Duck Duck Go serving a page after using the !lucire bang. The second result is a frameset that has not been linked to in over two decades, a sign of Bing being a Wayback Machine. As some of you know, I used Duck Duck Go as my principal search engine between 2010 and 2022, […]
Tag: technology
Vivaldi DLL disappears upon start-up; soon restores itself
Anyone getting these errors with Vivaldi? Sometimes I get them after I boot up Vivaldi and it works for a short period. Other times, they occur when the computer is booted up. ‘The code execution cannot proceed because vivaldi_elf.dll was not found. Reinstalling the program may fix this problem.’ ‘Windows cannot access the […]
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Why don’t we just stop tracking?
Not only is Linkedin OK with disinformation, thereby making itself complicit to fraud, it turns out verification isn’t that simple. I’ve said many times that I think most “apps” are just web browsers limited to a single site, but, in the interests of greater visibility, I relented and downloaded the Linkedin app. Like most apps, […]
New Zealand’s 3G switch-off: you might be fine despite the warning messages
I had been concerned that I was getting messages from One NZ (formerly Vodafone) telling me to change my phone because 3G was being killed off. The Australian 3G switch-off made things more concerning, since there are Aussies with virtually new phones being cut off, and the one thing they have in common is that […]
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Blocking the Semrush bots
It’s not enough to block just Semrush’s bot, SemrushBot, in one’s robots.txt, since they have a whole bunch of them. We’ve usually allowed all bots but with “AI” and Semrush’s terrible programming that wasted hours of my time every day for nine months, there are certain parties no longer welcome to crawl. To block Semrush […]
Forgetting humanity: the desperation of tech
How very interesting to see that the disinformation posts about me have stopped going up since I called out Semrush on their own subreddit. For four days I’ve not found any new ones on Google. The timing tells me that Semrush can, contrary to its response, adjust keywords, especially after learning the sheer hell their […]
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Forty-eight hours without new disinformation—dare we hope for seventy-two?
Now isn’t that interesting? After posting about Semrush on their Reddit, where their error is laid bare for all to see, I have now had a blissful 48 hours where there were no new disinformation posts about yours truly pop up on Google searches. So much for Semrush claiming that it could not remove a […]
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“AI”? Facebook’s bot city has already been around for a decade
I’m surprised that people are surprised that this is where Facebook is going. In the words of my friend Richard MacManus, in reference to this interview with Mark Zuckerberg in The Verge: ‘Mark Zuckerberg basically just confirmed that your feeds will soon be full of AI-generated content. Another reason the fediverse needs to exist: so […]
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If you’re still writing disinformation after all this, then tech is your master, and you are the slave
If you peel away the technobabble of what Semrush said to me on Reddit, basically their algorithm messed up when it included an unspaced version of my name. It wasn’t trending. It was just an extrapolation made by an algorithm that, unfortunately, had a very negative consequence for me. But it also didn’t help […]
The trials of removing disinformation from Bluehost
Here’s a company that seems to protect sploggers and disinformation spreaders: Bluehost. One of the disinformation splogs had a Cloudflare account, which hid their real host. I filed a DMCA report, as this splogger was stupid enough to use my photo. These seem to get through the Cloudflare system better than things classified as ‘other’. […]
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