Of all the sites on the internet, this is one.
This is disturbingly catchy, and almost certainly the most enjoyment I’ve ever gotten out of Pam Bondi talking. I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before I catch myself yelling “The Dow! during some housework or other.
Here are highlights (in the loosest sense of the word) of the meltdown in question should you wish to subject yourself to it.
Hi there. It’s me, the weirdo who keeps disappearing. I have all sorts of ideas, but either my brain goes zap or time disappears. So I figured I’d start with something silly.
When Steve posted about the weird freedom.gov website, he mentioned the song “Ocean Front Property”. This made me think of some confused small kid logic I had. And it made me think about how little geography I understood.
The first time I heard that song, it was on the radio. I think I might have been slowly waking up when I heard it. But I was trying to understand the words. By the time it was done, I was very confused. “What is the point of this song, anyway?” I thought to myself. “This guy’s a selfish, mean jerk, and he randomly wants to talk about real estate? Why do we care?” It didn’t help that where it says “If you’ll buy that,” I thought it said “I’m not ruled by that.” So I thought the verses and the choruses were two separate thoughts.
This is the part where grown up me wants to laugh and laugh and laugh, because at this point, kid me had no idea where Arizona was, so I had no idea how sarcastic the song was being. I also had never heard the expression “I have a bridge I can sell you.” I don’t think I ever asked anybody, because I don’t remember peals of laughter, so that’s a good thing. But I will always remember just how confused I was that morning.
This is just silly.
The Trump administration, the same one that strongarms talk shows off the air because it doesn’t like being made fun of and shakes down media companies for not praising it enough is apparently so concerned about free speech around the world that it’s reportedly launching a new website to help foreigners view content banned by their governments.
It’s pretty clear what the game is here. Rather than a sincere effort to promote democracy and freedom of expression worldwide, it’s more of the conservative voices are being suppressed nonsense that these MAGA types are famous for. The main target seems to be anti hate speech laws in Europe, which should tell you everything you need to know.
The U.S. State Department is developing an online portal that will enable people in Europe and elsewhere to see content banned by their governments including alleged hate speech and terrorist propaganda, a move Washington views as a way to counter censorship, three sources familiar with the plan said.
The site will be hosted at “freedom.gov,” the sources said. One source said officials had discussed including a virtual private network function to make a user’s traffic appear to originate in the U.S. and added that user activity on the site will not be tracked.
Let us stop right here and join together in a rousing chorus of “Ocean Front Property”, because I ain’t buying that. Trusting a government not to track you is a bit like trusting the dingoes with your baby.
If you do need a VPN, start here.
The Trump administration has made free speech, particularly what it sees as the stifling of conservative voices online, a focus of its foreign policy including in Europe and in Brazil.
Europe’s approach to free speech differs from the U.S., where the Constitution protects virtually all expression. The European Union’s limits grew from efforts to fight any resurgence of extremist propaganda that fueled Nazism including its vilification of Jews, foreigners and minorities.
There’s certainly an argument that can be made about how those laws work and whether or not parts of them are overbroad, but when you get so butthurt by negative press that you investigate “The View”, you don’t get to make it.
I went back and forth about whether or not I should bother posting this, but then it occurred to me that it’ll probably be the only time I’d ever be able to use this song for something. Carin will be so happy!
A 60-year-old man was charged after allegedly using a frozen fish as a weapon during an altercation at a Warren fish counter, according to officials.
The incident took place on April 2, at Desi Fruit Market on Nine Mile in Warren. Around 7:15 p.m., police say the suspect, MD Jobul Hussain, became angry with a store clerk after being told the fish counter closed at 7 p.m. due to Ramadan.
“The suspect then allegedly assaulted the clerk on the head with a four-pound frozen hilsa fish,” Macomb County Prosecutor Peter Lucido said in a news release. “The hilsa fish is a kind of herring.”
Contrary to what’s written here, the victim was not on the toilet when he was hit. He was, however, transported to a local hospital for a looking over afterwards.
And I’ll leave you with this, because I think it’s a reminder we could all use sometimes.
“I never thought I’d have to say this, but if you assault someone with a fish in our county you will be prosecuted,” Lucido said. “A frozen fish is dangerous if you use it to hit someone on the head.”
Raise your hand if you didn’t see this coming. Anybody? No one? Ok.
Both The Washington Post and Digital Trends have spotted instances of scam support numbers showing up in Google AI Overviews, reports of which appeared on Facebook and Reddit respectively. Credit unions and banks are also warning their customers about these scams.
Here’s what happens: the unfortunate victim Googles a company name looking for a contact number, then calls the number thrown up by AI. This doesn’t actually lead to the company in question, but rather to someone pretending to be that company, who then tries to take payment information or other sensitive details from the caller.
It’s not clear exactly how these fake numbers are being planted, but the best guess is that they’re being published in multiple low-profile places online, alongside the names of major companies. AI Overviews then comes along and scoops them up, without running the proper checks to verify the information.
