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Added on 4 Jul 2013. Last read 9 minutes ago.

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    • 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

    • Beware Substack—and TV3 makes terrible design and marketing decisions
      • Beware Substack. I received a newsletter today that I had never heard of, so I unsubscribed—to find that I had allegedly signed up to everything that the user publishes. Not bloody likely. This wasn’t a case of being on someone else’s Substack and accidentally clicking ‘Yes’ to other suggested newsletters. Normally there’d only [...] Read More... from Beware Substack—and TV3 makes terrible design and marketing decisions

    • Get the Abbey habit
      • Back in 1990, this was a missed opportunity to have a humorous tie-in between Abbey National and Jonathan Lynn’s film Nuns on the Run. Almost as good as the idea I had for Elizabeth Arden. [...] Read More... from Get the Abbey habit

    • Does clickbait work now? YouTube must think so
      • I watched a video by William Gourley (a friend of friends) recently, and here are the suggested videos to its right on YouTube. There is only one that is actually related to what I saw. The rest are completely irrelevant. In the olden days, YouTube would at least attempt to show you related [...] Read More... from Does clickbait work now? YouTube must think so

    • Thank you, Joe (Patroni)!
      • As my Typepad blog went into oblivion without any warning from Six Apart, I had better repost the following from my Tumblr, in case it has the same fate. This was an old favourite post of mine. The rise and rise of Joe Patroni George Kennedy’s most famous role. OK, so the last one [...] Read More... from Thank you, Joe (Patroni)!

    • Easier to write about the past ones
      • My dad made quite a few predictions, not because he was psychic (in fact, while he was never vocally against it, like Confucius he wasn’t a fan of it), but because he was a keen observer of people, natural phenomena, and the rise and fall of institutions. Off the top of my head: when Rob [...] Read More... from Easier to write about the past ones

    • Our own Eric and Ernie
      • Not what usually comes to mind when you say Eric and Ernie. Not many of you have wanted our edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Fair enough: the only thing new is a foreword where we acknowledge the influence of Eileen O’Shaughnessy, George Orwell’s (Eric Blair’s) wife. However, our A Farewell to Arms has drifted out [...] Read More... from Our own Eric and Ernie

    • The trails of the theftbots
      • This was interesting: how the “AI” theftbots (yes, I’m coining that word) affected Autocade’s traffic. We had blocked a bunch of them already—notably the western ones and ByteDance—but there were many others that still got through. This is from Cloudflare, but even their default settings miss a bunch, especially Chinese ones, and they don’t [...] Read More... from The trails of the theftbots

    • How to ensure people won’t read your page
      • Creative Commons/CC0/Pxhere Anyone else do this? You’re searching for something online and you go to a page where there’s an introduction, then a ‘Contents’ box dividing up the answer into sections. You immediately leave that page because it’s likely to be “AI”-written or the answer you want is buried within, and it’s quicker to [...] Read More... from How to ensure people won’t read your page

    • Autocade gets a new logotype; and we block a lot of “AI” bots
      • The Autocade logo has changed, and we’ll be letting you in on why in due course. It hasn’t been done just because of æsthetics, though after 17½ years it was probably time for an update. Meanwhile, on the “AI” scraping front, which Autocade has unfortunately been subject to, we’ve been blocking a [...] Read More... from Autocade gets a new logotype; and we block a lot of “AI” bots

    • Google lies (situation normal), Google users run scrapers, Tencent users attack
      • Big Tech lies. Each time I use Google, I get this: The message, ‘Our systems have detected unusual traffic from your computer network. This page checks to see if it’s really you sending the requests, and not a robot’ is a sham. The reality is that Google will force a captcha on you [...] Read More... from Google lies (situation normal), Google users run scrapers, Tencent users attack

    • Chelfyn Baxter honours Helen’s memory using AI in an ethical way
      • Originally published in Lucire A year ago, we lost our good friend Helen Baxter. This loss was most deeply felt by no one more than her husband and partner of 25 years, Chelfyn. In the past year, he has come across a way to honour her memory. Head to the YouTube channel Zoechelfyn, [...] Read More... from Chelfyn Baxter honours Helen’s memory using AI in an ethical way

    • Two of the web’s worst brands wind up in a scam
      • Internet Archive Above: An Internet Archive screenshot of one of the scam websites, presumably with the main image missing. From Malwarebytes in March: a Semrush impersonation scam has hit Google ads. While I would never side with bad actors, it is difficult to sympathize with a brand like Semrush after the nine months of [...] Read More... from Two of the web’s worst brands wind up in a scam

    • The extra things you now do in online publishing: blocking suspicious bots
      • Unfortunately, we’ve had to block some individual IP addresses as we suspect they’re guilty of stealing content from Autocade. These aren’t the clearly marked “AI” bots, but individual IP addresses that have hit the site at a far greater frequency than humanly possible, and some have tried to access non-existent pages that could not possibly [...] Read More... from The extra things you now do in online publishing: blocking suspicious bots

    • A product’s popularity is of no concern to me
      • Does this still work? Amanda and I were checking out cars last weekend and a sales’ rep tried to interest us in one by saying it was the top selling in its segment in Australasia. My first (unvoiced) reaction to this is: there are a lot of stupid people out there. If you can imagine [...] Read More... from A product’s popularity is of no concern to me

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