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

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 […]

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

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 […]

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

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 […]

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The decline continues: Facebook pages no longer accept YouTube links

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 […]

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

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 […]

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YouTube under fire for child exploitation videos—with ‘three unpaid volunteers’ monitoring reports

The Murdoch Press has rightly kept its pressure up on Google, with a cover story in The Times, ‘Adverts fund paedophile habits’ on November 24 (the online version, behind a paywall, is here).    Say what you will about its proprietor, but Murdochs have been happy to go after the misdeeds of Google: the earlier […]

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All I really know is who I won’t vote for

One thing I love about New Zealand is that we’re not mired in an election cycle years before the event. We’re three weeks or so out from our General Election, and only now am I feeling things are heating up.    It’s not that we haven’t had drama. Weeks ago, Metiria Turei was co-leader of […]

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A farewell to Tim Kitchin

For the second time in two months, I found myself announcing to the members of Medinge Group another passing: that of my good friend Tim Kitchin.    Tim passed away over the weekend, and leaves behind three kids.    I always admired Tim’s point of view, his depth of thinking, and his generosity of spirit. […]

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Happy and glorious

As one of HM the Queen’s loyal and humble servants, I wish her a happy 90th birthday and include this YouTube video of one of her most memorable moments of recent times. A bit of the ‘Dambusters March’ can’t go wrong, either. It shows the Queen to have a particularly good sense of humour. You […]

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No surprises as Facebook slips to third in Alexa, but tech press misses it

Above: Facebook’s latest move: ensuring that notifications for messages go to its own app. If you choose not to install it, tough. (Actually, you can reach your messages if you had bookmarked your old message index, and through some digging you can still get there. However, your old habit of clicking on the number won’t […]

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