There are a few experiments going on here now that this blog is on the new server. Massive thanks to my friend who has been working tirelessly to get us on to the new box and into the 2020s.
First, thereâs a post counter, though as itâs freshly installed, it doesnât show a true count. There is a way to get the data out of Yuzo Related Posts into the counterâeven though thatâs not entirely accurate, either, it would be nice to show the record counts I had back in 2016 on the two posts revealing Facebookâs highly questionable âmalware scannerâ.
Secondly, we havenât found a good related post plug-in to replace Yuzo. Youâll see two sets of related posts here. The second is by another company who claims their software will pick up the first image in each post in the event that I have not set up a featured image or thumbnail; as you can see, it doesnât do what it says on the tin.
Some of you will have seen a bunch of links from this blog sent out via social media as the new installation became live, and I apologize for those.
Please bear with us while we work through it all. The related post plug-in issue has been the big one: there are many, but they either donât do as they claimed, or they have terrible design. Even Wordpressâs native one cannot do the simple task of taking the first image from a post, which Yuzo does with ease.
Recently a friend recommended a Google service to me, and of course I responded that I would never touch anything of theirs, at least not willingly. The following isnât addressed to him, but the many who have taken exception to my justified concerns about the company, and about Facebook, and their regular privacy breaches and apparent lack of ethics.
In short: I donât get you.
And I try to have empathy.
When I make my arguments, they arenât pulled out of the ether. I try to back up what Iâve said. When I make an attack in social media, or even in media, thereâs a wealth of reasons, many of which have been detailed on this blog.
Of course there are always opposing viewpoints, so itâs fine if you state your case. And of course itâs fine if you point out faults in my argument.
But to point the âtut tutâ finger at me and imply that I either shouldnât or Iâm mistaken, without backing yourselves up?
So where are you coming from?
In the absence of any supporting argument, there are only a handful of potential conclusions.
1. Youâre corrupt or you like corruption. You donât mind that these companies work outside the law, never do as they claim, invade peopleâs privacy, and place society in jeopardy.
2. You love the establishment and you donât like people rocking the boat. It doesnât matter what they do, theyâre the establishment. Theyâre above us, and thatâs fine.
3. You donât accept othersâ viewpoints, or youâre unable to grasp them due to your own limitations.
4. Youâre blind to whatâs been happening or you choose to turn a blind eye.
Iâve heard this bullshit my entire life.
When I did my first case at 22, representing myself, suing someone over an unpaid bill, I heard similar things.
âMaybe thereâs a reason he hasnât paid you.â
âThey never signed a contract, so no contract exists.â
As far as I can tell, they were a variant of those four, since one of the defendants was the president of a political party.
I won the case since I was in the right, and a bunch of con artists didnât get away with their grift.
The tightwad paid on the last possible day. I was at the District Court with a warrant of arrest for the registrar to sign when he advised me that the money had been paid in that morning.
I did this case in the wake of my motherâs passing.
It amazed me that there were people who assumed I was in the wrong in the setting of a law student versus an establishment white guy.
Their defence was full of contradictions because they never had any truth backing it up.
I also learned just because Simpson Grierson represented them that no one should be scared of big-name law firms. Later on, as I served as an expert witness in many cases, that belief became more cemented.
Equally, no one should put any weight on what Mark Zuckerberg says since history keeps showing that he never means it; and we should believe Google will try one on, trying to snoop wherever they can, because history shows that they will.
Ancient history with Google? Here’s what its CEO said, as quoted in CNBC, in February. People lap this up without question (apart from the likes of Bob Hoffman, who has his eyes open, and a few others). How many people on this planet again? It wasn’t even this populated in Soylent Green (which supposedly takes place in 2022, if you’re looking at the cinematic version).
If you’d rather not read every Facebook entry I made on my blog this year, here’s a helpful video by Simon Caine on all the shitty things they’ve done over 2021. As we still have a couple of weeks of 2021 left to go, I’m betting they will still do something shitty that deserves to be in this video.
I canât yet reveal why, but Iâve come across the work of Hong Kong-trained and based designer Caroline Li, and itâs really good. Sheâs done a lot of book covers, and I know first-hand how hard it is to have a small canvas to work from. Maybe Iâm just used to magazines. Check out her work here.
After nearly two months, Lucireâs Twitter account has been restored.
