Every time I see an advert, a puppy dies

Ads, advert or advertisement? If the contractions introduced over time were not hint enough. Please tell me I'm not the only human who has spent the last 20 years teaching myself to ignore advertisements. It used to be that television adverts were entertaining back in the 80's. Billboards and newspaper advertisements glossy magazines with great artwork were setting the standard gradually higher and higher. Culminating in an entire book worth of advertising of homes, that you can buy every Sunday at the newsagent. Yes, there used to be a time when adverts targeting specific people would actually be all in one specific place.

Mutually Assured Destruction, simply by having a bigger banner Ad.

1. MAD

Digital changed all of that, advertisers can now follow you around and target you. Companies have always had more money that sense when it comes to advertising spend. That's because brand awareness and influencing peoples buying habits, is big big money. Brand loyalty is such big money that companies prostitute themselves to the advert companies, who happily ask for more money in order to promote their client above all the competitors. Creating a MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) cycle which sees ever more bizarre advertisement spending in order to emerge on top. Being seen becomes so important that brand awareness surveys and number of impressions become a metric to chase after, yet another lie to pile onto the ill in that industry. To the consumer, advertisements become a bombardment, which frankly comes across as increasingly desperate, and often insensitive.

The impact of advertisements on customer in many ways however is harder to ignore. An impact that goes beyond a datacenter carbon footprint, a datacenter built just to store gigabytes of data about you to target you. Because targeted adverts are coming under pressure with new privacy controls possibly coming to Apple. Apple are bizarrely not a player in the advertising game, even though their entire raison d'etre is about image, and suddenly Google and their free portable-device OS don't look so stupid anymore. I get that Apple are all about what will make them more money, so pandering to privacy is a song they have sung for a while, and will continue to sing new cover versions of. I can respect that, someone who sticks to their guns and gives me a service, worth the money I fork over to them. If only I did not have other problems with Apple, I would be mucking in down at the Macintosh farm instantly. but I digress, because privacy and the impact AI has on it is key, even if fans of the platforms cannot see that.

2. Privacy

So, lets get back to this anonymous user problem. Apple use a special "advertiser id" generated for each device, that allows you some privacy, because an advertiser gets a unique ID for you, but that ID is not tied to "you"... which is complete bullshit as a concept. But for now I'll let it stand.

The vast majority of us have nothing to loose by being tracked, until... Well let's understand privacy better here. Privacy is about protecting the vulnerable as well as about preventing identity theft. And you will be surprised at how many vulnerable people are online. Activists online who are tracked by state actors are just the very tip of this iceberg. "State level" actors are powerful enough to drop tracker pixels into social networks, and sniff metadata directly off the wire to find and start profiling the contacts of anyone the activist connects with. Apple's clever little "ID" can do nothing to protect these people, because the privacy metadata at risk is your links, to other people. And even if those people are anonymous, someone with enough metadata will quickly map your habits and location using ML. The only defense against being tracked is to change your identity regularly, or to use ML itself to randomly make you appear to behave differently or randomly. Humans are creatures of habit through their timing and their connections (sites they visit). Internet activists are more vulnerable than we think. Advertising has created a huge industry to enable tracking people, often for the wrong reasons. Don't even start me on the very very bad health biases that advertisers willfully create.

I'm not even going to start on how advertising trackers get misused to sell health related items to you, another landfill contributor. If you start visiting baby websites while trying to have a baby, and then your wife has a miscarriage, they keep on bombing you with misery for years without ceasing. I'm not even going to describe the trivial effort to research buying one toilet seat of the correct size, then going to buy a replacement toilet seat in a real store. For the next month I got toilet seat adverts, even though I only have 1 toilet in my house. What a waste. The other day I bought a special kind of bolt online, I never buy any similar finds of things, but just that one experience saw my stream flooded with all manner of metallurgical products. Products I could often not even identify, and less likely even ever buy. The waste is dangerous, but the creepy thing is that this data, me buying a bolt, asking a friend a bolt related question allowed the advertisers to link me with my friends. Soon we all see the same bolt adverts. I kid you not. Imagine if I was researching a sexual health related product, something very private? Suddenly my friends will know.

The thing that pisses me off most about this is that this has a huge impact not, on men.

So you think you are anonymous out there, let me tell you a story about a big games console company. They had a huge problem, their console could not advertise new games to users because not only did the console not really know who the gamers friends really really were. But they had no way of knowing how to push relevant adverts to a gamer and their friends, because the console had no web social network linkup. And we all know that the web and most especially the mobile platform gets the most "conversions", or actual purchases. On our mobiles, a device we carry everywhere and has our attention 24/7, the console game publisher had no way to touch it's users. So the console company went to a cloud company and agreed to combine basic user metadata with whatever data their own website tracking could provide. Suddenly using ML alone, an algorithm if you like, was able to use terabytes of metadata, not about the users, but about their activity alone. And successfully build customer journey patterns that now save the console company millions in advert budget. Watch this landscape. It's about to change.

