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Added on 4 Jul 2013. Last read 1 minute ago.

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This feed currently contains the following newsitems (total count 1266):

    • A crisis of confidence
      • Hat tip to Bob LeFridge on Mastodon. Businesspeople are as fallible as any other, so it’s interesting that our determination of business confidence is deemed more important than that of everyday people, enough to warrant its own item in the news. And have I seen friends and colleagues get it wrong when peering through their [...] Read More... from A crisis of confidence

    • Wake up—and cut off Elon’s Grok
      • A social media stream of consciousness on Mastodon tonight: There is no greater threat to the establishment than someone who sees that the emperor has no clothes. Though the threat is increased if that someone is a person of colour or a woman or trans. That will shake them to their core. They are already [...] Read More... from Wake up—and cut off Elon’s Grok

    • The Cassandras
      • Toby Buckle has a great piece in The New Republic, ‘The Americans who saw all this coming, but were ignored and maligned’. I can relate. Maybe not about national politics, but certainly about the things I’ve sounded the alarm on and can now unhelpfully say: I told you so. Like the people Buckle interviewed, I [...] Read More... from The Cassandras

    • The scale of the problem with “AI” and hacking
      • Here is a sampling of the IP addresses visiting the original Autocade website, and it’s a typical page on Cloudflare. Of twenty-five entries over two-and-a-half minutes, two are legitimate, the rest are blocked or challenged. This is an indication of the scale of the hacking and “AI” scraping going on out there, and why we [...] Read More... from The scale of the problem with “AI” and hacking

    • Here is a blog, wound up and ready
      • A generation ago, we were told that young people were good at spotting lies in advertising because of a ‘built-in BS meter’. We (I’m including myself) grew up with mass media and became quite immune to advertising messages, and we had an innate filter. Then came the internet and Stanford University found that the [...] Read More... from Here is a blog, wound up and ready

    • You may be on Amazon without your consent
      • Jeff’s wealthy enough without resorting to this. FYI apparently Amazon has a feature in beta that scrapes the web stores of companies (and independent artists) not on their website, allowing you to buy the items on Amazon. Basically they act as a middle man, without your consent, to put your stuff on their marketplace. They’re [...] Read More... from You may be on Amazon without your consent

    • Linkedin, useless for business, as with most Big Tech sites
      • Anyone know how to add images to projects on Linkedin, or how to add posts to a company page so they’ll show up on the company page? Or is this yet another half-baked Big Tech website where they haven’t done any testing of its features over the last two decades? I thought I knew how [...] Read More... from Linkedin, useless for business, as with most Big Tech sites

    • They’re a soft touch when it comes to Big Tech
      • I was surprised and disappointed to see TV commercials on Christmas Day. Quite crass ones, too, e.g. for Harvey Norman. It turns out that this is now allowed under law, and Labour has gone along with it. Only New Zealand First put up any meaningful opposition. The official line from the media minister, Paul Goldsmith, [...] Read More... from They’re a soft touch when it comes to Big Tech

    • How the occidental search engines with their own index fare with site:jackyan.com
      • Now that checking the sites for theftbots and hackers daily is the norm, I did notice that a lot of visits to this site were for older content. It squares with what I’m seeing in the traffic stats. Which got me wondering again: as Google is the most visited site in the world (and doesn’t [...] Read More... from How the occidental search engines with their own index fare with site:jackyan.com

    • Kicking off innovation again—and solving other things on the way
      • The Roosevelt Institute has released an interesting paper, entitled The Political Economy of the US Media System: Excavating the Roots of the Present Crisis, by Bilal Baydoun, Shahrzad Shams, and Victor Pickard. In a nutshell, democracy has been eroded because public interest journalism has been eroded, and that’s down to media consolidation under neoliberalist economic [...] Read More... from Kicking off innovation again—and solving other things on the way

    • Even with the correct information, Google’s “AI” will still spin BS
      • During the nine months of “AI” disinformation I experienced in 2024, I did wonder what concocted such false articles out of thin air. We may have an answer: Google. Google funds disinformation but it also appears to generate it. Upon trying the Google SEO jackyan keywords that the disinformation spreaders were so fixated on [...] Read More... from Even with the correct information, Google’s “AI” will still spin BS

    • “AI” bros want you to serve the tech, not the correct way round
      • Magnificent work from Cory Doctorow, as always: ‘The reverse centaur’s guide to criticizing AI’. Doctorow makes the case that centaurs are good. Centaurs are people who have help from a machine, e.g. a person driving a car. But the reverse is not good, a machine who uses up a human as its peripheral for the [...] Read More... from “AI” bros want you to serve the tech, not the correct way round

    • They say they don’t want a biased media, but really they do
      • This sort of thing gets my goat, in response to a pretty innocent post about the new Kia Seltos on the Autocade account on Mastodon (Weird.autos). I know ‘crime’ isn’t meant literally, but be careful when you use language like this to someone with a law degree. As media, it actually doesn’t matter [...] Read More... from They say they don’t want a biased media, but really they do

    • One NZ keeps changing its tune about the 3G shutdown
      • One New Zealand is like the little boy who cried wolf. For most of 2025, it has clearly said, in emails and SMSs, that I needed to change my phone because of the 3G shutdown. I smelled BS because it’s a cinch that if it’s about technology, and a big firm is telling you, you’re [...] Read More... from One NZ keeps changing its tune about the 3G shutdown

    • Block and challenge away—there are so few exceptions, it’s like winning the lottery
      • A few months ago, we began getting very vigilant about scrapers (or theftbots, as I call them) and other dodgy parties. The defaults in Cloudflare weren’t enough. It became a daily habit to check if there were any attacks and to block IP addresses if the default Cloudflare settings hadn’t done it. We also [...] Read More... from Block and challenge away—there are so few exceptions, it’s like winning the lottery