Earlier in the week, they had requestedâagainâthat I upload my ID to prove that I was who I said I was, despite this having been done countless times already in the past two months.
Today, I received another âit appears that this issue may have been resolved.â I had my doubts and was about to send them a reply giving them a piece of my mind, but I checked, and sure enough, Lucireâs account was back.
I donât know if my letter to Twitter New Zealand Ltd.âs directors, via their lawyers, did the trick, or whether my private information finally reached someone literate with reasonable intelligence.
I gave the lawyers till today (the 17th) to respond, though the timing of the resolution could be a coincidence.
It showed just how terrible Twitterâs systems have been and how right I was to call the entire process farcical. To think that Facebook did better when Lucireâs Instagram was deactivated, and we were only out for a week. And I have had plenty to say about Facebook over the years, as you all know.
Itâs a shame that we never got to play with Zoho Socialâs premium version trial with all our social media accounts intact. I just hope that now that weâve reactivated all our gadgets (IFTTT, Dlvr.it, etc.), that they work as they once did. (As they certainly didnât when we used our temporary @luciremagazine account on Twitter.)
When I was waiting for my new phone to arrive, I didn’t know what all the DHL status updates meant. I looked online to see if I could get a clue as to how long each stage took, especially the “last mile” delivery. There were very few screenshots or public traces. Here’s the trace from my package in case it helps someone else the same boat. (Vivaldi put the DHL website header near the bottom when I made the screenshot.)
Agreed. They claim I let someone into my Associates' account as their reason for not paying my earnings. It's utter BS and they can't tell me who this mystery person is. Maybe their computers are this insecure?!
Yes they are. I explained I had unique passwords, additional security software, no one had access to my computer etc but their line is âitâs not us itâs youâ. The ICO upheld my complaint. @amazon would not accept responsibility. https://t.co/WnbHuWiASE
Itâs clearly a policy. Cheap products were bought from my account at exorbitant prices and sent to me. They tried to say first Iâd committed fraud. When I invoiced the ICO they said I had breached my data. When I explained why it wasnât possible they started sending me money.
You read correctly: Amazon is just as dodgy as the others I’ve criticized publicly. Just that I hadn’t got around to them on this blog, because there had been a lengthy dialogue and I wanted to get more facts. But above is where I’ve got to so far, and it seems I’m not alone.
An internal Facebook presentation this spring called the phenomenon of single users with multiple accounts âvery prevalentâ among new accounts. The finding came after an examination of roughly 5,000 recent sign-ups on the service indicated that at least 32% and as many as 56% were opened by existing users. The companyâs system for detecting such accounts also tends to undercount them, according to the presentation, which was viewed by The Wall Street Journal.
They know, and frankly itâs been this case for years.
Bot nets are the biggest culprit but they donât even get on to that. But when you get news that milliards of bots have been removed, you know thereâs a serious problem.
And of course even regular people have multiple accounts, because no one can predict when Facebook is going to kill their primary one. I was locked out for 69 hours in 2014 because of a bug, then Facebook decided to force malware on to me in 2016 in the guise of a malware âscannerâ. Wouldnât you have a second back-door account? The Wall Street Journal also notes that this affects advertisersâ decisions about audience targeting. Considering that thereâs no independent verification of these metrics, why would you even bother with that site?
The newspaper continues: âFacebook said in its most recent quarterly securities filings that it estimates 11% of its monthly active users world-wideâwhich totaled 2.9 [American] billion for its flagship platform in the second quarterâare duplicate accounts, with developing markets accounting for a higher proportion of them than developed ones.â Notice how that total number is rising. Now ask yourself: do you know anyone whoâs recently joined?
Exactly.
The proportion is much higher, in my opinion. I’ve long said their total sits at around 750 million. Maybe it’s at 1 milliard now. It’s a great way for dictators to manipulate their countries.
If Facebook’s own sample of 5,000 says as many as 56 per cent were opened by existing users, it would not surprise me one bit if this phenomenon occurred through the entire user base. As early as 2014 I said Facebook had a bot ‘epidemic’ and I had the user account URLs from just one night to back me up.
And hereâs the biggest joke of all:
Unlike Twitter Inc. and other platforms without such rules, the company requires users to have just one master account under a real name.
I can find you 5,000 with fake names right now. Itâs bloody easy.
