Excellent links by way of the fediverse today. First up, Cory Doctorow about saving the news from Big Tech, with sentiments that aren’t far off my own, many of which have been recorded on this blog. His post is from June 2023. Highlights include this on contextual advertising: In studies, these contextual ads perform slightly […]
Tag: news
The captivating case of Brian MacKinnon
On a whim, I decided to look up the case of Brian Lachlan MacKinnon, who went back to his high school 15 years after he graduated and posed as a 16-year-old pupil. I saw it on BBC Scotland’s Public Eye at the time (around 1995), though I think I had also heard of the […]
Is Microsoft trying to stem its losses from Bing?
If Appledystopia is right in its 2020 article, Microsoft loses US$1·5 milliard per annum on Bing. So maybe that explains why it’s worsened so much. Microsoft might well be finding ways to cut its losses, and servers cost money. Pity that none of the Bing clones are saying anything, not even Duck Duck Go’s usually […]
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Attempting re-entry into Bing’s Pubhub
In early July, I wanted to see if we could add Lucire to Bing as a news source in their Pubhub—after all, Google has us as one, as Yahoo, Altavista and Excite had back in the day. And I’d say that 25 years of publishing with an international team might qualify us as being media. […]
Reduced Facebook? Australia is the lucky country
Whichever side you are on with Facebook imposing a ban on Australians sharing news content, this says it all about the level of intelligence over at Menlo Park. In Australia, Facebook has not only de-platformed legitimate governmental bodies and non-profits, it has de-platformed itself. Maybe taxing these companies would have been easier, and […]
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Back on RNZ’s The Panel: on Hong Kong’s new national security legislation
Public domain/Pxhere What a pleasure it was to be back on The Panel on Radio New Zealand National today, my first appearance in a decade. That last time was about the Wellywood sign and how I had involved the Hollywood Sign Trust. I’ve done a couple of interviews since then on RNZ (thank you to […]
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Cautiously optimistic about Boucher
When I ran for office, there was often a noticeable difference between how I was treated by locally owned media and foreign- owned media. There are exceptions to that rule—The New Zealand Herald and Sky TV gave me a good run while Radio New Zealand opted to do a candidates’ round-up in two separate campaigns […]
Facebook exploits COVID-19 for profit, and viral thoughts
A lot of the world’s population has come together in the fight against COVID-19. Except Facebook, of course, who is exploiting the virus for profit. Facebook has done well in the first quarter of 2020 with positive earnings. Freedom From Facebook & Google co-chairs Sarah Miller and David Segal note (the links are theirs): ‘Facebook […]
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Rather locked down than living within a controlled experiment
As a dual national, I hope there’s some exaggeration or selective quoting in the Bristol Post about its report of former police officer Mike Rowland, who’s stuck in Auckland with his wife Yvonne. Apparently, New Zealand is in ‘pandemonium’ and he feels like he’s in ‘Alcatraz’. As we are most certainly not in pandemonium, […]
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The British approach to coronavirus: by Grabthar’s hammer, what a savings
Still from AFP video I’d far rather have the action taken by our government than the UK’s when it comes to flattening the curve on coronavirus, and the British response reminds me of this 2018 post. Just because the chief scientific adviser there has a knighthood and talks posh isn’t a reason to trust […]
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