So how do conspiracy theories start and how does the internet and major search engine players contribute to them? As I type this, depending on where you are in the world, if you type "assassination attempt" in your search engine, and in particular one associated with Alphabet, the autofill options will have everything except "Trump" in the result set. You can get Kennedy, Hitler, Putin and George Wallace, but not the most prominent one so far this year that was one of those "where were you when you heard" events that some people saw in real time on their TV. The reason Alphabet offered for not giving the result was something along the lines that their policy is not to show political violence. You can of course find a plethora of political violence videos and examples from their search results, just not for this particular instance. Another example if you type "President Donald", the autofill adds Duck and Reagan but not Trump. Or if you Google Donald Trump you get a bunch of Kamala Harris results.
- When someone sees this, expecting to see a result not shown, the natural follow-up question is, why? Why is this search result being filtered out? Why hide something that most people have either seen or heard about? Why am I getting results with no relation to my search terms? Then comes, who is behind this? At the very least you start to question if current search engines can be trusted, but then I have pointed that out in previous articles. I leave it to readers to fill in the blanks to those questions, but at the very least the major search engines would appear to be filtering their results and you can decide how much to trust them. On that note I'd also point out that many of the self-proclaimed fact checkers are barely out of their teens with little or no real-world experience.
- The other thing occurring on the major platforms, especially in the US, is the banning of conservative voices in the run-up to the US election. YouTube, Google and all others under the Alphabet umbrella are for the smallest of reasons banning a number of names. The days of social media and media platforms being fair and balanced are long gone. Some are referring to this as election interference, but there are alternative platforms like Rumble now where people can still catch up with both sides of the analysis. On Rumble, however, why is it that they don't remember where you got up to in a video?
- About 50 years ago the early operation system CP/M (Control Program for Microcomputers) started appearing on hardware. It was the first cross-platform operating system and it triggered the growth of both hardware and software capabilities. It was written in his spare time by Dr Gary Kildall, who had a side job moonlighting for a start-up called Intel who were working on their 8-bit 8008 CPU at the time. He was also working on PL/M (Programming Language for Microprocessors) which he prototyped on a PDP 10. If you have the time, take a look at all the other things he built and contributed to, such as the first Basic I/O System (BIOS) that was based around the components of CP/M. Sadly, he was too slow to adapt to the 16-bit 8086 from Intel and they went with a version of QDOS that Microsoft licensed and called MS-DOS.
- I've been using the Duolingo Android app for over 160 days now trying, to pick up some of the Chinese language. I'm finding it is not a very good learning tool. The examples where you repeat back the phrase or construct the English equivalent is said at such a fast pace, and you can't slow it down, so I'm finding it impossible to pick out the individual words. The one speed fits all approach is a poor training tool. I'm going to look for a better alternative.
- On my VPN problem after getting an internet speed upgrade, my long-term product StrongVPN could not solve the problem. In the end I've gone with NordVPN because it can handle the new connection and also provides an interesting feature where you can split your apps between those using the VPN and the rest going over the normal channel. My only criticism so far is their billing process. After payment via PayPal, on being redirected back to their site it didn't work. The payment went through but since you set up your account with them after paying, I was left with contacting them for the next steps. For the first time ever, I was asked to prove my payment, something their accounting department should have been able to instantly. In the end they could not work it out and I had to reverse the payment and start the whole process over again. Sometimes I feel I'm back in the 1990s.
James Hein is an IT professional with over 30 years' standing. You can contact him at jclhein@gmail.com.