3. Waste

The ad industry is a huge waster, not just in terms of the MAD stacking and compounding problem, but because a lot of us cannot resist adverts. I've gotten into the habit of hating adverts and on a platform I block advertisers when possible, set preferences and enable trackers as often as I can to prevent adverts that are really more a waste of my time and a waste of money for the person placing them. Advertisers may want to start paying me, there's actually a browser that tries to do that, but that's another topic altogether. Adverts waste my bandwidth, which I pay for, and they just assume is free. Adverts waste my time. By lacking any kind of real targeting adverts force me to wait longer for pages to load and get in the way of me doing the things I love. Basically imagine you are about to kiss a beautiful girl, and a guy wizzes up on a bike and suddenly offers to sell you a condom. You buy one, she runs off anyway at this point, so you toss it into the landfill. 

Image showing the "Golden Girls" Maude not being rude.

Most commonly advertised products are the cheapest products and hence more likely to be impulse purchases, that get binned. Advertisers are often wasting their time because I've not bought a single product off of an advert, ever. I know this because I only buy items off of a researched wishlist which I keep in various ways. It's not hard to prevent landfill.

Bebo Inspired (sic)

 What the heck is Bebo? I mean, like what was it?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-55908193

Right now people are closing their Facebook accounts and Whatsapp accounts in droves, this happened about 5 years ago, but this year looks more like a single solid departing wave for many. I am perplexed by this, and so I'm writing now to clear up my thinking and also to poke fun at the fearmongers.

Exodus

My biggest fear with the social media exoduses that things like Parler which got killed off by AWS creates, merely cause new networks like the Bebo re-imagined service will undoubtedly bring the same broken services in the same way the google youtube algorithm would show you content to drag viewers in and thus was automatically showing them more and more extreme content just to see advert revenue. The fact that humans have failed to develop an allergic reaction to digital advertising and it's blatant waste culture distresses me. But even more distressing is the possibility that network fragmentation may split people farther apart. What am I talking about? Stuff nobody wants to talk about to be honest, but primarily the failure to inoculate against advert revenue is behind the Facebook screw-up. Because people don't want to pay for services, and even if we did, providers can make more money off of our data than they would off of a subscription. Even a Youtube ad-free subscription has very little take-up. The service probably costs more to run in that model to be fair. Why? I'm definitely no buying add-free youtube, not unless it comes with a fully add-free experience on the other platforms that touch it. It's a bit pointless. Like swimming in the goldfish bowl that is the internet. My big underlying fear is that the polarization that these social networks drive and thrive on is only now becoming evident and it's too late to stop a freight train that has been running down the track for decades. I have very little faith in the internet repairing itself. I keep seeing people on Twitter who think otherwise, and that old men cannot fix this thing, and that our youth will re-imagine the internet. Clearly the rose tinted spectacle wearers are prepared to wait for as long as their followers keep on promoting their bubble.

You could not make this up

As if 2020 was not an amazing yet humbling year, we not have 2021, it's over now for captain Tom. It's the movie script you could never write. I'm thinking of chucking out the TV set and youtube today, I keep seeing adverts for Netflix and other pointless entertainment services, sure I watch some non-broadcast TV, but not enough to warrant paying for Amazon Prime, the kids watch it for the most part, but if someone stole my TV, and blocked youtube.com on my internet, I would not cry. Just the captain Tom movie alone would be like the titanic movie that I have never seen and never will see, depressingly kitch.

And all because a spineless Prime minister could not be bothered to lock down the UK, and to actually stop all air travel in February when we all knew what was coming already. Your prevarication mister Johnson Sir, is costing 1000 lives per day, equivalent to about 5 lockerbie bombings every day. Chew on that one.

A different community

Last night I met up with a different community, an obscure underground movement that challenges the educational values held by the captains of democracy. They call themselves happy hackers.
Technology has become more affordable to the mass-market, but at the same time more accessible. You can perform scientific observations, investigations and home learning now, more than ever before. It's a bit like open-source, but for education.

For more on what they do, visit my e-journal.
For that that find this prospect scary, do not visit my techno blog/journal.

