I remember one of IMI’s scare campaigns

29.10.2011/08.09

I came across a fascinating article in Wired’s online edition about two scammers who promote “scareware”: those inferior antivirus programs designed to rid users of fake viruses they tell you about through fake pop-ups. And once you install them, you get a virus. This paragraph struck a chord: But those troubles didn’t do much […]

A whinge about whinging

19.06.2011/11.46

I’ve seen this lament on a few more places now: why bother having a comment box? We’ve just had someone tell us at Lucire that there is no such person as Princess Catherine. Well done. We all know that technically there is no such person, if one is referring to the wife of Prince […]

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Not all American hosting companies get it right

03.04.2011/22.37

While there was a British company that took months to respond to the equivalent of a DMCA complaint (under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act), generally American ﬁrms are very on the ball. There are exceptions. I won’t name this outﬁt but the weekend’s responses were laughable. March 21: Pirate puts up a copy […]

Someone’s doing something right inside Google

01.04.2011/23.45

The troubles with Google that I’ve faced—privacy breaches, Ads Preferences Manager not honouring its claims, ﬁghting for six months on behalf of a friend over a deleted Blogger blog, Chrome being buggy (but not nearly as badly as IE9), phantom entries in my Google dashboard, unanswered messages—would suggest, to anyone studying business or a graduate […]

Some positive news a month on from the Christchurch ’quake

21.03.2011/05.19

Tomorrow, it will be one month since the Christchurch ’quake. It’s tempting to argue scale—the Japanese earthquake and tsunami versus our own—but at the end of the day, people are people, and our nations have both been hurting. We have become united, through disasters that emphasized that we live in an emerging global community. […]

Autocade’s MediaWiki software gets locked down

05.03.2011/03.06

Autocade’s third birthday is on Tuesday, though today I had to introduce something that goes against the principles of MediaWiki: the prevention of public user registrations. Despite adding an Akismet anti-spam extension last week, spammers, evidently using non-blacklisted IPs, continued to add false content with their links on to the site today. I […]

Google’s new algorithm will likely weed out content mills

25.02.2011/12.05

I’m not enough of a bastard to only dis Google, because they have made a pretty good move today. Google’s new algorithm, it is claimed, will weed out content farms, one type of site that has annoyed us here regularly. These are sites that just pinch others’ content automatically. Because search engines pick […]

My holiday as a car anorak

06.02.2011/03.56

Since New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day are about the only two days I actually take off, I spent some time adding entries on Autocade, a site that doesn’t seem like “work” to me. It’s my hobby. The randomizer, which my friend Peter Jobes installed for me on the site’s home page, came […]

Bingo! Merry Christmas!

24.12.2010/12.04

Here’s a Christmas treat, an hour in to Christmas Day in New Zealand. Bing Crosby’s Merrie Olde Christmas, ﬁlmed in 1977 33 days before the crooner’s passing, featured a duet between Bingo and David Bowie. Taped on September 11, 1977, the special aired after Crosby’s death, on November 30. The set is supposedly the […]

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What others write about their Firefox crashes; Chrome is the oddity with font-face

16.12.2010/10.53

It has been interesting reading the comments from other disgruntled Firefox users over the ‘unmark purple’ error (nsXULControllers::cycleCollection::UnmarkPurple(nsISupports*))—now that I can trace the majority of my crashes to this. Yesterday, Mozilla’s Crash Reports’ site crashed (rather ﬁtting), and today, the CSS wouldn’t load, which allowed me to read what others wrote on the […]