‘We can’t level, you crazy bastard, we’re in advertising!’āPaul Reiser as Stephen Bachman, in Crazy People (1990)
Signal
You can run ads with misinformation, and you can launch bot nets of thousands of accounts, but what canāt you do on Facebook? Buy ads that expose their tools with which you have bought their ads. Thatās exactly what happened to Signal when it attempted to run ads on Instagram that illustrated the targeting.
I donāt believe thereās anything in their T&Cs that disallow this, but Facebook has never been about those. You can breach them as much as you like with running scripts and creating bots, after all. One bastard streamed a massacre on March 15, 2019, which was accessible for some time afterwards; and a year later, eight copies were still on the platform. Facebook āenforcesā what it wants to, and that includes disabling accounts that show just how invasive they are.
Iāve already had a taste of this after I began deleting my ad preferences and exposing how terrible they were. And they probably didnāt like my pointing out that they were collecting those preferences long after I had opted out of their ad targeting (at a time when their own site suggested that opting out meant just that). Now that feature is gone for me.
Itās what Facebook does. It lies, and even uses those lies to plant software on your computers that never show up in your programsā list. And, like Google, the timing of when ad accounts are disabled is interesting: it’s not the first time this took place right after you do something that reveals some hard truths about them.
Personally, I believe Facebookās preferences are a joke, so Signal may have found their ad account cancelled not because they reminded everyone that the conjurer had a trick, but just how lousy the trick really was. Imagine getting one of these ads and thinking, āThat aināt me at all.ā That would get certain Facebook advertisers thinking twiceāthat is, those who give Facebookās many bots a pass, and donāt mind that Instagram is 45 per cent bot, 55 per cent human, and donāt mind that their demographic estimates have no basis in reality. I mean, weāre already talking quite a gullible bunch who are doing an activity thatās marginally above setting fire to banknotes in terms of monetary utility, or donating to Jeb Bushās presidential tilt in 2016.
Facebook wants to keep as many of them as possible, and theyāre taking no chances. You just never know where the tipping point is, when the masses finally decide to jump ship.
Just another day dealing with US tech firms then.
When I signed up to Anchor, there was no mention of Google Podcasts, so I was very surprised to find later that I was syndicated there. Can you remove yourself?
Anchor: ask Google!
Google: ask Anchor!
All that money (Google, not Alphabet, is worth US$320 milliard) and theyāre about as useful as David Seymour at a socialist workersā conference. Actually, about as useful as David Seymour, full stop.
Sources
Viki Odintcova, via Instagram.
Alexa Breit, photographed by Weniamin Schmidt, via Instagram.
Vickery Electrical advertisement: something I asked my Dad to photocopy for me in the 1980s. Briefly we had one of those Apple II portables, on loan from a colleague of Dad. I can’t recall if it had one disk drive or two, but it was a fun little unit to have in my bedroom for that period. Dad was prepared to buy it if I wanted to keep it, but I didn’t have much software to run, plus I already had the Commodore 64 for schoolwork. Lucire issue 43 cover, photographed by Damien Carney, creative direction and fashion styling by Nikko Kefalas, make-up by Joanne Gair, hair by Kirsten Brooke Anderson, and assisted by Rachel Bell, and modelled by Elena Sartison. Find out more here.
Drew Barrymore quotation from Elephant Journal on Twitter.
I still have plenty of old stamps, which I tend to save for family (though I’m less discerning about those discounted Christmas ones, which I always used to buy in bulk). This is going to my cousin’s daughter and her husband, and their family.
Comments after an article on Buzzfeed News. Business as usual for Facebook.
Happy birthday to our niece Esme!
Tania Dawson promotes Rabbit Borrows, from Instagram.
Bizarre that the only car with a manual transmission on sale at Archibalds is from the 1950s. Iām sure New Zealand was majority-manual into the first decade of this century.
When I was a kid and wanted to hit back at someone for being mean to me, my parents would often say that successful people, true leaders, would be 大ę¹, which is roughly akin to saying that one should rise above it. I would say that goes with nations as well: you can tell when a country is in a good state by the way its citizenry behaves, and online behaviour is probably a proxy for that.