The planting of misleading phone numbers by bad actors is not a completely new danger of course; misinformation has been a part of the web for a long, long time. But the design of AI Overviews, which picks out information from the web and presents it as fact rather than encouraging you to do the research yourself, is making people much more susceptible to this kind of con.Of course, it’s not just happening on Google Search. Security researchers have shown how malicious text can be hidden in emails – and presumably documents as well – which is then scraped and summarised by the AI, and served up to the user who takes it as accurate and authentic. The issue is also showing up in other AI search engines.
Who in god’s name are these people having their emails summarized by AI? That sounds awful. Pretty much every AI summary I’ve ever seen is so useless that I just read the original thing anyway. And while we’re on that subject, I have a question for the newspapers in the crowd. If your automatically generated AI summaries are carefully checked for accuracy by human editors, what is even the point? Just write a decent headline and call it a night. It isn’t saving the workers any time or adding anything of value to the reader experience.
But back to our original point.
If you don’t want to be defrauded by AI (and why would you) what’s the best way to avoid it? If you said just go to the company’s website and get the contact info like a normal person, step forward and collect your prize. You can also call our special prize claiming hotline at 1-800-247-8257. That’s 1-800-AISucks. It’s totally safe, and you can take that to the bank if your account hasn’t been compromised.
If you’re looking for a contact phone number or something similar, run a search for the company you’re trying to get in touch with, then use the details on the company’s own website: it may be an extra click or two, but it’s worth it to make sure you’re dealing with correct contact information.
Caution is still required wherever you get your information from, though, especially when it comes to dealing with customer service representatives and discussing anything to do with payments or personal information. Ideally, you want to verify any number you call with a second Google search for it.
Google recommends this as well. The company says it has recently launched a number of updates to further improve scam protections for AI Overviews specifically, but it still encourages people to double-check phone numbers by performing additional searches.
Progress, everybody!
I’m going to cut this lady a little slack because she’s 86, but if the rest of you fall for this I may arrange to have you destroyed.
Police are searching for a suspect after an 86-year-old Guelph woman was scammed out of $5,900 by a person claiming to be a bank investigator.
Guelph police said the woman reported the scam Friday, saying she had received a call from someone claiming to be with her bank, and her cards had fraudulently been used in Alberta.
The person arranged to have the woman hand over her debit and credit cards so they could be destroyed.Police said on Thursday, at about 5 p.m., a man came to her home and was given an envelope with the cards inside. The cards were then used to make a number of purchases and withdrawals.
The standard advice applies here, of course. When you get a call like this, the only action you should take is to hang up and contact your bank directly to confirm whether or not there’s anything actually wrong with your accounts. But if somehow we’ve gone beyond that point, allow me to offer a little extra. Take a breath and ask yourself two questions.
Yes, scams are getting more complex. But the human brain is also rather sophisticated, and in many cases it can still be used to thwart them. Please, use yours.
Mystery bot traffic from China floods websites, puzzling cybersecurity experts
This has been happening to us on and off for months. Like the article says, it doesn’t seem to be malicious. None of our security systems has flagged anything, which I’m fairly certain would have happened by now were there anything to flag. It’s just giant traffic spikes that are almost certainly Chinese and most definitely not human. No human could possibly view the number of pages these things do in as little time as they do it, nor would he be as interested in things like the manage your subscription pages in the comment threads that the bots seem to love. Whatever they are, they’re clearly indexing something.
The worst thing I can say about them is that I’ve got a pretty good feeling that they’re the reason why the site has been getting slow at times. We’re hosted on shared servers. I don’t know how many people hang out here with us, but I’m willing to bet that some or all of them are experiencing the same thing. Enough of this going on simultaneously is bound to drag things down some.
They mess with our stats too, but that isn’t really one of those things we need to care about beyond a surface level. We don’t sell our own ads, and the closest we get to a content strategy around here is I feel like typing right now followed by typing. Any regional targeting we do is a combination of where we’re from being our main frame of reference and the location of whatever we happen to find ourselves interested in at the moment.
Google Analytics showed that these users stayed on the webpage for an average of 0 seconds and did not scroll or click at all. That’s when Quintero realised his website was being visited by an army of bots.
Quintero was not the only one whose website was being flooded by Asian bots.
Wired reported that several websites, such as an Indian lifestyle magazine, a blog about a small island near Canada, a weather-forecast platform, Shopify’s ecommerce shops, and even US government websites, were being similarly flooded by bot traffic.
For example, over the past 90 days, 14.7 per cent of visitors to US government websites were from China’s Lanzhou and 6.6 percent were from Singapore, according to Wired.And no one has an explanation for what’s going on.
To be sure, no one has alleged any wrongdoing as these bots have not been linked to any cyberattacks or other nefarious activities.
But the mystery surrounding their purpose —and the people behind them— has led to unease among web managers and observers.
