Someone’s doing something right inside Google

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 […]

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More Facebook dating scam profiles: is this now the scammers’ medium of choice?

Remember when spam ruined email?    Welcome to Facebook, 2011. And why, some day, people mightn’t be joining it if spammers begin making up a larger proportion of the membership.    I have received two odd friend requests, and since there was no way I knew these people, I asked them what our connection was. […]

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Autocade’s MediaWiki software gets locked down

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 […]

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Spam commenters are losing their minds

Despite the smaller visitor numbers, this blog seems to leave way more spam in the Akismet queue than the other Wordpress installations we have. I had wanted to write a post swearing at some of the dumb comments that come in, as all of these are automated, but three of the first ten today are […]

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The “next Google” has to save the web

Spotted on Tumblr yesterday, via Dave Sparks: ‘Why Facebook Browsing Annihilates Web Browsing’, on the Fast Company blogs. The intro pretty much summarizes the whole piece:   Recent research suggests that Facebook is overtaking search engines in terms of “time spent” on the web. Want to see where the trendline is heading? Take a look […]

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The 10 types of Twitter account I am unlikely to follow back

I’m getting fussier about whom I follow back these days on Twitter, and have noticed myself removing some people I followed.    Initially, my rule on Twitter was to follow back only people I knew in the real world. Eventually, I opened that up and even went back among the following to include people I […]

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Vox cars’ group crosses 100

Even though I am no longer blogging on Vox, I have some good news there: the cars’ group that I founded got its 100th member today.    It’s actually the third time we’ve crossed 100, but on those previous occasions, it was sploggers that got us over that number. And each time I’ve had to […]

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It’s a bot if it does 3,000 posts a month

Is it any wonder Vox’s resources are taxed? Here’s a chap that does 3,265 posts in a month—all off-site spam. (I won’t give them the privilege of a link—no point raising their search engine rankings.)    I vote that Vox has some form of alarm at HQ for people who blog too often. Twitter and […]

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