As many of you know, my literacy in my mother tongue is just above the level it was at when I left Hong Kong, that is to say, itās marginally better than a kindergartenerās. And where I come from, that means age 3, which is already in the big leagues considering I started at 2Ā½, having passed the entrance exam, and had homework from then on. What I can write is in colloquial Cantonese, devoid of any formal structure that someone with a proper education in the old country would know. If youāre Cantonese, youāll be able to read what I write, but if your only idea of Chinese is Mandarin, youāll have little clue. (Bang goes the official argument in Beijing that Cantonese is a ādialectā. It canāt be a dialect if a speaker of one finds the other unintelligible.)
With Meizu having essentially shut its international forum, I decided to head to the Chinese one to post about my experience with its Music app, and was met by a majority of friendly, helpful people, and some who even went the extra mile of replying to my English-language query in English.
But there were enough dickheads answering to make you think that mainland China isnāt a clear global leader, regardless of all the social engineering and online credit scores.
When I used Facebook, I had ventured on to a few groups where people simply posted in their own language, and those of us who wished to reply but didnāt understand it would either use the siteās built-in translator, or, before that was available, Google Translate. I still am admin on a group where people do post in their own language without much issue. Thereās no insistence on āSpeak English, I canāt understand you,ā or whatever whine I hear from some intolerant people, such as the ones sampled below.
That makes you despair for some folks and one conclusion I can draw is that members of a country who demand such a monoculture must not see their country as a leader. Nor do they have much pride in it. For great nations, in my book, embrace, or believe they embrace (even if they fall short in practice) all tongues and creeds, all races and abilities. They revel in their richness.
Of the negative souls on the forum, there was the crap youād expect. āWrite in Chinese,ā āWhy is a Cantonese person writing in English?ā āThink about where you are,ā and āI donāt understand youā (to a comment I wrote in Cantoneseāagain supporting the argument that it isnāt a dialect, but its own distinct tongue).
Granted, these are a small minority, but itās strange that this is a forum where people tend to help one another. And it tells me that whether youāre American or Chinese, thereās nothing in the behaviour of ordinary folks that tells me that any one place is more likely to be a centre for 21st-century leadership than another.
Iāve had far worse responses to Tweets, by a much greater proportion of people (the UK still stands out as the worst when I responded to a Tweet about George Floyd), but itās the context. Twitter is, as Stephen Fry once put it, analogous to a bathing pool into which too many people have urinated, but a help forum?
Itās the globally unaware, those who engage in casual xenophobia, who are intolerant of other languages, who are the little people of our times, having missed out on an education or life experience that showed them otherwise. They reside in the old country as much as in so many other places. The leading nation of the 21st century does not look like itās one of the obvious choices. Future historians, watch this space.
The songs, all 1,229 of them that I had fed in manually, are still there, and they still play, but the question remains: for how long? If they don’t show in the listāI told you computing devices were forgetfulāthen how long before the program fails to play them at all? Not only were the songs gone from the list, the few MP3 files that were on the phone’s RAM (from dynamic wallpapers and recordings) don’t show, either!
I really didnāt want to chance it but you just have to conclude that Meizu has released a lemon, and if in a year they still canāt get it right, then itās time to abandon it.
I could go with Migu Music but I wanted something with the functionality of the old Meizu Music. After trying several apps, Iāve settled on an advertising-supported Muzio Player. Itās not perfectāthe cover artwork doesnāt show for everything, and updating it manually for an album doesnāt see it shared with the individual tracks withinābut it does the job for the most part. And, like every other app I trialled, it picks up the music on the SD card.
Since I keep phones for some timeāthe old M2 Note is repairedāitās going to be a long time before Iād contemplate a replacement for the M6 Note. But when I do I doubt itāll be another Meizu. After being a cheerleader for the brand in the late 2010s, theyāve really fallen behind in customer service and, how, software development. Whomever else is willing to go the Google-free route is going to get my vote.
