Earlier in December, we decided to put a TV into our guest room. One catch: there is no aerial there, so initially we thought, âWe have some great DVDs, letâs plug in the DVD player.â But it didnât quite feel right.
Weâve stayed at enough places with smart TVs, including some running the Android TV system. Weâve never really had a need to pursue this since most of the things I really love to watch have come out on DVD, and if Amanda and I wanted on-demand, thereâs always the laptop with an HDMI cable. Simple.
I began looking into this and was intrigued by one suggestion on Mastodon for an Nvidia Shield, but alas, none were available in the time-frame (viz. before guests arrived). I was largely stuck with the Amazon Fire sticks, various Google-branded Chromecasts, and the DishTV Smartvu. The ever-knowledgeable Drew at PB Tech recommended the Smartvu, since he was in a similar boat: his place didnât have an aerial, and he used the Smartvu to work as his regular TV. It also happened to be the most expensive of the lot.
My criteria were fairly basic. I wanted something that I could set up and sideload APKs on to, and never, ever go to a Google Play store. I began de-Googling in earnest at the end of 2009 and I sure as heck wasnât going to intentionally invite the bastards back 13 years laterâand actually pay to have their spyware in my home. The fact that Googleâs offerings were more expensive than Amazonâs should be an affront to all consumers. Pay more to have them spy on you!
DishTVâs New Zealand distributor has comprehensive instructions on how to set it up, and sure enough, one of the first steps was it would take you to the Google Play store. No doubt that would be the same story with the Google Chromecasts. Which, unfortunately, left me with one choice: give Amazon money even though they owe me (and this is an ongoing dispute in which, since they are Big Tech, I believe they are lying).
But Amazon it was. PB was charging quite a lot more than Harvey Norman and Noël Leeming and, while Gerry Harvey might be a prized dick, he does seem to hire good people on the shop floor. I never had anyone at Leeming help. Nor could I even find the product at their Tory Street store.
Amazon does require an Amazon account, which I still have, despite all the BS; but once you are in, sideloading is not too difficult. And thereâs no Google Play in sight, even if it is a reasonably stock Chromecast set-up.
Of course, I went through the privacy settings and made sure any data the gadget had collected to date were deleted.
I then proceeded to follow these instructions and enabled third-party apps.
The first method, sideloading from my phone using Apps2Fire, never worked. Waste of time. For whatever reason, the third method didnât, either: ES File Explorer refused to sync with Dropbox despite all my credentials being correct. Of course I had to attempt the second one lastâdownload the Downloader (yes, really), then go to the address where the APKs are.
Itâs just as well, since some of the Amazon-hosted APKs donât work (e.g. Euronews), so you need to find alternatives. Matt Huisman offers some New Zealand ones on his website, and getting the Freeview one was a no-brainerâthe terrestrial channels are then all available, as though one had a normal TV. (I was very surprised to learn that this is not a common thing to do, and equally surprised that the APK was not available on Amazon; presumably itâs not on Google Play either.)
Amazon did suggest getting the Fire TV app for my phone, but when you scan the bar code, it offers two destinations from which to download it: Google Play and Apple Appstore (I still want to call it Ishop). This is pretty senseless, since Amazon has gone to the trouble of hosting so many APKs itself, why not its own one?
Maybe ⊠itâs because itâs a lemon and doesnât work. I grabbed the one at APK Mirror, and it was about as useless as a milliardaire running a social network. (I donât believe it even installed.) No biggie, once everything was set up I had zero use for it.
Which leaves Alexa, which interested me from a technological point of view. The original Alexa will stop working on December 31, so I might as well shift to using the thing that Amazon now calls Alexa. And to ask it to make fart noises, which seems to be its only utility if you donât have other gadgets wired into the network. Only problem: how does it work? Where do you talk into? The stick? The remote?
Strangely, Amazon does not say when I searched for information on its own site, so I guess everyone else automatically worked it out by telepathy.
All I know is when I pressed the button, as per the very few instructions provided in the box, the TV said to wait for the tone, then speak. Nothing ever happened, whether I spoke to the remote or to the stick.
One Mastodon user told me that I had to talk into the slot in the remote.
It was a week later that I tried keeping the button pressed down after the tone. Only then did it work.
Iâm not sure how anyone is supposed to know that, especially as Amazonâs own instructions just instruct you to speak after the tone. Thereâs no instruction to keep the button pressed down. I would even say that implicitly, youâre instructed to let go of the button. You hear a strange noise, you release the button. That seems like a natural reaction to me.
