21 Monday Dec 2020
Posted in News and Notes
≈ Comments Off on Today’s “Holiday” Cheer!
Today, we are nagged by our fellow Amerikans at Google as follows:
A click and we are instructed by our public servants at the CDC (and fellow Amerikans at Google):
Wear a mask.Save lives.
Wear a face cover
Wash your hands
Keep a safe distance
“Holidays” = Christmas and … the luciferio-pagan events. Yes, I’ll keep a safe distance from those latter happenings. Thanks, fellow Amerikans!
15 Tuesday Dec 2020
Posted in News and Notes
≈ Comments Off on Happy “December Global Holidays!”
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Google is currently informing us about the above matter. Click on today’s “Google” and see:
I am astonished that Christmas was on top, even including the name of Jesus Christ. Somebody might lose a job for that oversight.
MERRY CHRISTMAS!
23 Saturday Nov 2019
Posted in News and Notes
≈ Comments Off on Google’s 1.2 Billion Record Oops
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Quite the breach there, Google.
For well over a decade, identity thieves, phishers, and other online scammers have created a black market of stolen and aggregated consumer data that they used to break into people’s accounts, steal their money, or impersonate them. In October, dark web researcher Vinny Troia found one such trove sitting exposed and easily accessible on an unsecured server, comprising 4 terabytes of personal information—about 1.2 billion records in all.
While the collection is impressive for its sheer volume, the data doesn’t include sensitive information like passwords, credit card numbers, or Social Security numbers. It does, though, contain profiles of hundreds of millions of people that include home and cell phone numbers, associated social media profiles like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Github, work histories seemingly scraped from LinkedIn, almost 50 million unique phone numbers, and 622 million unique email addresses.
“It’s bad that someone had this whole thing wide open,” Troia says. “This is the first time I’ve seen all these social media profiles collected and merged with user profile information into a single database on this scale. From the perspective of an attacker, if the goal is to impersonate people or hijack their accounts, you have names, phone numbers, and associated account URLs. That’s a lot of information in one place to get you started.”
Maybe linking al those accounts wasn’t a good idea. Of course, it made logging in so easy. Faster access to the cat videos and such.
08 Monday Jul 2019
Posted in News and Notes
≈ Comments Off on Peak Google?
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Here’s an article on the alternatives to Google and why they’re important.
Here is a great list of alternatives you can try instead of Google. It’s interesting to compare search topics and see what comes up compared to Google:
Here are ten alternatives to Google search:
Read the whole thing.
25 Tuesday Jun 2019
Posted in News and Notes
≈ Comments Off on De-Algorithm-ing the Undesirables
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Another new shift limits search availability for those not in the new Big Club of digital SJWism.
Mercola.com targeted in Google’s latest core algorithm update
Now, any time you enter a health-related search word into Google, such as “heart disease” or “Type 2 diabetes,” you will not find Mercola.com articles in the search results. The only way to locate any of my articles at this point is by searching for “Mercola.com heart disease,” or “Mercola.com Type 2 diabetes.”
Even skipping the “.com” will minimize your search results, and oftentimes the only pages you’ll get are blogs, not my full peer-reviewed articles. Negative press by skeptics has also been upgraded, which means if you simply type in my name none of my articles will come but what you will find are a deluge of negative articles voicing critiques against me in your searches. Try entering my name in Yahoo or Bing and you will see completely different results.
As explained by Telapost,3 a core update “is when Google makes several changes to their main (core) algorithm.” In the past, Google search results were based on crowdsource relevance. An article would ascend in rank based on the number of people who clicked on it.
Traditionally, if you produced unique and high-quality content that matched what people were looking for, you were rewarded by ranking in the top of search results. You would find Mercola.com near the top of nearly any health search results.
So, let’s say one of my articles on diabetes was seventh on the page for your search; if more people clicked on that link than, say, an article listed in third or fifth place, my article would move up in rank. In a nutshell, Google search results were, at least in part, based on popularity.
That’s no longer the case. Instead, Google is now manually lowering the ranking of undesirable content, largely based on Wikipedia’s assessment of the author or site.