    • Reminders that our current direction should give us pause
      • A few bookmarked pages on my phone to share. From 2021, but it’s worth repeating, since nothing has changed here—in fact, it’s accelerated: ‘How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation’, from Karen Hao in the MIT Technology Review. Her story begins with the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar and how Facebook contributed to that. Ten thousand [...] Read More... from Reminders that our current direction should give us pause

    • A farewell to Jimmy D: James Dobson’s own words
      • It was sad to find out that my friend James Dobson is shutting down most of his Jimmy D label last Thursday, with only a small online presence selling merchandise remaining after February. He is one of Aotearoa’s most respected fashion designers and a World of Wearable Art judge. His designs have often been [...] Read More... from A farewell to Jimmy D: James Dobson’s own words

    • The nostalgia box
      • I don’t remember an end-of-year quite so hectic. We have been working with a couple of licensee editions as well as getting Autocade Year of Cars out there, plus, of course, life continues. The busy-ness is not helped by having to check into the logs regularly to see if the theftbots from Tencent, Google users, [...] Read More... from The nostalgia box

    • Film themes getting a second life in TV commercials
      • When AA Mutual split into two companies, I have huge trouble telling which is which. One of them has a long-running TVC campaign using ‘Born Free’, and despite this song having my favourite composer, lyricist and singer (John Barry, Don Black, CBE, and Matt Monro respectively), I still don’t know who it’s for. Maybe by [...] Read More... from Film themes getting a second life in TV commercials

    • Cloudflare, because we don’t know how to use anything else
      • We use Cloudflare, knowing full well that it landed itself in trouble for upholding some unpalatable websites. But here’s the thing: if you’re not a technical person (raising my hand here), you may have no other choice. This is not like Twttr, Google or Microsoft Word where there are alternatives that work largely the same, [...] Read More... from Cloudflare, because we don’t know how to use anything else

    • If Google is a marketing and disinformation portal, not a search engine, then treat it as such
      • I really dig where Strypey is going with this, from Mastodon (shared under CC BY-SA 4.0): A platform that respond to keywords with “AI” slop and advertising is not a search engine; a neutral tool for sifting through an index of web pages. Which is what Goggle Search offered to build its initial reputation and [...] Read More... from If Google is a marketing and disinformation portal, not a search engine, then treat it as such

    • How we chose this year’s Autocade Year of Cars cover
      • We had compiled a press list this year for Autocade Year of Cars—but I still wound up sending personal emails, some from my private address, some from a work one. What I didn’t do this year was give Lucire first dibs on the news days early—we’ll run it there now that most of our [...] Read More... from How we chose this year’s Autocade Year of Cars cover

    • Caveat emptor: the hypocrisy of Natsav
      • There’s still one disinformation page from 2024 that remains, because the party committing the fraud is a web host who isn’t willing to enforce its own AUP against themselves. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Natsav of Jaipur, India, who doesn’t deserve your business. Because if they are this callous, then will they defend you [...] Read More... from Caveat emptor: the hypocrisy of Natsav

    • Avoiding signing in to your Microsoft account during Windows set-up—and other tech matters
      • I hadn’t turned my laptop on for a while, and its battery had run extremely low. It also prompted me to set up Windows 11, which I should have skipped. The computer already had 11, but it after each update, Windows often forces you to do a bunch of set-up things, which, if you go [...] Read More... from Avoiding signing in to your Microsoft account during Windows set-up—and other tech matters

    • Facebook really is that moronic, and Semrush really is that dodgy
      • Although I bought Facebook whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams’s book Careless People: a Story of Where I Used to Work some time ago, I only began getting into it in earnest this week. It was thanks to Facebook’s relentless marketing (i.e. its attempts to silence Wynn-Williams with legal threats) that got me interested, and saw me [...] Read More... from Facebook really is that moronic, and Semrush really is that dodgy

    • Out now: Autocade Year of Cars 2026
      • I’m very glad to say that we’ve soft-launched Autocade Year of Cars 2026, with the motoring press being notified soon. Like all good journalism projects, I wrote stories on things I didn’t know about but wanted to pursue. When did BMW grilles get all so confusing? The Bugatti Tourbillon was previewed in 2024, but [...] Read More... from Out now: Autocade Year of Cars 2026

    • Top 10 car manufacturers by sales, 2024—beware the bogus figures
      • Having published the top 10 car manufacturers for 2023 in Autocade Year of Cars 2025, I felt our readers deserved the 2024 table, and put it on the Autocade World website. There was only one public source that had them at that time: a website called Focus2move, and they seemed to be credible. The page [...] Read More... from Top 10 car manufacturers by sales, 2024—beware the bogus figures

    • Variety is the spice of life, so get away from the defaults
      • It still surprises me that “the defaults” in life have the hold that they do. I tried a lot of computer programs when I was younger and found WordPerfect the best word processor, and to this day I use it. In the early 1990s, it was the default. However, it got there through fair competition [...] Read More... from Variety is the spice of life, so get away from the defaults

    • Stuck with me for over 50 years
      • It’s hard not to get sentimental over these. These were the stickers on my cot, which I slept in in Hong Kong. For whatever reason, my parents decided to ship it over to New Zealand even though I had outgrown it. That reason would have likely been that in 1977, the potential of my [...] Read More... from Stuck with me for over 50 years

    • Ninety per cent of the web could be “AI” slop next year
      • As NixCraft wrote when sharing this: the irony is that it’s from Perplexity. The rest of you can do this, we won’t. We might be one of those little corners of the web still making human-written content. Life skill in 2025: to spot what is real and what is slop. A bit like [...] Read More... from Ninety per cent of the web could be “AI” slop next year

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