This is a pretty typical story: find fault with Big Tech, try to alert the appropriate people in the firm, get fired. Julia Carrie Wongās excellent article for The Guardian shows a data scientist, Sophie Zhang, find blatant attempts by governments to abuse Facebookās platform, misleading their own people, in multiple countries. Of course Facebook denies it, but once again itās backed up by a lot of evidence from Zhang, and we know Facebook lies. Endlessly.
Facebook claims it has taken down over ā100 networks of coordinated inauthentic behavior,ā but I repeat again: if a regular Joe like me can find thousands of bots really easily, and report some with Facebook doing next to nothing about them, then 100 networks is an incredibly tiny number in a sea of hundreds of millions of users. Indeed, 100 networks is tiny considering Facebook itself has claimed to have taken down milliards of bots.
And people like me and Holly Jahangiri, who found a massive number of bots that followed the Russian misinformation techniques, have been identifying these since 2014, if not before.
Zhang reveals how likes from pages are inflating various postsāforget the bots Iāve been talking about, people have manufactured full pages on the site.
She uncovered one in Honduras, and then:
The next day, she filed an escalation within Facebookās task management system to alert the threat intelligence team to a network of fake accounts supporting a political leader in Albania. In August [2019], she discovered and filed escalations for suspicious networks in Azerbaijan, Mexico, Argentina and Italy. Throughout the autumn and winter she added networks in the Philippines, Afghanistan, South Korea, Bolivia, Ecuador, Iraq, Tunisia, Turkey, Taiwan, Paraguay, El Salvador, India, the Dominican Republic, Indonesia, Ukraine, Poland and Mongolia.
Facebook was inconsistent with what it did, and its own self-interest interfered with it taking action. In other words, Facebook is harmful to democracy, and not just in the US which has received most of the occidental news coverage. On Azerbaijan, Zhang wrote in a memo:
Although we conclusively tied this network to elements of the government in early February, and have compiled extensive evidence of its violating nature, the effective decision was made not to prioritize it, effectively turning a blind eye.
She was ultimately fired for her trouble, Facebook saying she wasnāt doing the job she had been hired for.
So if you are going to work for Big Tech, leave your conscience at the door. That blood on your hands, just ignore it. Redās such a fetching colour when itās not on a balance sheet.
Little Tech can be troublesome, too. Last year, Meizu updated its Music app after a few years of letting it languish (a familiar theme with this firm), and it was a real lemon. It wouldnāt pick up anything on my SD card, at the location the old Music app itself saved the files. When I could still access the Meizu (English-language) forum, I managed to post a comment about it. Only today did I realize someone had responded, with the same issue.
I can read enough Chinese to get the phone to do a search for local music files, and the only things it could pick up are whatās on the phone RAM itself, not the card. Thereās no way to point to custom locations such as a card (even though there is a custom search, but it applies to the phone only).
Above: Meizu Music will only find music on the phone’s RAMāin this case sound files that come with the dynamic wallpaper and a couple of meeting recordings I made.
Eventually I restored the old app through the settings, and all was well. It would occasionally forget the album cover art and Iād have to relink it (who says computers remember things?), but, by and large, Music 8.0.10 did what was expected of it.
Until this last week. The phone insisted on upgrading to 8.2.12, another half-baked version that could never locate any SD card music.
Sure I could just move the entire directory of 1,229 songs to the phone, but I wondered why I should.
Restoring the app would work only for a few hours (during which I would try to relink the album cover art, ultimately to no avail). Blocking the new version the app store did nothing; blocking the entire app from updating did nothing. Blocking network access to the Music app did nothing. Essentially, the phone had a mind of its own. If anyone tells you that computing devices follow human instructions, slap them.
Above: I asked the app store to ignore all updates for Meizu Music. The phone will ignore this and do what it wants, downloading the update and installing it without any human intervention.
I had a couple of options. The first was to make Migu Music the defaultāand I had used that for a while before I discovered I could restore the Music app. Itās passable, and it does everything it should, though I missed the cover art.
