

We’ve had a ‘Highlights’ section in our T&Cs for a while, but today I thought I’d take another look at them. Without reading them again, I drafted these: • We don’t know anything about you unless you tell us. • When you do tell us stuff (like signing up with your email address) we store […]

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More TV Dregs, please

I was looking through the old JY&A links’ section, which dates back to the beginning of the site in the 1990s (indeed, back to Windows 3·1, as we couldn’t use a file name with more than three letters in the suffix). The last revamp of its look was over 15 years ago, judging by its […]

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The real privacy policy

Documentaries such as Terms and Conditions May Apply (embedded here) and Doc Searls’ The Intention Economy got me thinking about our privacy policy.    We have one for our company, but how do we really use your private data? It got me thinking.    Since we’ve been online for longer than most people, we have […]

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In Wellington, the players need to change

The below was written on April 22, 2013, in response to an article in The Dominion Post. It was offered to the newspaper as an op–ed, then to The Wellingtonian, but it was eventually declined. The Dominion Post’s headline on April 22 confirmed what many of us knew after numerous friends and colleagues left Wellington […]

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In praise of Zoho Mail

  Now that all of our email, bar a handful of client accounts, are going through the paid version of Zoho Mail, I couldn’t be happier.    When we shifted things over, my friend and web development expert, Nigel Dunn, suggested either Google or Zoho. He’s a big fan of Google, and I can see […]

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Retrograde steps for our cellphones

Last week, our company’s Nokia 2730 Classics arrived as part of a contract with Telstra Clear, of whom we’ve been a customer since the 1980s. They are a reminder of how technology is regressing.    Remember that scene in Life on Mars, where Sam Tyler, or Samuel Santos in La chica de ayer, tells Annie […]

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Eating Google humble pie

Today, I am eating Google humble pie, because it was right about malware on Autocade. Therefore: thank you, Google. (I’m not so petty as to not thank them for when they get things right.)    Since Google had cried wolf over this blog, which has never had malware issues, I had to question it. Nevertheless, […]

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