I hadn’t turned my laptop on for a while, and its battery had run extremely low. It also prompted me to set up Windows 11, which I should have skipped. The computer already had 11, but it after each update, Windows often forces you to do a bunch of set-up things, which, if you go […]
Tag: privacy
Beware Substack—and TV3 makes terrible design and marketing decisions
Beware Substack. I received a newsletter today that I had never heard of, so I unsubscribed—to find that I had allegedly signed up to everything that the user publishes. Not bloody likely. This wasn’t a case of being on someone else’s Substack and accidentally clicking ‘Yes’ to other suggested newsletters. Normally there’d only […]
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Google lies (situation normal), Google users run scrapers, Tencent users attack
Big Tech lies. Each time I use Google, I get this: The message, ‘Our systems have detected unusual traffic from your computer network. This page checks to see if it’s really you sending the requests, and not a robot’ is a sham. The reality is that Google will force a captcha on you […]
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Two of the web’s worst brands wind up in a scam
Internet Archive Above: An Internet Archive screenshot of one of the scam websites, presumably with the main image missing. From Malwarebytes in March: a Semrush impersonation scam has hit Google ads. While I would never side with bad actors, it is difficult to sympathize with a brand like Semrush after the nine months of […]
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First-hand experiences on the corruption of “AI”, and what Meta knows
It should be no surprise that “AI” started off being far more ethical, but it has since been corrupted. We know Google fired those who warned about its dangers. Here’s one more perspective via Mastodon, from Fabio Manganiello. (There was no embed code, so this is a copy and paste.) My background is in #AI […]
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The frauds of online advertising, and blocking sign-up bots
Bob Hoffman has his book, Inside the Black Box, available on his website as a free download. It’s a fascinating read about how online advertising is largely a con, with lots of ad fraud, made-for-advertising sites (MFAs), and opaqueness, he explains. Bob is critical about programmatic advertising (25 per cent of programmatic ad dollars are […]
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What they can tell from a single photo
Again via Ben Daubney’s blog, which I found yesterday, a site called They See Your Photos, which uses Google’s Vision API to infer information about you. If you feed in a photo, the site provides Google’s output, and it is eerie what they are capable of “seeing”. However, the single photo’s output is not accurate, […]
Substantial drop in site: results at Mojeek; is Ecosia now Google?
I’m told by Mojeek that this should not happen but it has. In October 2023, it had 3,103 results for a site: search for the original Autocade website, beating Google at 2,910 and Bing at 2,170. Mojeek is meant to build on its index but earlier this year, it dropped into the 700s. Currently site:autocade.net […]
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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 […]
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 […]