Community escapes big British Freeze

Well to be honest, the whole county seems to have escaped the horror stories about the entire United Kingdom. There has been the good-natured grumble, the dismayed grumble, and then defense of Councils and the Highway Agency maintenance of our roads. The gritty part of this story is how the state has now gotten involved in what is really a day-today matter of letting a tiny team of often overlooked men, women and their machines get out there and grit the roads. Ok, it's not that funny - seriously; why do we need to get salt imported from the mainland in such a hurry? Are the 'food-miles' out of proportion with the emergency? That's not going to do my carbon footprint any good at all.
Talking about carbon, I wonder how green we can make our websites?
I have lost count of the internet interests in the village I live in. For 2500 households, we have at least 10 websites, all doing different things, for different reasons, many looking a bit Web 1.0. Sure, sites link to each other, we have to do this kind of thing to survive, but are we just surviving, or are the geeks in the community actually going somewhere with all this computing power.

I got a newsletter recently, one of the Cambridge professors has a plan to make PCs greener, perhaps things like desktops that shut off when not in use, servers that go into sleep mode when not used; I'm probably breaking some patent law by just talking about this. So where are you going today Conrad? (Wow, this journal is looking like a blog, suddenly I'm talking to myself)
Greener printing, greener load-time web pages, in short greener conscience.
In more pertinent news, an update on a new plan to start a Cottenham e-newsletter circulation will be up next. The site is still blank, but it won't hurt to get some early visits.

I should get ready for my big interview tomorrow. Ciao.

Software download statistics

My download report for the last 2 weeks, looks impressive, but what does it mean?
Report for - Modbus - PLC Simulator






Report for - DIP Switch






I will have to come back in a month's time and compare.
Statistics are gathered from these 2 URLs on a 3rd-party download site called BrotherSoft. (nope, not related to Broederbond)
I need to turn this all into a marketing window.

Do not Click

I'm warning you, do not click here . But if you do (you should) you only have to click once, on the entire site it's the internet, but without carpel-tunnel syndrome Yay!

Windows Live and Hotmail

I have sent a comment to the Windows live team, because I have been missing mails.

I am loosing emails because they are getting filtered out as spam, what can I do?
I am also forwarding mails from websites to my hotmail as a convenience, but if I never get any of them, I cannot know people are trying to reach me. My junk folder is 'empty' too, is hotmail just deleting my spam automatically?

Anyway, this is not the only bit of hotmail that annoys me, can I get some feedback, and get my lost mails back. Please.

Is anyone else out there having similar junk/spam questions? I mean my GMail account hold around 50 junk mails for 30 days, so even 2 mails per day is reasonable. But Hotmail is totally spam-free, also contact-free. I had a similar issue with Yahoo 3 years ago, and they lost their advertising revenue space because of being blocked regularly, a similar, but not similar problem to my current one.

Come on Microsoft, if Tiger can do it, you can too!

Is your password strong enough?

Data from the recent hotmail phishing attack dumps show that some people still use passwords like '12345678' and 'password'. So where does that put netizens with more than a dozen different logins? All that one can do is write them all down on a piece of paper in a script too small for the cleaning lady to read (she did miss that spot under your chair non?), and incinerate it every month when you make up a new list.

Just because your data is not worth much no longer means someone will not take it away without a second thought in a bot-net attack using mall ware installed on our PC last night when you downloaded that handy little video converter or viewer.

Webs links and more spiders

or is that crawlies - Web-crawlers are crawling your website right now. Are you able to control what they see? Probably not, but I'm going to give those crawlers a few extra places to go



I've been promised an Editors Pick on Brothersoft, they are a pretty neat and tidy downloads site, with a good navigation system. So please click on the button above.
Do not click on this link, its here just for the crawlers.

Website update due

This is a test, if you can click on the image to the left, then you are in the right place.

999 and Facebook Apps

The sticker that means my house could blow up due to a gas leak on 10/10/10 and it would be my fault.

FaceBook Flood
Do you have millions of friends on facebook? I find I am staying in contact with a lot of people I would never have, and in so far it creates a way of publicly meeting with folk I know - but Facebook Apps (the advertising/Commercial side of FB) are invading my time, every day I have to brown-down at least one person by ignoring a request to install a virtual vaccum-cleaner or aquarium. Every home needs a vacuum cleaner, but it's like ice cream, fun - but not achieving anything more than a environment to chat a little longer.
So if I dont' respond to your Pokes, Bloody Marys or Bacarat, it's because I'm busy cleaning up a desert island oil-slick, not offense meant nor taken.

New Timed Posting Test

OK so this is simply a test-post, it should not count, but it will. Now does that count? Hmmm anyone got good guidance on creating help-files that can squash into a small file?

Search plugin update

My idiots-guide search plug-in how-to-add-search-engine-to-ff in 15 minutes was great, but missing an icon. THe problem was FF stores the icon in a base64 text tag - needed to convert my bmp to a base64 text - if you have a codeproject login, go here image-base-64-converter - download the sample app, run it, paste the output (there's even a nice button in the demo that pastes the text to your clipboard).

