The US, where big business (and others) can lie with impunity

One thing about not posting to NewTumbl is I’ve nowhere convenient to put quotations I’ve found. Maybe they have to go here as well. Back when I started this blog in 2006—15 years ago, since it was in January—I did make some very short posts, so it’s not out of keeping. (I realize the timestamp […]

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Old-school Brexit

I was led by this Tweet to have a peek at the Draft EU–UK Trade Cooperation Agreement and can confirm that on p. 931 (not p. 921), under ‘Protocols and Standards to be used for encryption mechanism: s/MIME and related packages’, there is this: The text: The underlying certificate used by the s/MIME mechanism has […]

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Is NewTumbl hiding posts critical of it?

Postscript: Alex, who maintains three spaces on NewTumbl, can still see my “missing” five posts. In addition, NewTumbl has responded and it’s believed there was a bug. More on that here. This is interesting: talking to Bii on Twitter, who is also a NewTumbl user, I discovered that he can’t see my last five posts […]

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Facebook leaves up over 95 per cent of hate speech; ‘embarrassing to work here,’ says ex-staffer

Buzzfeed’s article, on departing Facebook staff who write ‘badge posts’, wasn’t a surprise; what was a greater surprise was just how long it took for such news to surface.    Badge posts are traditional farewell notes at Facebook, and not everyone has had rosy things to say. One wrote, ‘With so many internal forces propping […]

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The 2020 Level 2 history exam is racist

The below is excerpted from an email sent to the Race Relations’ Commissioner, Meng Foon, sent yesterday, in light of this Tweet (and the thread that follows): Me and my friend just wrote a letter to NCEA about the inclusion of a Lionel Terry poem in the History exam 💅😘 — Cadence Chung (@cadence_chung) November […]

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Bring back humour to all, please!

Nigella Lawson saying 'Microwave' like this has made my Christmas already pic.twitter.com/ByXTDVIloq — 🍯 (@EtceteraWithEst) December 8, 2020 Very humorously, Nigella Lawson mispronounced microwave, only to have Those Who Have No Humour get up in arms and Ms Lawson having to clarify that she indeed knew how to pronounce the word the Tory way. Maybe […]

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When Sibelius started our TV day

If I hadn’t mentioned this on Twitter, I might not have had a hunt for it. When I first came to this country, this was how TV1 started each morning—I believe at 10.30 a.m. prior to Play School. I haven’t seen this since the 1970s, and I’m glad someone put it on YouTube.    I […]

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Looks like Twitter makes up your settings, too

Speaking of Twitter doing weird things, I checked out some of Lucire’s settings on there today, something I haven’t looked at for a long time.    I do not ever recall telling them I was in Malaysia—it’s not a country we’ve even had a correspondent in—and Estonian and Welsh were never marked as languages. I’m […]

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Confirmed: Twitter does unfollow people

Pixabay People have long suspected that Twitter “unfollows” without human intervention (I’ve heard the stories for over a decade), but I never had any first-hand proof. Like the Google Ads Preferences Manager (they don’t use apostrophes in Mountain View) situation in 2011, where I initially doubted myself, thinking maybe I hadn’t opted out when in […]

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Only 10 months on, let’s not repeat history

This was my Tweet after having privately expressed my frustration over the WHO’s failure to declare an emergency of international concern in January: No surprise. Will the WHO revise its evaluation, because this is (and has always been) of international concern? Did they not realize the New Year is the biggest migration of humans on […]

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