Odd little aside: Watching these things hit scads of dusty old webpages has made it into my dreams.
the other night I dreamt that I was looking at stats and came upon a section of the blog that I didn’t remember at all. Carin had gotten a guide dog named James between Tansy and Domino, and had been writing rather extensively about him. He even went missing at one point!
But it wasn’t just these posts I didn’t remember. I had no recollection of James being in our lives, no matter how hard I tried. It didn’t help that the timeline made no sense. He was supposedly here during the pandemic, but a lot of the stories about him involved people and places from our time in Guelph, where we haven’t lived for over 13 years.
I was worried, of course. Why can’t I remember this? What’s going to happen if Carin starts telling a James story? I certainly can’t admit I don’t remember him or she’ll have me on the express train to the memory care wing. But I can’t fake my way through it, either. She’s not that dumb. Who should I ask instead? The person who helped find him that time is sadly no longer here, and anyone else is just going to end up telling Carin and then I’m right back where I started.
Thankfully I eventually came to enough to realize that this wasn’t real, but just in case, I did sack up and ask Carin later on when we were both awake. We had a good laugh, which was a relief. But I am still a bit worried whenever I hear a train whistle…
You ever hear about something and all at once think “I sure am curious how that would taste” and “I do not want that thing in the same city as my mouth”? This is one of those moments for me.
If you assumed the developers would’ve taken inspiration from fruity classics like Trix and Froot Loops, think again. Tropicana Crunch comprises honey-flavored clusters of oats and almond slices. Almond and orange aren’t incompatible flavors: They’re sometimes mixed in cakes, among other things. Nor are honey and orange, which can be found in recipes for everything from beverages to chicken to carrots.
Oats and orange juice, on the other hand, aren’t exactly the most intuitive combo—but the decision was all about durability. As a Tropicana spokesperson told Food & Wine, granola doesn’t get soggy when exposed to OJ’s acidity nearly as rapidly as something like corn flakes would. And for what it’s worth, the company itself is quick to admit that this experiment may not be a smashing success. “The first cereal made for OJ (and maybe the last),” the Tropicana Crunch website proclaims.
According to Kellogg, dumping orange juice on their cereal is something that a not insignificant minority of people were already doing. Twenty percent of respondents to a survey they conducted on the subject of cereal eating habits back in 2015 said they did it, if you can believe that. About half of the 2000 participants were college kids though, so my guess is a lot of those people were either hung over at the time and mixed up the cartons or trying to win a bet.
The only Oshawa Generals fan I know I know for sure is Matt, whose Tall Can Audio podcast you should make some time to check out if you haven’t. It’s almost always a solid listen if you like some combination of sports, beer, music, wrestling or media, which I assume you must since you’re here. And yes, I’d say that even if he wasn’t who he is.
It’s been a long time since Matt and I have been in the same room. Time and distance will do that. But we used to see quite a bit of each other, and as best I can remember from those times, he always smelled just fine. A fact which puts him a level above your average Generals spectator, apparently.
This week, the team sent and then promptly apologized for a letter to fans reminding them to acquaint themselves with a touch of soap before heading out on the town.
Earlier this week, the Ontario Hockey League club sent an email to season ticket holders asking them to shower.
“I got a lot of people complaining about the (person) next to them smelling like cat pee, bad breath, this, that and everything else,” Generals director of ticket sales and service Jason Hickman told reporter Tim Kelly at Oshawa This Week.In response, the Gens sent a generic email that encouraged fans for their co-operation “with a few simple hygiene practices.”
Among them was a push to cheer from home for those feeling ill. Another suggestion was to hop in the shower “if you went to the gym or did something that produced body odour.”
I feel bad for this guy, and I’m not sure what I would have done differently in his position. If you’re getting the odd complaint here and there, you can likely brush that off. But if you’ve reached the point where your best customers are regularly bringing up to you that others in their section have them wanting to bring up regularly, you have to do something. If it isn’t an open letter, what is it? Signs at the building? Selling your naming rights to Irish Spring?
Nobody likes being told they smell. I get it. But nobody likes being subjected to it, either. Sometimes you just need to have the talk, and I think this was the best way to have had it. Unless the thing began “Dear Dave, section B, row O, seat 39,” nobody should be taking anything personally. It’s just a reminder about common courtesy. And at least this way, if you do need to take it personally, you can do that in private rather than being centred out by security in front of a few thousand others.
Carin for sure and probably me at some point have described what passes for our Valentine’s Day tradition, so I won’t go over it again. But what I will say is that I feel very lucky whenever jokes like these come around, because sometimes they ain’t jokes, my guys. Pay attention, and good luck.
Speaking of Carin, she suggested I include this song as well. Chances are it’s as close as she’s getting to a present this weekend, so here ya go, little dude.
We should be in for a fun Valentine’s Day this year. We haven’t figured out who’s subsidizing the food yet, but we’ll be seeing Gowan for cheap, so that’ll be nice. We’ve seen him once before, but it was in a club setting rather than a theatre, so I imagine this will be a bit of a different experience.