The other was to find a way to make Music 8.2.12 work.
There is one way. Play every one of the 1,229 songs one by one to have Music recognize their existence.
Using ES File Explorer, you head to the SD card, and click on each song. It asks which app youād like to open it. Choose Music. Repeat 1,228 times.
Above: I finally got there after doing something 1,229 times. As a non-tech person I know of no way to automate this easily. I can think of a few but developing the script is beyond my knowledge.
Whoever said computing devices would save you time is having you on. They may have once, but there are so many systems where things are far more complicated in 2021 than they were in 2011.
You may be asking: doesnāt ES let you select multiple files, even folders? Of course it does, but when you then ask it to play them, it ignores the fact youāve chosen Music and plays them in its own music player.
And even after youāve shown Music that there are files in an SD card directory, it wonāt pick up its existence.
Itās at odds with Meizuās Video app, which, even after many updates, will find files anywhere on your phone.
For a music player with the same version (8) itās vastly different, and, indeed, inferior to what has come before.
Howās the player? Well, it connects to the car, which is where I use it. But so many features which made it appealing before are gone. Editing a songās information is gone. Half the album cover art is unlinked (including albums legitimately downloaded through the old Meizu music service), and thereās no way of relinking it. European accented characters are mistaken for the old Big 5 Chinese character set.
The only plus side is that some songs that I had downloaded years ago with their titles in Big 5, as opposed to Unicode, now display correctly. That accounts for a few songs (fewer than 10) of the 1,229.
I know Meizu will do nowt, as its customer service continues to plummet. I may still file something on its Chinese BBS (the western one is inaccessible and, from what I can tell, no longer maintained by anyone from their staff), but itās highly unlikely Iāll be brand-loyal. It’s yet another example of a newer program being far, far worse, by any objective measure, than its predecessor, giving credence to the theory that some software developers are clueless, have no idea how their apps work, have no idea how people use their apps, or are downright incompetent. It’s a shame, as Meizu’s other default and system apps are generally good.
In the future, Iām sure someone else in China will be happy to sell me a non-Google phone when it’s time to replace this one.
While I saw Vodafoneās Super Wifi commercials, I never thought to act on them, since (mistakenly) I thought it was something to do with cellphones. Might have been the gadgets they used in the commercial.
But, after talking to Raghu, their salesā rep in Pune, a city outside of Mumbai that I know well, he convinced me to upgrade not just my cellular plan (which was from 2012 when a gig of data were a lot) but the home internet to Super Wifi.
This is really a laypersonās post as there isnāt much online about it, at least not from a New Zealand perspective.
The set-up consists of the Vodafone Ultra Hub (a modem that I was already familiar with, since I had mine since 2018), and two TP-Link Deco X20 units, which are for all-home wifi. The idea is that they transmit the wifi signal over the house. Theyāre equipped for wifi 6, which really just tells you the speedāand not 6G was I was told on the phone (a minor slip).
I knew about mesh wifi units since a friend had already told me how she and her partner used them in their home.
Weāre in a 290 mĀ² home so I had a suspicion that the two units would be insufficient, but Vodafoneās protocol is to begin with two.
The Ultra Hub is identical to the old oneāthe copyright notice on the box says 2017āso Iāll be returning it. The two Deco units plug in, one to the Ultra Hub, the other in another part of the house. The theory is that they communicate between each other.
I downloaded the TP-Link app first before plugging in the Deco unitsāin fact I had them the day beforeāand I was fortunate that it could be found at a public APK site, since I do not have Google, and, God willing, never will, on any cellphone of mine.
Itās a remarkably easy to use app, fortunately, with a Speedtest built in.
Iāve always had problems at one end of the house where I have a desktop PC thatās not wifi-enabled, and putting in a PCI-E adapter wouldnāt work due to space restrictions inside the case. My only option to pick up wifi would be a USB 3 adapter, which coincidentally was also made by TP-Link (itās the Archer T9UH).