Again we come to the usual conclusion that tech people make a lot of presumptions about how tech-savvy the public is. Folks, you need to assume that we are coming to these gadgets with zero knowledge about them. Yes, I realize Walter Matthau had to press the button on his mic to talk to Robert Shaw in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, but Walt never had a computer tone beep back at him.
Now with hundreds of channels, thereâs still barely anything to watch, though I did find the Jackie Chan movie Wheels on Meals in the original Cantonese. Once I finish watching that, itâs back to the DVDs for me. I just hope our guests are happy.
It was pretty unsurprising to see Mastodon links blocked on Twitter. If you consider that its owner is a petulant manchild, then everything makes sense. But I was surprised that this censorship extended to private messages. This from Tweetdeck as I advised a friend:
Note the links arenât even liveâtheyâre just text mentions. Those are too upsetting for Elmu to deal with.
Remember, petulant children who harp on about free speech care about only their free speech, as they lack the maturity to understand othersâ free speech.
I havenât seen this sort of censorship since Google Plus, though I’m sure users of Chinese social media will find it familiar.
I eventually copied and pasted the text and took a screenshot for my friend, so OnlyKlansâ software isnât smart enough to do OCR yet. That got through.
Sadly, till Dlvr.it is capable of exporting my RSS feeds to Mastodon, my Twitter account remains liveâplus I still donât want people pinching my handle that Iâve had since 2007. But some of these tech companies are pretty slow. Dlvr.it has only had six years to build in ActivityPub and the capability to export to Mastodon. Give them time. One day, they, and Zoho Social, will get there.
Though realistically, our government should be blocking OnlyKlans itself, due to its alleged distribution of the March 15 video. A service that was based here would have been shut down already, and Twitter does have a New Zealand office (via a law firm on Brandon Street). The fact Labour isn’t working on this means they will continue kowtowing to Big Tech. The fact National hasn’t uttered a word means nothing will change under them, either. Blairites and the right love these foreigners and the power and money they wield.
Iâve written about searches for my own name earlier, where my personal and company sites lost their first and second positions on all search engines that I knew of after we made the switch. Only Google has my personal site back up top, with the company site on the middle of the second page. Bing has my personal site at number two, and Iâd love to tell you where the company site is, but their search engine results’ pages wonât let me advance beyond page 2 (clicking ‘next page’ lands you back on the same page; clicking â3â and above still keeps you on p. 2). Duck Duck Go, which uses Bing results, has it well below thatâI gave up looking. And this is after I signed up to Bing Webmaster Tools in the hope I could get the sites properly catalogued.
Itâs a real shame because Duck Duck Go has been my default for 12 years this August.
However, it was the loss of search results for Lucire that really bothered me. Hereâs a site thatâs 25 years old, with plenty of inward links, and c. 5,000 pages. Before the switch to HTTPS, the popular search engines had thousands of pages from our site. These days, Bing and Duck Duck Go tell me they have dozens of pages from Lucireâs website. Again, only Google seems to have spidered everything.
When I check Bing Webmaster Tools, the spidering has been shockingly poor.
The received wisdom that you should have HTTPS instead of HTTP to do better in search engines is BS, and the belief that search engines will eventually catch up has also not been realized. We made the switch in March, and Iâm to believe that Bing hasnât completed the indexing of our sites.
Are they using the same computers New Zealand banks do? (Cheques used to clear overnight in the 1970s, and now banks tell us that even electronic payments can take days. When we last used cheques, they were telling us they would take five to seven days. Ergo, bank computers are slower today than in 1976.)
The real downer is that Lucireâs website search box is powered by Duck Duck Go, so our own site visitors canât find the things they want to look for. If you believe some of the search engine marketing, over 40 per cent of site visitors use your search function.
What to do?
I began looking at having an internal search again. We used to have a WhatUSeek (later SiteLevel) internal site search, but that siteâs search functions appear to be dead (the site is still live). A user on Mastodon recommended Sphinx Search, an open-source internal site search, but the instructions were too complex. I even saw real computer geeks having trouble. The only one that I could understand was called SphiderâI could follow the instructions and knew enough about PHP and MySqlâbut it was last updated many years ago, and successive projects also looked a bit complex.
A Google internal search was absolutely out of the question, as I have no desire to expose our readers to trackingâwhich is why so many other Big Tech gadgets have been removed from our site(s). Baidu and Yandex also have very limited indices for our sites.
I am very fortunate to have tried Mojeek again, a British search engine recommended to me by Matias on July 2. What I didnât know then was Mojeek has its own spider and its own index, so it doesnât have to license anything from Bing. And, happily, it claims to have 3,535 results from lucire.com, which might not be as good as Googleâs 5,830, but it beats Bingâs 50 earlier todayâin fact, at the time of writing, it showed a grand total of 10. Thatâs how bad itâs got. Duck Duck Go now has 48, also down from a few thousand before March.
