Facebook goes even more pro-bot with change in group policy

Why are there antitrust or monopoly laws? Why is the usual interpretation of the Chicago School really, really bad for the United States? Umair Haque’s latest post spells it out pretty well, in my opinion.    Just an idea: let’s not import any of their dangerous ideas into our society, or allow their ever-growing giants […]

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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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Like communist dictatorships, Google and Facebook threaten Australia

You know the US tech giants have way too much power, unencumbered by their own government and their own country’s laws, when they think they can strong-arm another nation.    From Reuter: Alphabet Inc’s Google said on Friday it would block its search engine in Australia if the government proceeds with a new code that […]

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This was the natural outcome of greed, in the forms of monopoly power and sensationalist media

I did indeed write in the wake of January 6, and the lengthy op–ed appears in Lucire, quoting Emily Ratajkowski, Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden. I didn’t take any pleasure in what happened Stateside and Ratajkowski actually inspired the post after a Twitter contact of mine quoted her. This was after President Donald Trump was […]

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The US, where big business (and others) can lie with impunity

One thing about not posting to NewTumbl is I’ve nowhere convenient to put quotations I’ve found. Maybe they have to go here as well. Back when I started this blog in 2006—15 years ago, since it was in January—I did make some very short posts, so it’s not out of keeping. (I realize the timestamp […]

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Old-school Brexit

I was led by this Tweet to have a peek at the Draft EU–UK Trade Cooperation Agreement and can confirm that on p. 931 (not p. 921), under ‘Protocols and Standards to be used for encryption mechanism: s/MIME and related packages’, there is this: The text: The underlying certificate used by the s/MIME mechanism has […]

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Facebook leaves up over 95 per cent of hate speech; ‘embarrassing to work here,’ says ex-staffer

Buzzfeed’s article, on departing Facebook staff who write ‘badge posts’, wasn’t a surprise; what was a greater surprise was just how long it took for such news to surface.    Badge posts are traditional farewell notes at Facebook, and not everyone has had rosy things to say. One wrote, ‘With so many internal forces propping […]

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Why con?

  During the course of the 2010s, I came across two con artists. One thing that united them was they were men. But they could not have been more different: one was rather elaborate and was the subject of a Panorama documentary; the other was a rank amateur and, at least in the situation we […]

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Medinge Group at Dutch Design Week: the contribution from Aotearoa New Zealand

My partner Amanda and I are part of Medinge’s presence at Dutch Design Week this year.    Since Medinge couldn’t celebrate our 20th anniversary due to COVID-19, some of our Dutch members, helped by many others, took the opportunity to get us into the event, which is virtual this year.    We had done a […]

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Another mailbox bites the dust from another crash—what is taking out Eudora’s data?

Something is crashing my PC and taking Eudora mailboxes with it.    The latest is losing my Q3 outbox table of contents, which I suppose isn’t as bad as losing the inbox, outbox, and all third-quarter emails, though being at the end of the week, there was still some repairing from the weekend back-up I […]

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