Jack Yan: the Persuader Blog

Google doesn’t understand consent (or, more bots to block)

Jack Yan — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 04:04:25 +0000

Google has two bots which will ignore websites’ robots.txt files. In other words, to heck with consent. Like a rapist with ‘She was asking for it’ (credit to Kilroy for making the analogy), Google’s justification is ‘Because the fetch was requested by a user, these fetchers generally ignore robots.txt rules.’ As explained by Thomas Baekdal [...]

Google’s opt-out cookies still ignored, 15 years later

Jack Yan — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 10:40:47 +0000

There’s an excellent report in 404 Media by Matthew Gault with the headline, ‘Google, Microsoft, Meta all tracking you even when you opt out, according to an independent audit’. That audit was done by WebXray, which ran it on over 7,000 popular websites in California. ‘Google failed to let users opt out 87 percent of [...]

Up the national brand

Jack Yan — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 12:32:26 +0000

It’s always nice to get mentioned. I noticed one Mastodon account said that Lucire is ‘originally based in Aotearoa/NZ’. I welcomed their link to our Mastodon account, but had to add that we’re still HQed in Aotearoa, but that we have licensed editions internationally. There’s nothing in particular that says we’re foreign, but it’s something [...]

Too lazy to do anything but parrot the voices of the rich

Jack Yan — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 10:33:41 +0000

Well written words from Adriana Wilhelmina van Altvorst on Linkedin, powerfully summarizing in seven paragraphs one angle of the reports from the Royal Commission of Inquiry into COVID-19. Those who occupied Parliament in March 2022 claimed that they were a silent majority, but van Altvorst notes that 82 per cent of New Zealanders chose to [...]

Why would anyone work for Elon Musk for free?

Jack Yan — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 08:57:54 +0000

Robin Berjon has an excellent piece, penned at the end of 2025, on why it makes no sense for non-Nazis to be on whatever Twttr is called these days. Their notion that we need to be there to prevent the bastards from winning (which I heard from one leftie friend) doesn’t work in practice, argues [...]

Apologies to Viettel customers—and why is Harvard loading myriads of our images?

Jack Yan — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 10:30:36 +0000

While we’ve blocked obvious ASNs where we suspect evil might congregate—Google’s cloud service, for instance, and all of Microsoft excepting Bingbot—last week, we had to issue a block on the main Autocade website for all Viettel customers. This was with great regret, as I am sure there are legitimate people on Viettel who use Autocade. [...]

Family loses all their accounts and data on Google—debunked

Jack Yan — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 11:13:38 +0000

I’m not going to preach here, especially with how much this family is going through, their livelihoods threatened and a dissertation up in smoke, all because they had everything hooked up to Google, and the 14-year-old did something in front of Gemini Live. Google’s parental controls failed here, as they did not cover Gemini Live. [...]

Kagi’s “AI” assistant hits thousands of times

Jack Yan — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 01:32:39 +0000

If the Kagi Fetcher (kagi-fetcher) ‘is an AI Assistant operated by Kagi that fetches web content to answer user queries through Kagi AI, their suite of AI-powered tools including Assistant, Research, and other knowledge discovery features,’ then how come we see this traffic pattern caused by five Kagi Fetcher IP addresses, which are the five [...]

Happy 18th to Autocade

Jack Yan — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 09:35:02 +0000

Eighteen may be a lucky number in the Cantonese culture but it’s not an anniversary you typically remember, so Autocade’s passed earlier this month without fanfare. March 8, 2008 was when the first entries went up. The oldest I can trace on the Wayback Machine and on the site itself is the Renault Mégane II’s, [...]

You’ll wait a long time for Meta to remove fake content

Jack Yan — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 02:02:55 +0000

An ABC News (the Australian one) investigation has shown how good the deepfakes are, usually right-wing-supporting content to fool the public. Matt Martino shared this link on Linkedin, to a story he, Michael Workman, and Lucy Carter worked on. The video that went on Linkedin by way of demonstration was a deepfake that used an [...]