Like Google, it seems to have coped with the switch to HTTPS without falling to pieces! And guess what? For a search of my own name, my personal site is number one, and our work site is number two. Presumably, Mojeek is the only search engine which coped and behaved exactly as the experts said!
You can imagine my next move. Mojeek has a site search, so now all Lucire searches are done through it. And readers can actually find stuff again instead of coming up nearly empty (or having very irrelevant results) as they have done for months.
I still have good memories of chatting to Gabriel in the early days and figuring out ways of spreading the word on Duck Duck Go. My contribution was going to hotels and changing the search defaults on business centre computers. Back then I had the impression Duck Duck Go did some of its own spidering, but these days, if Bing has a shitty index for your site, the Duck will follow suit. And with HTTPS not living up to its promise, thatâs simply not good enough.
Tonight, Mojeek is very much the site of the day here, and I heartily recommend you try it out. Iâve switched the desktop to Mojeek as a default, and Iâll see how it all progresses. Right now I feel it deserves our support more than Duck Duck Go. Finally, we might truly have an alternative to Google, and itâs run from the UKâs greenest data centre. With our servers now being greener, too, running out of Finland, the technology is starting to match up to our beliefs.
Google, the biggest index of them all
Mojeek, a creditable second place
This is it on Bing: a 25-year-old history on the web, and it says it has 10 pages from lucire.com. Altavista, Excite and Hotbot had more in the 1990s
Duck Duck Go is slightly better, with 48 resultsâdown from the thousands it once had
After switching to HTTPS Number of results for lucire.com
Google: 5,830
Mojeek: 3,535 (containing the word Lucire, as term-less searches are not allowed)
Duck Duck Go: 48
Bing: 10
Number of results for jackyan.com
Google: 878
Mojeek: 437 (containing the term “Jack Yan”)
Duck Duck Go: 54
Bing: 24
Number of results for jyanet.com
Google: 635
Mojeek: 297 (containing the word jyanet)
Duck Duck Go: 46
Bing: 10
Presumably the only search engine that could handle a server going from HTTP to HTTPS and preserving the domains’ positions
Years ago, we removed the Facebook widgets from Lucireâs pages. Last year, there were Instagramâs and Twitterâs turns, after each of those platforms locked us out (though later we regained access, and in Twitterâs case we issued a veiled threat to their lawyers). Last night, it was Disqusâs turn as we removed the commenting gadget from the Lucire site.
Obviously, not having Disqusâs trackers was a big plus, and speeding up page-load times, but there were two other major considerations: readers seldom comment these days (fashion is less divisive than politics), and, we have no idea where the money for all the Disqus advertising is.
I seem to recall that we were nearing their US$100 payment threshold, and I had in mind that once we hit it, Iâd take the ads off. They were pretty ugly anyway.
Logging in yesterday, I was surprised to see Disqus claimed we had earned a little over US$3 now, while there is no record of any payment to us in the last year. Disqus also has nowhere on its site detailing payments made. Nor has it any feedback forms for non-subscribers (though you could argue that we have âpaidâ them in terms of the space their ads took up on the Lucire website all these years). I posted a question on their forumâthe best I could do there. Seventeen hours later, no answers.
Right after that, we removed the Disqus gadget on all of Lucireâs static (HTML) pages, and switched off the Disqus plug-in on the WordPress (news) part of the site for posts going forward. No pay, no stay. I also removed the default comment boxes for the last 100 stories, though I might still change my mind and reinstitute them. If I do, theyâll be native ones, not anything to do with a plug-in that slows things down.
All those years, adding plug-ins that were once far more innocent; as each one became part of the surveillance economy, the detriments began to outweigh the benefits. Whatâs interesting to me is, other than the Facebook widget, their removal came after they prompted us with something dodgy, not because we suddenly had concerns about their tracking. Till I started investigating, I didnât even realize how bad the problem was, though with hindsight of course I should have known, given how Iâve banged on about Facebook and Google. Part of me thought wishfully about Twitter, and as for our Instagram gadget, it was being run through another service (which might have been worse since it meant another company knowing stuff), and back when Instagram was a thing, I thought our readers would enjoy it.
Iâm not consistent as Autocadeâs Disqus forms are still up (at least on desktop), but they donât have the dreaded Disqus ads, and readers actually comment there. But I will have a look for a good alternativeâand I wonât be touching any of those Disqus settings as I donât wish for the ugly ads to be introduced.
