18 July 2024 | Computers, How Does it Work?, Spare Me! |
Well, here we go again…
A few years ago, Google announced FLoC, which I talked about here.
In short:
Led by Google, a group of businesses and advertisers is pushing a new standard that would have your browser identifying your particular group of interests by a unique ID number.
This number will be sent to all sites you visit. VOILA! No more 3rd party cookies, and supposedly more privacy!
Fast forward three years, and Mozilla is jumping on the bandwagon with their own such technology.
So, how do you turn it off?
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21 June 2022 | How Does it Work?, Programming, Video |
In recent news, a guy at Google claimed that one of their AIs, LaMDA, had become sentient.
Well, that’s quite a claim!
So, I decided to read the entire transcript of a chat with LaMDA and see what all the fuss is about.
Turns out, it’s not so simple…
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8 March 2022 | Computers, How to |
If you use Thunderbird to download e-mails from your Gmail account, it may stop working soon.
You may remember a similar thing happening not long ago. Google insisted that POP3 mail accounts were, “not secure enough”.
So, you had to go through a convoluted process on Google to enable “less secure” Tbird to play nicely with POP3 for Gmail.
Right. Now, Gmail will effectively shut off POP3 completely for Thunderbird users by May 30, 2022.
So, how do you fix it?
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19 May 2020 | Computers, Gizmos, Video |
For awhile now, we’ve been hearing rumors of anti-trust actions against the four main Big Tech companies.
Recently, the word is that actual charges will be brought starting in June of this year.
When you put all the recent stories together – along with some other interesting events involving Big Tech – it DOES look like something is finally about to happen.
But will any of it actually change anything?
It’s easy to be cynical, but I do see an opportunity here to make a difference…
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31 March 2020 | Gizmos, How Does it Work? |
A recent study about smart speakers revealed that they are, in a word, crap.
The study, entitled, WHEN SPEAKERS ARE ALL EARS: Understanding when smart speakers mistakenly record conversations, revealed that these smart gizmos are very often activated by words and phrases that have little to do with anything.
Of course, that means they are recording and sending audio clips when they really shouldn’t be.
Not to worry, though – we are reassured by the researchers that it’s no big deal!
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24 September 2019 | Gizmos, How Does it Work? |
Last week, I published a video entitled 4G Dumbphones: Get one with KaiOS!
In that vid, I talked about why KaiOS is a great OS to have on a 4G dumbphone.
Quite a few people asked various questions, like:
But hang on, isn’t that just a smartphone disguised as a dumbphone? But if it has Google, how is that different from an Android smartphone?
And so on.
So this week, I want to dig into some of the details of KaiOS and why it is NOT your daddy’s smartphone.
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2 July 2019 | How Does it Work?, Spare Me! |
Oh dear god, make it stop…
It’s time once again for The Great YouTube Algorithm Tweaking!
This time, that means even more nonsense, even fewer recommended videos that you actually want to watch, and just general chaos.
Of course, what most people are concerned about is the “curating” of content. Naturally, it’s a bit more complicated than that…
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19 March 2019 | How Does it Work?, Networking, Video |
Ah, the internet… It’s big. Really, really BIG.
We don’t often think about these things, but just how much storage space is needed for the internet to go?
What kind of power is needed to make Google googley?
How on earth does YouTube store and process all that crazy video data?
Join Cletus and me for a look at some fun facts and statistics about YouTube, Google, and the internet as a whole!
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27 November 2018 | Gizmos |
As regular readers/viewers know, I’m not a terribly big fan of smartphones.
For more info, see my video Why I ditched my smartphone.
In response to my musings, many people have said that they don’t think people buried in their smartphones all the time is causing any real harm.
After all, they argue, people used to just bury their noses in newspapers – right?
Well, yes… But no.
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30 October 2018 | Computers |
With Chrome version 69, Google was very naughty.
It was quite easy to miss this little tidbit, but it seems Google decided to make Chrome automatically log you in to Chrome itself if you used the browser to log in to any Google web service.
Before, you didn’t have to log in to Chrome itself in order to log in to Google services. With Chrome 69, that changed.
Fortunately, Google introduced the ability to turn off this annoying feature in Chrome 70.
While you’re at at, there are a few other browser “features” you may want to turn off…
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Well, here we go again…
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