Paste it into the XML file in the right place, (the IMG tag) and viola!

LAMP or Socket?

Been playing with an Ubuntu distro lately to start setting up a LAMP to host the www.plcsimulator.org domain where I keep my modbus protocol simulator program. My current gripe is that Linux is not overly difficult to learn, is nice and cheap, but just takes time. This is just much more fun than work at the moment, so I am rushing home in the evening to find all the FAQ and a HOW-TOs that all the apache dummies like me can follow. Once I can write some PHP to talk to the SQL-DB, I will effectively have some live website content to publish and maybe have a live "TODO" page that shows people what bugs are being reported, fixed and what features are being added.

A great fan of the self-learnt-man, this exercise generally takes time.
Now all I need to work out is how to get this thing to print out edible choc eclaires.

How to add Search engine to FF

I wanted to do Google searches for a keyword + list of sites. Simple? Not really, so I will save myself the trouble of all the typing of something like:
DATASHEET NE555 site:datasheetcatalog.com
When all you want is NE555. Adding a new engine to the FF bar is simple, or you could spend 30 minutes to try finding a plug-in that does not do what you want.






Not scared of editing a bit of XML? Read on.

Find your firefox install folder, the default is C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins - you want the searchplugins sub-folder. Next make a copy of your fave engine file, I copied my google.xml file, and called the new one data.xml.
Open in a text-editor, and find the line:
<ShortName>Google</ShortName>
Give your 'engine' a name, (keep it short-ish) next go to the line:
<Description>Google Search</Description>
You can add a description, which I think gets used only in the properties to manage (add/remove) your engine. Next find the line:
<param name="q" value="{searchTerms}">
This is where the magic starts, and depends on which engine you copied, since other engines will not have a 'q' parameter for instance.

If you are lost now, use your engine to do a proper search, and then inspect the resulting location or URL to see which is the parameter is you actually want to modify.
To search only for datasheets I used this line
<Param name="q" value="DATASHEET {searchTerms}"/>
You could add a site or list of sites by adding the site:datasheetcatalog.com strings to your query.
The search-parameter tag might look a little strange to some of us who are new to XML, but you will notice the / slash in the closing, this is a space-saver telling an XML parser, that there is no 'closing' of this tag. If restarting FF does not give you a new engine, try double-click on your new file to open it in your browser, which should reveal what you broke.


Viola! (Fluit-fluit, my storie is uit.)

How to be del.icio.us

I figured out how to tag things with delicious yesterday, it's one of those social-bookmarking things, you start out by tagging sites that you would have bookmarked, to tag a site, you type in 1 romore keywords that may help you find it back. inityiallyI though, this is going to be totally huge effort, but it seems to work better than bookmarking for 2 reasons, it collects by date, so has cronology, and it graphically presents, so it has size. You can also add tags to a mark so that it sends the link to your buddies (or network), that is where the social angle comes in. delicious is also web-based, so your bookmarks are available anywhere.

So it's not evil, will probably not damage my karma, and I can probably drop my del.icio.us 'cloud' onto my blog page right here. (click on it to find my del.icio.us name)

Oh here is one awesome/hilarious Youtube series, primarily about vegetables to get you started - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYhuT5ksL4A&feature=dir .

Why youtube is evil
Ok not evil, just all consuming. I know Google own it now, and this blog-site. But this is a world of free speech, and youtube does that very well. Youtube is even better than TV, and TV is BAD, in a too-much-of-a-good-thing kind of way. It can eat away at your social life, and productivity. /RANT

Some children links

coppied from a posting on Pencaitland Primary Blog http://edubuzz.org/blogs/pencaitland
http://www.funwithspot.com/house.asp?locale=UK
http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/funandgames/
Numberjacks gameshttp://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/numberjacks/games/index.shtml
For Doctor Who fans there’s
Dr who e-books
Dr who music maker
CBBC Wild gameshttp://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/wild/games/
Art activitieshttp://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/art/activities/
http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artroom/

Blog taxonomy. the idea that some bloggers blog in one way only: Republishing, junk or research/creative. so this post falls into the first category, so what? Most of my posts fall into the junk category (personal posts of no real value) but what the heck. Heard some clever researcher fellow who loves little things that live in the ocean off antarctica. Invited to talk about global warning, I even got a question in about how bad it can become, his answer, serious! Another thing I got from this whle natural-history thing that he presented was how little accurate data we have about what life was like (temperature recordings, diet, methane, CO2 etc) was going back 1000s of years. The only "time-capsule" historians have of this stuff is things that got trapped or frozen into something. I rest my case, blogging may be boring, but so is molecules of methane trapped in ice 1Km down in antartica that was laid there 60000 years ago so that we can melt it and interpolate global conditions. Next topic is my diet LOL.