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Tag: social networking

  • Image representing post: Hackers Simply Asked Meta AI to Give Them Access to High-Profile Instagram Accounts. It Worked

    Hackers Simply Asked Meta AI to Give Them Access to High-Profile Instagram Accounts. It Worked

    Meta decided to replace a lot of their tech support with a chatbot. Which meant giving that chatbot the power to manipulate data. Which meant, to the surprise of nobody whatsoever, that hackers tricked the chatbot into giving them access to other people's accounts.

    Read more (176 words)

    • Repost
    • of this original
    • posted 2 June, 2026
  • Framegrab from The Matrix. In the foreground is the silhouette of Morpheus, who is about to be interrogated by Agent Smith, a man in a suit at the windowed far end of an office.

    rejecting convenience

    RNottΓ© shares a manifesto to seek out inconvenience in order to seek greater human connection and authentic experiences. And you know what their post reminds me of? The Matrix!

    Read more - about 3 minutes (561 words)

    • Repost
    • of this original
    • 1 comment
    • posted 30 April, 2026
  • Mastodon status 'Walking to class, eating a cheese sandwich' with a map showing a route to a University campus with a walking route indicated, and a flag about three quarters of the way along labelled 'Eating a quarter of a cheese sandwich'.

    Food divided by Distance

    In the kind of dream that only happens when I'm ill, I invented an app that would track both your location and your food consumption, and report to social media your journey progress as a proportion of your remaining meal.

    Read more (434 words)

    • Article
    • posted 25 March, 2026
  • I've had my itch.io account for about six years; I think I first created it to buy a copy of We Are But Worms: A One Word RPG. I've since made several purchases, donations, reviews, and comments, but never really used my account as a "creator".

    I changed that today when I realised that there was nothing to stop me re-publishing games like DNDle and Axe Feather 2021 via my itch.io profile as well as on their current homes (and on GitHub, I suppose). For some folks, itch.io's discovery features might be the best way for them to discover worthwhile content weird stuff like this.

    I might republish some other "things" I've made on itch.io too. It's not like there haven't been lots of them over the years!

    • Note
    • posted 5 February, 2026
  • Screenshot from Pornhub showing Dan Q's profile (0 subscribers, 1,000,000,000 videos watched)'s 'all achievements' page, listing all available achievements.

    Gamified... Pornography?

    When the Online Safety Act came into effect, I considered writing a blog post investigating exactly how difficult it made it to access Pornhub. But it turned out to be boringly easy (it's not NOW, of course!), so I didn't. So here's a different discovery I made about the site...

    Read more - about 7 minutes (1543 words)

    • Article
    • 2 comments
    • posted 4 February, 2026
  • Obviously I wasn't planning on going to the US anytime soon, but if I did... they might struggle with my visa application when I put every "email address I've used for the last 10 years" on, because I actively use a variety of catch-all domains/subdomains.

    I've probably missed some addresses (e.g. to which I've only ever received spam that's since been deleted), but a conservative estimate of the number of personal email addresses which I've sent mail from or to would be... 7,669 email addresses. 🀣

    • Note
    • 3 comments
    • posted 12 December, 2025
  • Galaxy Quest: Tawny Madison says "Gosh, I'm doing it. I'm repeating the damn computer."

    We Need to Talk About Botsplaining

    In a wonderful blog post from last month, Stephanie describes the scourge of Botsplaining. Here's my experience of it.

    Read more - about 3 minutes (577 words)

    • Repost
    • of this original
    • 3 comments
    • posted 14 November, 2025
  • Two modes of Internet use

    Tracy Durnell keeps her online- and offline- friends separate, and describes some solid reasons to do so. I appreciate her thoughts, even where I don't want to apply her conclusions to my own life.

    Read more (450 words)

    • Repost
    • of this original
    • 2 comments
    • posted 11 November, 2025
  • I got kicked off LinkedIn this week. Apparently there was "suspicious behaviour" on my account. To get back in, I needed to go through Persona's digital ID check (this, despite the fact that I've got a Persona-powered verification on my LinkedIn, less than six months old).

    After looping around many times identifying which way up a picture of a dog was and repeatedly photographing myself, my passport, and my driving license, I eventually got back in. Personally, I suspect they just rolled out some Online Safety Act functionality and it immediately tripped over my unusual name.

    But let this be a reminder to anybody who (unlike me) depends upon their account in a social network: it can be taken away in a moment and be laborious (or impossible) to get back. If you care about your online presence, you should own your own domain name; simple as that!

    • Note
    • posted 25 July, 2025
  • Screenshot showing a text field for an address, in which has been entered '2 Other Street, Somewherevilla, SO4 4ME'. An invalid phone number beginning 07803 can be seen below it.

    Doxxing an Imaginary Person?

    This morning, Google pulled a video from YouTube belonging to my nonprofit Three Rings. This was a bit of a surprise.
    Apparently the video - which is a demo of some Three Rings features - apparently fell foul of Google's anti-doxxing rules. I'm glad that they have anti-doxxing rules, of course. But in this case, the person we 'doxxed' lives on Some Street, Somewhereville. Which I'd like to imagine is clearly a made-up address, but maybe not!

    Read more (114 words)

    • Note
    • posted 9 July, 2025
  • Sometimes LinkedIn's approach to anonymising who looks you up isn't very effective.

    Full image of 'Anonymised' LinkedIn notification advising that 1 hour ago, 'Founder at WordPress viewed your profile'.
    Alt

    'Anonymised' LinkedIn notification advising that 1 hour ago, 'Founder at WordPress viewed your profile'.

    I wonder who that could be? πŸ˜‚

    • Note
    • posted 1 July, 2025
  • Framegrab from video showing a Nespresso machine making coffee, with the subtitle 'six shots of this caffeinated brown tea'.

    Get Ready with Me: Techfluencer Edition

    WordPress.com's YouTube channel just shared an influencer 'get ready with me'-style video but featuring a techfluencer. It's... weird? But funny?

    Read more (152 words)

    • Repost
    • of this original
    • posted 19 February, 2025
  • Large companies find HTML & CSS frustrating β€œat scale” because the web is a fundamentally anti-capitalist mashup art experiment, designed to give consumers all the power.
    - Mia, 2019

    This is what I needed to be reminded, today.

    Read more (114 words)

    • Repost
    • of this original
    • posted 17 February, 2025
  • Bluesky and enshittification

    Cory Doctorow's post this week about how Bluesky's model isn't (yet) immune to enshittification matches my reasoning for not using it, too. But also points out a hypocrisy in my own behaviour for so-far failing to apply a "Ulysses Pact" model to Three Rings.

    Read more (457 words)

    • Repost
    • of this original
    • posted 3 November, 2024
  • A white-and-brown bulldog lies flat, his tongue sticking out, on a rug.

    [Bloganuary] Paws to Hear my Scents-ible Idea

    Social networking plus scent analysis/synthesis provides for the possibility of... social networking for dogs. As definitely-not-seen on Dragon's Den.

    Read more (417 words)

    • Article
    • posted 11 January, 2024

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