I disliked the D-Link Powerlink units, which, despite the manufacturerās claims, lost 90 per cent of their speed between the two points. The signal at the modem end would come in at speeds of between 700 and 1,000 Mbit/s, but 40 to 90 Mbit/s at the other end was commonplace. The 1 Gbyte promised by all the marketing was a fantasy.
The previous owner of this house also used Powerlink units, but at different points.
Computer geeks still tell me these are good and I suspect they could work well in smaller homes or ones with newer wiring.
For context, using the old Saturn fibre cable that I had installed in 1999 at the old house, I would easily see over 300 Mbit/s via a cat 5 ethernet cable. Having to live with speeds between a ninth and a third of that in a house with Chorus fibre was tough going, and life proved too busy to get an extra internal cable installed.
I was glad to see the tail end of those powerline units as I was promised that 600 Mbit/s was going to be possible at the end of the house with the mesh.
It wasnāt. In fact, the second unit failed to pick up the first, and I was forced to bring it closer to the first in another room.
Speedtestās first result was 106 Mbit/s down and 58 Mbit/s up, which was an improvement, but not a good one, and far short of the promised levels.
The TP-Link app had a Speedtest result of over 916 Mbit/s no matter where I went. I didnāt realize that it was giving me the results at the point of entry on the first Deco unit.
Therefore, it should show a higher number. When I realized this, I began running Speedtests via speedtest.net, and was disappointed to see, even at the first unit via wifi, results in the 120 Mbit/s region.
I called tech support. The first person didnāt know much, but I explained that Raghu had promised two additional mesh units should my experience not be up to expectation. She said she was only authorized to send one. I decided to take it. She was also authorized to give me unlimited phone data for seven days in case I needed to use the cell as a hotspot.
I called again later and got to speak with a tech, Paul, who had the units at his home, and could tell me more.
First, the X20s have two LAN ports on the back. I had read somewhere that these were for the modem-to-unit link exclusively. It turns out that was wrong. You can plug in an ethernet cable and run it straight into your computerārendering my purchase of the TP-Link Archer adapter redundant. Secondly, I should employ a wifi test if I really wanted to see what was going on: I should plug in a device via ethernet into the Deco unit.
The results were then markedly different: between 600 and 700 Mbit/s from the first unit, but still low numbers with the second.
The third unit arrived and this helped somewhat, with 300-plus Mbit/s in a ground floor room when connected via ethernet.
In the meantime, I had got back in touch with Raghu and suggested that a fourth unit might do the trick, and get me at least back to the speeds I had in the late 2010s. Interestingly, he was only authorized to send two, which meant I would be in possession of five such units, all of which I had to pay the courier charges for.
Units four and five arrived. The fourth unit went into the upstairs office and I had a 3 m ethernet cable running from it, on the floor, to the PC. The speeds were still poor: 178 Mbit/s down, 175 Mbit/s up.
One thing TP-Linkās app does not tell you, at least not in diagrammatic form, is how the Deco units are all connected. I discovered through the web interface (tplinkdeco.net in a browser, using the password that you signed up to the app with) that the office one was stretching to get its signal from the first oneāand not the other two in the house. This Reddit page told me what I needed to know: you reboot the unit that you want reconnecting elsewhere. I did that, and it found the third unit in the ādenā (as we call it) and speeds went up to between 200 and 270 Mbit/s both down and up.
Iām still dealing with speeds lower than what I had in 2018 using a 1999 cable but getting into the 200s is a far sight better than being in the double digits. If I have any serious downloading to do, thereās always the option of the laptop and a direct connection from the Ultra Hub, where I can work away at 700ā900 Mbit/s.
Iāll continue to tinker since the laptop managed to get over 300 Mbit/s during the tests, and I believe that that was down to the location of the office Deco unit. However, Iām hampered by the 3 m ethernet cable and Iām going to need 5 m, possibly (no one sells a 4 m). Possibly going to a cat 7 cable might do the trick there, too.
So there you have it, a real-world trial of Vodafone New Zealandās Super Wifi. Not as great as promised but less of a let-down than what powerline modems do in real life. And yes, you can hook ethernet cables from the units to your computer.