Of course Iâve reported some of them, but itâs not my job to sit there and report all of themâparticularly if Facebook consistently gives the ones I report a pass.
Iâm glad the WSJ is keeping the story going because for a while the Frances Haugen whistleblowing had disappeared from the headlines. On that note, here are several links to that, from Aljazeera English, The Independent, and Vox.
Usual story: go into the Facebook advertising preferences, spot organizations that Iâve never dealt with somehow possessing private information about me that theyâve uploaded to Facebook.
One noticeable one was Afterpay, both its Australian office (no reply on Twitter) and the âAfterpay USA Business Managerâ (the US office did reply).
Iâve never had an Afterpay account. Iâve seen their TV commercials. One of the Lucire crew attended Australian Fashion Week, although I registered him before Afterpay became a sponsor. So how does this company have my details? How does anyone?
The US office asked me to go into DMs on Twitter. And as this is (a) public policy and (b) their replies look copied-and-pasted, I doubt I am breaching any confidences here.
My first DM:
Hi folks, I donât know if I can tell you any more than what was in the Tweet.
Somehow you have my private information and according to Facebook you uploaded it to their site for your marketing purposes.
Iâve never dealt with you so how you have any info on me is a mystery.
Obviously it would be nice to get me off your lists and off Facebook.
Their first reply was this. From here you can already tell they didnât read my first message.
Hi Jack,
We would love to investigate this for you.
Before we do, we need to verify your identity to protect the privacy of your account.
Can you please confirm:
* Your full name
* The mobile phone number registered to your account
* The address registered to your account
* Date of Birth
* Email registered to your account
Polite reminder: It is essential you maintain the personal information we hold on our systems – this means keeping things like your current mobile number and email address updated, and updating your home residential address when you move home.
We collect and handle personal data in accordance with our Privacy Policy (afterpay.com/en-au/privacy-âŠ).
Thank you,
My reply:
Hi there, thatâs the thing, I donât have an account with you, so you shouldnât have any of this. Could you please just search for my name and delete anything tied to it? I can only assume youâve bought someone elseâs list.
Obviously Iâve seen you in TV commercials and to my knowledge thatâs the sum total of our contact.
The next one was positive:
Sure! I can search your name to see if you have an account with us.
That’s your full name?
Me:
Thank you, and yes!
I wonât have an account though, and if I do, thatâll be pretty suspicious since Iâve never signed up âŠ
This morning, we were back to square one:
I would love to investigate this for you.
Before we do, we need to verify your identity to protect the privacy of your account.
Can you please confirm:
Your full name
The mobile phone number registered to your account
The address registered to your account
Email registered to your account
Thanks,
Three minutes later:
Hey Jack,
Without verifying your identity in order to protect the privacy of your account, we can not provide any account details.
If you don’t want to provide any requested information via this chat, you can email us or give us a call to discuss this matter directly.
Please contact us via +1855 289 6014 or use the link below to email us:
help.afterpay.com/hc/en-us/articâŠ
I hope this was helpful! Please feel free to reply to this chat if you have any further question or concern.
Have a great day,
You can tell what Iâm thinking here:
We are going around in circles here. I donât have an account so how can I provide information tied to an account? Can you please explain how you would do this?
Please see your message at 1.47 p.m. GMT. You said you would use my full name, which you have, to see if I have an account with you. What was the result of that?
Iâm betting you came up blank âŠ
I tried their link and none of the options really apply here.
We know that an unethical US-owned company operating in Australia did once obtain my private information through Lumino, the dentistry franchise, and I accordingly kicked up a big stink about it. And as Afterpay is Australian, are they somehow connected?
Updates since original post
Afterpay, October 20, 1.33 p.m. GMT:
Upon further investigation, I was not able to match your name: Jack Yan to any Afterpay account.
Have a good day,
It took two days for them to realize this, despite my saying so from the beginning. My response:
Thank you, this is what the original Tweet was about. Itâs precisely that I donât have any relationship with Afterpay that makes this perplexing.
Now that weâre on the same page, hopefully you can finally start dealing with my original Tweet.
What I asked there was: why you have uploaded private information about me to Facebook? Thatâs what theyâre claimingâboth you and your Australian head office did so over a two-day period.
This means you must have some info about me and as I do not have an account with you, I would like to know how you got it.
