“AI” bots drive Wikipedia traffic up 50 per cent—as we already witnessed in 2023

Another thing I experienced before others: “AI” scraping causing a substantial increase in bandwidth, notably at Autocade in 2023. In Wikipedia’s case, this happened last year, as the “AI” bots sent their bandwidth up 50 per cent. Casey Newton writes:   Post by @caseynewton View on Mastodon The bots steal, do not give attribution, and […]

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Civility and self-righteousness don’t mix

There may be a group of people today who are far more tolerant and accepting, their numbers increased by young people who have grown up in a far more connected world, and have been exposed to more creeds and races than their forebears. That’s a good thing. And we should, rightly, be intolerant toward the […]

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Another advocate for non-tracking ads

Again, not alone here, just ahead of the game (at least ahead in terms of public pronouncements; I’m sure Jon has had this in mind for some time).   Post by @jon View on Mastodon   With an excellent reply by Dan Seitz further down the thread (a direct quote since Vivaldi Social isn’t displaying […]

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No matter how bad you had it, someone had it worse

Two things: I did say “AI” programs would ultimately make up false stories about us all. And what happened to me in 2024 was not as bad as what happened to Arve Hjalmar Holmen in Norway. There are still a few disinformation stories left about me—about four more where companies who would normally enforce their […]

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The public is waking up about Google

Former journalism academic Dan Gillmor writes:   Post by @dangillmor View on Mastodon   People are waking up. Such warnings have been on this blog for over 15 years. The Facebook ones started a bit later when it became evident that they were a bug-filled privacy danger zone, then Twitter. Dan is right: ‘You never […]

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Kudos for Lucire; global trade sans the US; and our ads go tracker-free

Nice to see Lucire can still pick up kudos with Feedspot putting it into their top 100 fashion magazines, ranking it at 21st. Not bad after 27 years, and going on 28, with a fraction of the budget of the multinationals. We’re two behind Women’s Wear Daily, and three ahead of British Vogue. We do […]

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Testing the browsers: can Vivaldi be succeeded?

Because of regular errors with Vivaldi, which they blame on my antivirus, I’ve been testing alternatives for Windows 11. The errors include this message, rendering the program useless.     Vivaldi’s people would have you believe that an antivirus program is deleting things out of the folder, but that doesn’t explain why, after many attempts, […]

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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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Another nonsense “SEO” word appears on the web

I’ve noticed another nonsense word make its way on to the search engines: appkod. Similarly to how Semrush told users that jackyan was trending alongside Google SEO, there are weird web pages all over with SEO service appkod or similar combinations, such as Appkod SEO Agency and Instagram marketing Appkod. A Pakistani company has adopted […]

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