What’s all this Johnny Foreigner type?

23.10.2019/06.56

After all that bollocks from the Hon J. Rees-Mogg, MP about banning the metric system from the Commons, I thought the Brexit-loving Tories would at least get this right. That #Brexit bill is typeset in Palatino. That was designed by a German. Come on, people, don’t you want to use British typefaces? Tell Johnny Foreigner […]

Wikipedia acts swiftly when criticized, bans an editor for life

05.10.2019/08.06

When I wrote this post in May 2018, ‘People are waking up to Wikipedia’s abuses’, even I didn’t expect that Wikipedia would act so harshly when it gets criticized on its own platform. One editor decided to create a page on Philip Cross, who (or which) received a great deal of attention that month, […]

Huawei without Google: isn’t that a good thing?

21.05.2019/08.39

I see Google’s going to stop supporting Huawei as a developer. How is this a bad thing? First, Huawei can still get the public parts of Android, since they’re open-source. Secondly, if they don’t get updates ahead of time, so what? When have western software companies rolled out bug-free updates? Based on my own […]

Spoiler alert: The Avengers’ endgame

24.04.2019/09.13

I’m hearing the young people talk about this lately. But we already know how The Avengers ends. Then they come back with some new cast members years later. John Steed (Patrick Macnee) and Tara King (Linda Thorson) on board a rocket. You may also like Is your favourite 1980s’ celeb here? Not quite a […]

Navigating the Julian Assange arrest

12.04.2019/14.14

I find it disturbing that some of the talking heads here we’ve seen are giving the Julian Assange story the same bias that much of the US mainstream media are. To me, it’s dangerous territory: it either shows that our media wish to be complicit with Anglo-American interests, that they do little more than repeat […]

YouTube tracks you even when you’ve signed out and blocked their cookies

03.12.2018/12.49

Of course YouTube lies. Say you’ve paused your search and watch history on YouTube. And you block all youtube.com cookies. YouTube won’t track you, right? You’ve made it quite clear you don’t want a record of what you’ve done, so YouTube shouldn’t keep one. Wrong. As with Big Tech, what you expect given […]

Autocade hits 14,000,000 page views, and we start a YouTube channel

13.10.2018/12.07

Above: Behind the scenes of the Škoda Karoq road test for Autocade. I hadn’t kept track of Autocade’s statistics for a while, and was pleasantly surprised to see it had crossed 14,000,000 page views (in fact, it’s on 14,140,072 at the time of writing). Using some basic mathematics, and assuming it hit 13,000,000 on May […]

In line with what I discovered in 2011: Google tracks your location even after opting out

16.08.2018/01.46

The Associated Press had an exclusive this week: Google does not obey your opt-out preferences. I could have told you that in 2011. Oh wait, I did. And I pointed out other instances where Google ignored your request to pause your history, continuing to track you either through its main site or its properties […]

The decline continues: Facebook pages no longer accept YouTube links

18.07.2018/11.14

Many of you know that I no longer use Facebook for my personal stuff. However, there are still work things to do, although I’ve noticed Facebook pages get more and more useless by the day. Here are the stats for my Facebook page: Strangely, I can see the stats on a page that’s not […]

It can’t be that hard to rank media meritoriously, if only the big players had the will

14.03.2018/09.20

US Department of Defense Keen to be seen as the establishment, and that means working with the military–industrial complex, Google is making software to help the Pentagon analyse drone footage, and not everyone’s happy with this development. The World Economic Forum’s ‘This is the future of the internet’ makes for interesting reading. It’s […]