As embedding from Mastodon is not working tonight, I’ll copy and paste Per Axbom’s post:
Nice bit of reporting from Swedish Radio. They built an online fake pharmacy and activated Facebook advertising tools. Thousands of simulated visits to the pharmacy were made each day, and the reporters could see all the sensitive, personal information being stored by Facebook.
Facebook sent no warnings to the pharmacy, despite saying they have tools in place to prevent this from happening.
A few weeks ago they revealed how this was happening with real pharmacies.
In chatting to Alexandra Wolfe on Mastodon about the previous post, I had to draw a sombre conclusion. If it werenât for Google, thereâd be no incentive to do content mills or splogs.
I replied: âPeople really are that stupid, and itÊŒs all thanks to Google. Google doesnât care about ad fraud, and anyone can be a Google publisher. So scammers set up fake sites, they have a script trawling Google News for stories, and they have another script that rewrites the stories, replacing words with synonyms. Google then pays them [for the ads they have on their sites]. Every now and then they get someone like me who tries to look after our crew.â
Google is the biggest ad tech operator out there. And over the years, Iâve seen them include splogs in Google News, which once was reserved only for legitimate news websites. And when we were hacked in 2013, the injected code looked to me like Google Adsense code. You could just see this develop in the 2000s with Blogger, and itâs only worsened.
Have a read of this piece, which quotes extensively from Bob Hoffman, and tell me that Google doesnât know this is happening.
Google is part of the problem but as long as they keep getting rich off it, what motive do they have to change?
Speaking of ad fraud, Bob Hoffmanâs last couple of newsletters mentions the Association of National Advertisers, who reported that ad fraud would cost advertisers $120 milliard this year. Conveniently enough for the industry, the ANAâs newsletter has since disappeared.
I still haven’t got into programmatic or header bidding or all the new buzzwords in online advertising, because I don’t understand them. And as it’s so murky, and there’s already so much fraud out there, why join in? Better buying simple ads directly with websites the old-fashioned way, since (again from Hoffman, in the link above):
Buying directly from quality publishers increases the productivity of display advertising by at least seven times and perhaps as much as 27 times compared to buying through a programmatic exchange.
Everyone wins.
And:
Ad tech drives money to the worst online publishers. Ad techâs value proposition is this: we will find you the highest quality eyeballs at the cheapest possible locations. Ad tech can do this because your web browser and mobile platform are vulnerable to a problem called âdata leakageâ where your activity on a trusted site is revealed to other companies ⊠If youâre a quality online publisher, ad tech is stealing money from you by following your valuable audience to the crappiest website they can be found on, and serving them ads there instead of on your site.
In other words, Google et al have an incentive to give ads to sploggers, who are getting rich off the backs of legitimate, quality publishers. And as to the intermediaries, I give you Bob Hoffman again, here.
Itâs worth having a read, especially about the BS behind behavioural advertising (i.e. surveillance advertising) and the âreal-time biddingâ that so many ad networks have been trying to sell to me but which none of them can explain.
If it smells like BS, it probably is.
I tell each one: we sell ads, give us some banner code, and weâll stick it up. They perform well, we increase their share. They perform badly, we decrease them.
They usually go on about the superiority of their systems but if I donât understand them, then Iâm not going to make the switch.
I wonât cite what Cory says on that as the real gems are later in the entry.
Hereâs the one, which agrees fully with something Iâve been saying, though my experience is anecdotal and not backed up by proper, quantitative research: âContextual advertising converts at very nearly the same rate as behavioral advertising, and just as well as behavioral ads for some categories of goods and servicesâ.
He notes that in 2019, The New York Times âditched most of its programmatic behavioral adsâ and that the Dutch public broadcaster, NPO, has followed suit, âditching Google Ad Manager for a new custom contextual ad system it commissionedâ.
âThey’ve since experimented with major advertisers like Amex and found little to no difference between context ads and behavioral ads when it comes to conversions.â
Thereâs also greater reach because of GDPR requiring that people opt in to behavioural ads.
My emphasis here: âAnd theyâre keeping that money, rather than giving a 50% vig to useless, creepy, spying ad-tech middlemen.â
I knew there was a reason I kept rejecting those people.
Itâd be unfair if I didnât note that I managed to see a âCreate postâ button today on Lucireâs Facebook page for the first time in weeks. I went crazy manually linking everything that was missed between April 25 and today.
Maybe I got it back as it would look even worse for Facebook, which still live-streams massacres as a matter of course in spite of its âpromisesâ after March 15, 2019, if white supremacist murderers had more functions available to them on the site than honest business people.
The upshot still remains: get your supporters going to your website as much as possible, and wind down whatever presence you have on Facebook. You shouldnât depend on it, because you never know when your page might disappear or when you lose access. Both are very real possibilities.