We already know that Facebook does nothing if you want to use scripts to join groups, even if the scripts all give roughly the same answers. Apparently thatās not enough to trigger the systems at this company thatās worth almost a billion dollars (thatās a proper billion, or what the Americans call a trillion). Unless, of course, they want these bot accounts on there to continue lying about reach, or run some other sort of scam.
But what about brand-new accounts that are clearly bots, that write nonsensical things that bots are programmed to do, and which friend other bots? These are bot nets, the sort I saw all the time when I used Facebook regularly. The nights in 2014 when I spotted over 200 bot accounts? A lot of them were in these nets, and I made it a mission to report them, since they tended to exist in groups of a few dozen, maybe a hundred at most.
Last night I saw nets of thousands. Imagine a new account thatās friended thousands of other new accounts, all using a series of names, and all pretending to work for a limited number of workplaces. Surely these are obviously bots, and Facebookās systems would detect them? I mean, if youāve been on Facebook for even six months youād know that these patterns existed, let alone 17 years.
Um, no.
Iāve been reporting a whole bunch of these bots and Facebookās reaction is to tell me, as they do with bot accounts running group-joining scripts, that no community standards have been violated.
Normally I would see a dozen or so bot accounts each time I pop in (and my friends who moderate on there tell me they can see many per minute). Even as an irregular user it means I see more bots than humans, but now that Iāve seen over 4,000 (just go to one of these botsā friendsā lists and take a sufficiently large sample) that Facebook allows, then come on, you canāt tell me that this site is still worth giving your money to. In 2014 I called seeing 277 bots in one night an āepidemicā, on the basis that if a regular Joe like me could, then how many were really on there? Now I see 4,000 in one night. These two have over 4,000 and 3,000, with some overlap:
And in 2014, I could report them, and some would actually be deleted. Others would need repeated reports. In 2021, none are deleted, based on the ones I reported.
Therefore, Facebookās systems neither detect bots nor do a thing about them when a user blatantly points them out.
And given that this company is worth over US$800 milliard, then you know they exist with their blessingāat the least with their inaction. Because US$800 milliard buys a lot of technology, but apparently not enough to deal with bots or misinformation.
The scammers know this and the con artists know this. Governments know this. This is a danger zone for consumers, yet the last few years still werenāt sufficient for most western governments to act. It makes you wonder just what itāll take to wake people up, since folks donāt even seem to mind giving their money to a company that has such a poor track record and no independent certification of its metrics. Would shame work? āYou dumbass, you gave money to them?!ā Surely this now makes it more obvious than ever just what a terrible waste of money Facebook is?
PS.:Here’s another new account with what appears to be 4,326 bot friends (based on a reasonable sample).āJY
Iām not entirely sure I need to block out the email addresses here since theyāre likely to be burner Gmail accounts, but Iāll give these spammers the courtesy they donāt deserve.
As shown below, theyāve been coming for over a year; thereās a chance I may have even received them in 2019.
The text of the latest reads:
Hello,
I hope youāre well!
I am currently working with a number of clients in placing guest blogs/sponsored articles on high-quality sites, such as yours. I recently came across your site and, after having a quick read through some of your more recent posts and articles, I think itād be a great fit for some of the sorts of content campaigns that we frequently work on.
I work with a range of clients across different areas such as fashion, lifestyle, home decor, legal, travel plus loads more. Would you be interested in working together on one of our future/upcoming content campaigns?
Looking forward to hopefully working on a campaign together soon!
First up, I already know they never visited since the latest refers to Lucire as a āblogā in its subject line. Just because you run Wordpress doesnāt mean itās a blog.
A more crazy one recently actually requested we publish something at lucire.net, which is a brochureware site with no posts on itāso I donāt think they are even hunting specifically for Wordpress-driven sites. Anything will do.
Last year, I replied to one of them, thinking they could be a legit enquiry for advertorial. It went nowhere, since, as far as I know, they were just after backlinks, and not prepared to pay what a commercial advertorial purchaser would.