Wikipedia’s founder and anonymous editors are well-known to have extreme bias against natural health content and authors. Google also contributes heavily to funding Wikipedia, and Wikipedia is near the top of nearly all searches — despite the anonymous aspect of contributors. Who better to trust than a bunch of unknown, unqualified contributors?
Wikipedia’s co-founder even admits these bad actors have made it a “broken system.”4 Why would Google give such credibility to a platform that even its own founder says is broken and overrun with bad actors?
Probably because both Wiki and Google are converged and in the process of abandoning their core functions. I know how he feels. This site isn’t all that popular with the SJWs or the AI. But, he must be especially despised. Can you think of anyone less healthy than an SJW? And, as they wreck their own bodies, they just as happy to wreck companies – and your website.
02 Sunday Jun 2019
Posted in Other Columns
≈ Comments Off on Catch THIS if You Can
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One thing leads to another. This morning I checked an email from a friend. She’d done a Google Talk, about serving vs. selling, and wanted to spread the video. I watched on YouTube (pretty good stuff!). On the sidebar, I noticed a similar talk by Frank “Catch me if you can” Abagnale. His talk was unique, more for what he says about family and society than for his amazing life story. Please watch:
02 Sunday Jun 2019
Posted in Legal/Political Columns
≈ Comments Off on e tu Amazon?
Maybe they should shadow-ban the DOJ?
The FTC’s plans for Amazon and the Justice Department’s interest in Google are not immediately clear. But the kind of arrangement brokered between the Justice Department and the FTC typically presages more serious antitrust scrutiny, the likes of which many Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill have sought out of fear that tech companies have become too big and powerful.
Pols on Capitol Hill think two corporations are too big and powerful… Then again, they’re just two more government entities.
01 Saturday Jun 2019
Posted in Legal/Political Columns
≈ Comments Off on Farcebook and the Twits Next
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The DOJ preps an antitrust investigation of Google.
The Justice Department is gearing up for an antitrust investigation of Alphabet Inc.’s Google, a move that could present a major new layer of regulatory scrutiny for the search giant, according to people familiar with the matter.
You know,”big tech” and “antitrust” do go together rather nicely.
25 Sunday Nov 2018
Posted in News and Notes
One would have to be a complete fool (aka, an ordinary modern Amerikan) to voluntarily have any of these spy devices in the home.
Patents recently issued to Google provide a window into their development activities. While it’s no guarantee of a future product, it is a sure indication of what’s of interest to them. What we’ve given up in privacy to Google, Facebook, and others thus far is minuscule compared to what is coming if these companies get their way.
These patents tell us that Google is developing smart-home products that are capable of eavesdropping on us throughout our home in order to learn more about us and better target us with advertising. It goes much further than the current Google Home speaker that’s promoted to answer our questions and provide useful information, and the Google-owned Nest thermostat that measures environmental conditions in our home. What the patents describe are sensors and cameras mounted in every room to follow us and analyze what we’re doing throughout our home.
They describe how the cameras can even recognize the image of a movie star’s image on a resident’s t-shirt, connect it to the person’s browsing history, and send the person an ad for a new movie the star is in.
The advertising annoyance is the least of the possible concerns, really. And, it may eventually come down to ultimately involuntary concern. Imagine a future where the only hope for privacy is not having any electric devices at home and Faraday shielding to halt external probing. Look for measures like those to be outlawed while laws still hold.
1984 was a warm up.
08 Tuesday Aug 2017
Posted in News and Notes
≈ Comments Off on All That Tolerance
Speak your mind, speak the truth, at Google and they exact a price:
The internet giant Google has fired the male engineer at the center of an uproar in Silicon Valley over the past week after he authored an internal memo asserting there are biological causes behind gender inequality in the tech industry.
James Damore, the engineer who wrote the memo, confirmed his dismissal, saying in an email to Reuters on Monday that he had been fired for “perpetuating gender stereotypes.”
Damore said that he was exploring all possible legal remedies and that before being fired he had submitted a charge to the US National Labor Relations Board accusing Google upper management of trying to shame him into silence.
“It’s illegal to retaliate against an NLRB charge,” he wrote in the email.
Vox Day has more on the horrible, terrible, and shameful thought crimes that kicked this off. And the attack on the reasonable dissent. And the descent…