And as Facebook claims you have uploaded it to their platform, I would like you to remove it from both their and your databases.
Trust me, if this was routine, where I could have just used your FAQs and your website, I would have done so.
I’ve yet to hear from [email protected] over this matter but I only contacted them today.
Since they have obstructed for two days it makes you wonder what they’re hiding. Over in Australia they’ve already done this:
Afterpay accessing electoral roll data under laws designed to target terrorism, money laundering
Thank you for your patience
We have reviewed your request to erase your personal data. The right to erase only applies to a customer who has an account with Afterpay. As we believe none of these circumstances apply to your situation, we have not option to upload private information to Facebook nor we can do if you had an account with Afterpay.
You can read more about the purposes we use personal data for in our privacy policy afterpay.com/en-CA/privacy-âŠ
Please let me know if I can assist in any other way.
Not a full answer but my feeling is that this is as far as things can go with their US office. If I don’t hear from their Australian head office in a week, I’ll get in touch with our Privacy Commissioner. I know, Facebook lies, but on those earlier occasions when I chased up firms who had done this, the honest ones took my details off. (One less honest one denied it happened but then my details disappeared!)
My final DM for now:
Thank you. The privacy policy probably allows for uploads to business partnersâI had read it when you first sent me the linkâso you are technically covered should an upload have taken place, but I appreciate your going as far as you can in this thread.
Notes
Chrysler’s finest? The 300M rates as one of my favourites.
The original cast of Hustle, one of my favourite 2000s series.
Boris Johnson ‘wage growth’ quotationâwhat matters to a eugenicist isn’t human life, after all. Reposted from Twitter.
For our wonderful niece Esme, a Lego airport set. It is an uncle and aunt’s duty to get decent Lego. My parents got me a great set (Lego 40) when I was six, so getting one at four is a real treat!
Publicity still of Barbara Bach in The Spy Who Loved Me. Reposted from Twitter.
Koala reposted from Twitter.
Photostat of an advertisement in a 1989 issue of the London Review of Books, which my friend Philip’s father lent me. I copied a bunch of pages for some homework. I have since reused a lot of the backs of those pages, but for some reason this 1989 layout intrigued me. It’s very period.
Fiat brochure for Belgium, 1970, with the 128 taking pride of place, and looking far more modern than lesser models in the range.
John Lewis Christmas 2016 parody ad still, reposted from Twitter.
More on the Triumph Mk II at Autocade. Reposted from Car Brochure Addict on Twitter.
The origins of the Lucire trade mark, as told to Amanda’s cousin in an email.
More on the Kenmeri Nissan Skyline at Autocade. Renault Talisman interior and exterior for the facelifted model.
The original 1971 Lamborghini Countach LP500 by Bertone show car. Read more in Lucire.
More on the Audi A2 in Autocade.
We all know what will happen. This is one of two fakes who have sent me a Facebook friend request this week. The first was given the all-clear despite having spam links; and no doubt this will be judged to be perfectly acceptable by Facebook. (In the meantime, a post from Lucire that featured the latest PETA âwould rather go nakedâ campaign was instantly removed.)
What isnât acceptable, is, of course, criticizing them. Bob Hoffman writes (original emphases):
According to Vice, recently the Cybersecurity for Democracy project âhas revealed major flaws in Facebook political ad transparency tools and highlighted how Facebookâs algorithms were amplifying (COVID vaccine) misinformation.â This should come as no surprise to anyone who has been conscious for the past few years âŠ
This week Facebook, in an act of abject unscrupulousness, suspended the accounts of several of the researchers from NYU who are leading the Cybersecurity for Democracy project and need to access Facebook to do their work. One of the researchers called Facebookâs action ââdisgracefulâ at a time when the disinformation around COVID-19 and vaccines is literally costing lives.â
This is how weak and pathetic Facebook is. Instead of doing better (which they claim they try to do), theyâd rather shut down criticism. A bit like a dictatorship.
Theyâre not alone, of course. In the news recently were the snowflakes of Ebay, who also canât take a bit of criticism.
Ina and David Steiner publish a news website about ecommerce and were critical of Ebay in its latest incarnation. The CEO wasnât happy, nor was Ebayâs head of global security, James Baugh, who began a campaign to terrorize the Steiners.