Bob Hoffmanâs newsletter was gold this week. It usually is, especially as he touches on similar topics to me, but at a far higher level.
This weekâs highlights: âBlogweasel calculations indicate that adtech-based targeting adds at least 100% to the cost of an online ad. In order for it to be more efficient it has to be more than twice as effective. I’m slightly skeptical.
âAn article in AppleInsider this week reported that, “Apple has revealed to advertisers that App Store search ads served in a non-targeted fashion are just as effective as those relying on targeting via first-party data.”â
Indeed, ads that might use the page content to inform their contents (contextual advertising) work even better. Why? The publisher might actually get paid for them.
Iâve seen so many ads not display at all, including on our own sites. Now, our firm doesnât use trackers, but we know the ad networks we use do. And for whatever daft reason, there are ad networks that wonât show content if you block trackers. (Stuff is even worse: their home and contentsâ pages donât even display if you block certain cookies.)
If we went back to how things were before tracking got this bad, the ads would be less creepy, and I bet more of them would displayâand that helps us publishers pay the bills. If you donât like them, there are still ad blockers, but out of my own interests, I would prefer you didnât.
âYouâre either driving a really nice new car, a deeply unsatisfying new car, or a very old used car.â Drew notes that there are nasty base models, and also fully loaded ones, and the former âtreat you like absolute shit, and everyone on the road knows it.â
It seems whatâs happening is that the middleâthe âGLsâ of this world, as opposed to the Ls and GLSsâis getting squeezed out.
It says something about our society and its inequality.
Interestingly, itâs not as bad here with base models, and that might reflect our society. But look at the US, as Drew does, or the European top 10, where cheap cars like the Dacia Sandero do exceptionally well.
This goes back many years, and Iâve seen plenty of base models in US rental fleets that would make a New Zealand entry-level car seem sumptuous.
Finally, the legacy pages are reasserting themselves on Autocade. When the latest version was installed on the server and the stats were reset, the top 20 included all the models that appeared on the home page, as Mediawiki recommenced its count. Search-engine spiders were visiting the site and hitting those the most.
Fast forward two months and the top 20 are exclusively older pages, as visits from regular people coming via search engines outnumber spiders.
During February, I received spam from Novuna in the UK, the finance company thatâs a subsidiary of Mitsubishi. It wasnât personally addressed, it was just a general message. I complained via their complaintsâ email, only to have the message bounce back as it wasnât working. However, they did respond on Twitter, unlike less caring companies such as Afterpay, followed up via my company feedback form by their senior marketing manager, Rob Walton.
Rob asked me to send them the spam for their investigation, and, after about seven attempts, they received it (ironically, their own server blocked the message on the grounds of it being spam). I confirmed that although I do have British nationality, I had never resided in the UK or had had any contact with Novuna.
He was as good as his word, and after a few days, came back to me to say Experian, a credit reference agency, had supplied my address to them. He also included a web address so I could get make a âsubject access requestâ from the provider, made sure I was off their email lists, and apologized.
From there, ESB Connect Ltd. also took things seriously. The request came back, and ESB’s CEO, Suz Chaplin, took the time to write a personal email. It turns out that ESB had acquired the details from another company, Datatonomy, who falsely claimed that I had signed up via two websites: Idealo and Great British Offers.
Hereâs the real kicker: it claimed that my name was âMrs Jayne Mooreâ of Liverpool.
Rewind back over 15 years (maybe closer to 20!) and a dodgy spam list doing the rounds in the 2000s saw a lot of messages sent to my email calling me âMrs Jayne Mooreâ. I even have a filter for it in Eudora thatâs been there since the â00s.
Indeed, 10 days prior to Suz getting back to me, I said to Rob: âI do remember one UK-based spam list from the 2000s that had my email address listed against the name âMrs Jayne Mooreâ and those still come. It will be interesting to discover if this is the same source.â
Imagine my surprise to find that a common and badly compiled spam list (obviously my details were erroneously married up with Mrs Mooreâs name, address and date of birth) is still being sold by dodgy parties in the UK, making false claims about sign-ups!
I wrote to Suz: âIt seems you may have unwittingly and innocently purchased a common spammers’ list where such details were mixed up (after all, these people have no qualms) or that you have been duped about the veracity of the opt-ins detailed in your document.â And cheekily, I suggested she should get her money back from Datatonomy.
Suz says she will look into this further as her company prides itself on data integrity. I thanked her, and true to both her and Robâs promises, I havenât received anything like the Novuna spam since. Nor have I seen that many purporting to be from British companies.
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.
