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Added on 4 Jul 2013. Last read 4 minutes ago.

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This feed currently contains the following newsitems (total count 1276):

    • On “AI”, brainwashing, and Epstein
      • I have said for a long, long time that a lot of the folks working for these Big Tech companies aren’t smart. I think I began saying that about Facebook soon after they launched Timeline, especially when they presumed all 750 million users (as it then was, apparently) lived in the US Pacific time zone. [...] Read More... from On “AI”, brainwashing, and Epstein

    • Nearly 20 people can use the same Gmail address
      • When I blogged about multiple people being able to use the same Gmail address, I didn’t expect to find first-hand experience of this. Yet this week, I did, as it turned out that we, too, had an early Gmail account, set up in 2004. It was inactive but the recovery address was still current, so [...] Read More... from Nearly 20 people can use the same Gmail address

    • Gems found via Mastodon
      • I said for ages that someone should administer the Voigt-Kampf test on politicians here in Aotearoa and it turns out someone did, with the Hon Judith Collins MP. Probably a Nexus 3. Let’s hope the two Chrises get asked, minimum. I have my suspicions on which ones are replicants. And the number is [...] Read More... from Gems found via Mastodon

    • Nothing new under the sun, not even “AI” libel
      • Yesterday’s story about Scott Shambaugh being the victim of a rogue “AI” attacking him and making a blog post has had some people believing that there was still a malicious human hand in it, and we shouldn’t be so quick as to attribute agency to the machine. Regardless of agency, is this so new? In [...] Read More... from Nothing new under the sun, not even “AI” libel

    • Version 2 of “AI” attacking reputations: this time, it’s autonomous
      • Remember when I said sooner or later, “AI” would be writing smack about all of us? This has just happened to Denver, Col. engineer Scott Shambaugh, who blogs ‘An AI agent published a hit piece on me’. It’s just one, but what’s particularly weird is that the “AI” did this autonomously, whereas the hundreds I [...] Read More... from Version 2 of “AI” attacking reputations: this time, it’s autonomous

    • Our Black Friday sale, and Autocade’s top 10 car makers’ table for 2025
      • I thought of doing this late in 2025 but only remembered I said I would today—so for Friday, February 13, there’s a Black Friday sale on at Libriz, with 10 per cent off store-wide. The coupon code is BF12026, good for two uses at check-out till the clock ticks over to the 14th. With the [...] Read More... from Our Black Friday sale, and Autocade’s top 10 car makers’ table for 2025

    • Of course Google cooperates with ICE; did a Cloudflare security rule go missing?
      • The TechCrunch headline: ‘Google sent personal and financial information of student journalist to ICE’. The journalist is Amandla Thomas-Johnson, a British subject who briefly attended a pro-Palestinian protest in 2024. Google handed the US régime’s secret police his ‘IP addresses, phone numbers, subscriber numbers and identities, and credit card and bank account numbers’. The TechCrunch [...] Read More... from Of course Google cooperates with ICE; did a Cloudflare security rule go missing?

    • An Epstein files round-up
      • I imagine if I had been more au fait with security software, I’d have sounded alarms about Peter Thiel’s Palantir, but thank goodness others more knowledgeable about such matters are doing it, especially in the wake of the new Epstein files’ release. This time, Mandy—Lord Mandelson (not for long, Pete)—has been implicated, and the Byline [...] Read More... from An Epstein files round-up

    • Slop, everywhere you look
      • In the trackbacks yesterday at Lucire: “AI” slop that actually bothered to credit us. We can’t DMCA it, as it’s not an exact copy, and the act wasn’t designed to handle such situations—and right now I don’t believe judges have interpreted it that widely, yet. I’m not thrilled about it because it builds on [...] Read More... from Slop, everywhere you look

    • Time for a bold nation brand: bring on a new Brand Aotearoa
      • I finally watched the 2019 documentary Very Ralph, on Ralph Lauren, and how he built his company on an aspirational image of the American Dream. Never mind that it wasn’t exactly real, and a fantasy that he brought out for customers to buy into, the public understood the codes (life in the Hamptons or the [...] Read More... from Time for a bold nation brand: bring on a new Brand Aotearoa

    • 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

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