I wouldnāt have been any the wiser if they didnāt keep repeating the messages, and it seems that during the last few weeks theyāve shifted into high gear. And when you know theyāre spam, the innocent experience that you had in 2020 suddenly becomes a supreme waste of time.
I know, all the signs are there: they run Gmail accounts and there are no signature files or details of what company they represent. Gmail, to me, has plenty of spammers, and it is not the service used by professionals. (When 200 people can share the same email address, why would you?) But there was that charitable side of me wondering if the first one was just someone who had shifted to working from home and trying to make a buck. I didnāt really think, since Iām not of this mind myself, that it was spam and that I was a mark.
I now have common phrases from the spams fed in to my filters so these will just go into the trash folder. Iām posting this in case others have received these spams, and wish to do the same.
Hereās a recent Tweet of mine. Not altogether an accurate one, but when I wrote it I genuinely believed Facebook claimed it had 2 milliard users.
Remember when I said #Facebook probably only had 750 million users? Now, if they claim to have deleted 1Ā·3 milliard bots, and they also claim to have 2 milliard users, then surely my maths was right? https://t.co/3KsC82G9ur
As Don Marti says, the fact Facebook even has to claim this tells us they are fighting a losing battle.
On one of the groups I administer there, Iād say over 99 per cent of the membersā queue are bots. Hereās a typical screen in botland, I mean, Facebook:
These are common patterns and I see them all the time; they all use a variety of responses but they all come out of the same program. āI will seriously abide!ā, āYes broā and āOK broā are pretty common, and there are others.
The thing is, Iāve seen these for years, reported each one as a fake account (since there is no option for āthey are using automated softwareā), and in 99 per cent of cases (no exaggeration; in fact I may be underestimating), Facebook tells me there is no violation of their terms of service.
This can mean only one of two things: Facebook is too stupid to realize that an account that feeds the same things into group questionnaires constantly is a bot or running some sort of software that is not permitted under its own terms; or these accounts exist with Facebookās blessing.
In the queues, legitimate humans are being outnumbered by over 99 to 1, and if this is a representative sample of Facebookās current user base (Iām betting I see more accounts than the average person), then hardly anyone is on site any more. I wouldnāt know, I only check client pages and this queue for the most part.
But if you wish to waste your money advertising to bots on the Facebook platform, then be my guest. Zuckerberg and co. are already getting enough money for doing nothing useful.
I wonder if Iām getting more Twitter fatigue after 14 years. I have built up a fun network there, especially of car people that I made a point of following over the last couple of years. But the cellphone keyboard is such a fidgety, impractical and slow device, Iāve found myself starting to respond, even writing the first few words of a Tweet, then giving up. This has had wonders on my email inbox as the number of messages drops. Iām getting through stuff.
Fortunately for Twitter, Jack Dorsey hasnāt come across as big a dick as the Facebook and Google people, and the man has been doing some good with his money, like donating US$1 milliard to COVID-19 research. Yes, Twitter still has some major problems, especially when it comes to censorship, but when someone says, āI can afford to give that away because Iād still be a rich bastard with the US$2 milliard I have left,ā itās actually a contrast to Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. Unlike the latter, he also hasnāt been publicly lying and calling us ādumb f***sā.
Even so, more often than not I now find myself stopping. Is Tweeting that really worth it? Who cares? So I have a different opinion to that person. I donāt need a global audience for it. If I feel strongly enough, and have the time, thereās always long-form blogging.
Finally, here’s a page explaining just why Google is corrupt.
This was the back of Mum’s 1985 tax assessment slip from the IRD. Helvetica, in metal. The bold looks a bit narrow: a condensed cut, or just a compromised version because of the machinery used?
Not often seen, since by this time phototypesetting was the norm, though one reason Car magazine was a good read was its use of metal typesetting until very late in the game. I know there are many reasons the more modern forms of typesetting are superior, least of all fidelity to the designed forms, but there’s a literal depth to this that makes me nostalgic.