The Steiners found their fence tagged, then Ebayâs staff began sending ordering items to be sent to them, including a fĆtal pig, a mask of a bloody pig face (witnessed by a police officer), a book on surviving the death of a spouse, a package of live spiders and fly larvĂŠ, and a sympathy wreath, among others. Then Ebayâs employees went to Boston, near where the Steiners lived, and planned to plant a tracking device on their car. The Steiners spotted the rental vehicles stalking them. Understandably, they couldnât sleep properly, and even slept separately fearing they would be physically attacked.
It was thanks to the Steinersâ own efforts that they managed to get the number plate of one of the vehicles tailing them, which was then referred to police, who finally managed to figure out what was going on.
One person has been sentenced in all this mess to 18 months in prison, and there have been other arrests, though as this is the US, the CEO gets off scot free with a US$57 million golden handshake.
This isnât that out of the ordinary, and entirely predictable for anyone who has followed this blog. Or the news, for that matter.
A few years ago, I blogged about how Elon Musk and Tesla tried to get one of its whistleblowing employees killed by telling the police that he was planning a mass shooting. According to Bloomberg Businessweek:
Many chief executive officers would try to ignore somebody like Tripp. Instead, as accounts from police, former employees, and documents produced by Teslaâs own internal investigation reveal, Musk set out to destroy him.
The employee, Martin Tripp, allegedly was hacked and followed before the attempt to have him swatted.
Former Gigafactory security manager, Sean Gouthro, said Tripp never sabotaged Tesla or hacked anything, and Musk knew this, but still wanted to damage Trippâs reputation. You can read more directly at the source.
My negative encounters with Big Tech, which I put down more to shoddy programming or incompetence than malice, are pretty tame.
Put together, the pattern of IP theft, censorship, inciting genocide and misinformation, and targeting individuals, is very obvious. Itâs part of their culture these days, since the US keeps letting these companies do what they wish with impunity, and to heck with what anyone would reasonably think the laws actually say. And itâs not just the US: when has our Blairite government or its predecessor moved against Big Tech in any meaningful way, on taxation, or on apportioning some responsibility for their part in COVID-19 misinformation?
Meanwhile, I was amused to see this under Arthur Turnure’s entry in Wikipedia:
So Turnure starts Vogue but decides to work under an 18-year-old in another city.
The reference linked doesn’t back this up at all.
I know Wikipedia is full of crap that we can all go and correct, but as we’ve seen, shit sticks and on the internet, bullshit sticks, including one item that I’ve blogged about before that remained for over a decade.
What gets me is why someone who doesn’t know a subject would deem themselves sufficiently knowledgeable to write about it. Because I just wouldn’t dare.
As detailed before, you don’t see as many inaccuracies in the Japanese or German versions of Wikipedia, and you have to conclude, especially now with politicians doing the same thing, that the Anglosphere is increasingly an anti-intellectual place to be. ‘The fundamental problem with the English-speaking world is that ignorance is not considered a vice,’ said the brother of my friend, Prof Catherine Churchman. My earlier post from 2018 stands now more than ever.
Last month, I Tweeted that I would stop replying to advertorial queries sent to us from Gmail, since over 99 per cent of them result in no deal whatsoever. In fact, that 99 is an underestimate.
One of the early (say mid-1990s to the mid-2000s) rules of the ânet was that if you didnât have a custom domain, and were relying on the likes of Hotmail or AOL, then you instantly lacked credibility when approaching another business. But as Gmail became ubiquitous, that rule was no longer that important for us, especially since some of our own team opted to use their Gmails and have their work addresses forward to them. Iâve always been one to go with the flow when it came to my colleagues, so if they were using Gmail more, then who was I to be so negative against others approaching us doing the same?
Except for sanity. Of course Iâll still read emails from Gmail but since I get numerous advertorial enquiries every day, then you have to draw the line somewhere. You might say that Iâve waited too long to do this as the 99 per cent sample was taken over years. But past behaviour does show I tend to stick at something for longer than many people.
Iâm also surprised at how many of these enquirers want us to ignore New Zealand law, and to have advertorials not marked as such. Iâm not in the business of publishing salesâ catalogues, or a salesâ catalogue masquerading as a magazine, so advertorials are marked as promotional material in some way. So even if they get past first base, they usually fall at the second.
