The EU lands Google with another fine—but will Google change?

Zain Ali   The EU gets it when it comes to fines. Rather than the paltry US$17 million certain US states’ attorneys-general stung Google with some years ago for hacking Iphones, they’ve now fined the search engine giant €4,340 million, on top of its earlier fine of €2,420 million over anticompetitive behaviour.    That US$17 […]

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Endorsing Laurie Foon for Southern Ward

While I no longer live in the Southern Ward in Wellington, I know whom I would vote for if I still did. It’s after a lot of thought, given how strong the candidates are—I count several of them as my friends. One stands out.    I have known Laurie Foon for 20 years this year […]

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Why the love? Google tracks you when location services are off; Facebook allegedly listens in on conversations

Above: We boarded the Norwegian Jewel yesterday—then my other half got a cruise-themed video on YouTube. Hat tip to Punkscience for this one.    My other half and I noted that her YouTube gave her a cruise-themed video from 2013 after we boarded the Norwegian Jewel yesterday for a visit. Punkscience found this article in […]

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Saving the internet from itself—Sir Tim Berners-Lee sees the same dangers

Above: The Intercept is well respected, yet Google cozying up to corporate media meant its traffic has suffered, according to Alternet. There’s a select group of countries where media outlets are losing traffic, all because Facebook is experimenting with moving all news items out of the news feed and on to a separate page.   […]

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Trading identities in the 2010s: when corporate branding and personal branding adopt each other’s methods

Above: Brand Kate Moss was probably seen by more people when the model collaborated with Topshop. In 1999, the late Wally Olins sent me his book, Trading Identities: Why Countries and Companies are Taking on Each Other’s Roles, a fine read published by the Foreign Policy Centre that argued that countries were trying to look […]

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When someone you know got ‘Harveyed’

‘Repugnant’ is a very good word, used by the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences to describe producer Harvey Weinstein’s sexual harassment and assaults. It’s a small world when someone you know was ‘Harveyed’, and it all follows a very familiar script. My op–ed’s in Lucire today. You may also like We need to change […]

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Secret “Asian” man (with apologies to Tak Toyoshima)

Matt Clark Above: Driving a silver Aston Martin. I’m citing the Official Secrets Act when I say I may or may not be on the tail of Auric Goldfinger.   Oh dear, I’ve been outed. I’m a spy. Actually, Walter Matthau and I prefer ‘agent’.    You can read between the lines in this New […]

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There’s still a place for blogging—in fact, it might be needed more than ever

My friend Richard MacManus commemorated the 14th anniversary of ReadWrite, an online publication he founded as a blog (then called ReadWriteWeb) in 2003, by examining blogging and how the open web has suffered with the rise of Facebook and others.    It’s worth a read, and earlier tonight I fed in the following comment. I […]

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We need to change how we consume and share media as Sir Tim Berners-Lee warns us about privacy and ‘fake news’

Paul Clarke/CC BY-SA 4.0, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37435469 Above: Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. Earlier this month, Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote an open letter expressing his concerns about the evolution of his invention, the World Wide Web. (Interestingly, he writes the term all in lowercase.)    It wasn’t just about ‘fake news’, which […]

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Online publishing: how the players we dealt with changed in 2016

Above: Brave Bison’s predecessor, Rightster, left much to be desired in how it dealt with publishers, while investment commentators had concerns, too.   Twenty-sixteen had some strange developments on the publishing front.    First, we noticed Alexa rankings for a lot of sites changed. Facebook itself went from second to third, where it has stayed. […]

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