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, […]
Tag: technology
“AI” bots drive Wikipedia traffic up 50 per cent—as we already witnessed in 2023
Another thing I experienced before others: “AI” scraping causing a substantial increase in bandwidth, notably at Autocade in 2023. In Wikipedia’s case, this happened last year, as the “AI” bots sent their bandwidth up 50 per cent. Casey Newton writes: Post by @caseynewton View on Mastodon The bots steal, do not give attribution, and […]
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Ad tech is suspect
Got to love the irrepressible Bob Hoffman. In his March 23 newsletter, he notes that Adlook studied target segments from popular data providers, and asked the people in those segments about themselves. I won’t spoil Bob’s entire list but the top two are: 47 per cent of the people who the data said were women […]
No matter how bad you had it, someone had it worse
Two things: I did say “AI” programs would ultimately make up false stories about us all. And what happened to me in 2024 was not as bad as what happened to Arve Hjalmar Holmen in Norway. There are still a few disinformation stories left about me—about four more where companies who would normally enforce their […]
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No one is an island, not even when on an island
With the dismantling of the US by Lone Skum and others, Mike Masnick wrote in Techdirt: ‘And now we’re watching Musk, Trump, and their allies destroy these foundations. They operate under the dangerous delusion of the “great man” theory of innovation—the false belief that revolutionary changes come solely from lone geniuses, rather than from the […]
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It’s finally mainstream to report what Big Tech has been about for over a decade
Now that the world is waking up to Big Tech and its shenanigans, there is less need for me to post about them. Finally, what was once very evident to me is becoming mainstream thought, from Big Tech’s kowtowing to the suppression of a free press. I posted because it was frustrating to see everyone […]
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A decade on AWS stagnated this company
For many years (2002–12), we hosted with a US company that gave us a Plesk front end. That meant we did a lot in-house: create PHP and MySql databases, started up hosting environments for new domains, even managed our own email server. That company eventually opened up an Australian branch and my appointed customer manager […]
Everyone now sees the rot economy—and we’re beginning to understand what’s behind it
Again, things I’ve been pointing out for over a decade—heck, even over two decades, if you consider early concerns I had over Yahoo!—are now mainstream thought. Ed Zitron’s latest newsletter begins: A great deal of what I write feels like narrating the end of the world—watching as the growth-at-all-costs, hyper-financialized Rot Economy seemingly tarnishes every […]
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One of the last times we went out-of-house for typesetting
A spot of nostalgia today: another little sheet dug up among all the old paperwork. After desktop publishing came out, the technology wasn’t good enough for everyone to have access to it, so some elements were still contracted out of house. This would have been one of the last times, done by one of […]
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After warnings were ignored, we now arrive in the new tech mainstream
If you look back at all the tech companies I’ve called out, deep down I did so as a warning. If they show this contempt for the user, then it’s symptomatic of greater problems. Everything from Google switching your ad preferences’ opt-outs back to opt-ins and the stonewalling when it came to deleted blogs, to […]
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