Category: Tech
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Spotify Stinks for Classical Music
Spotify may have popularized streaming music, but really doesn’t seem to work well for the entire genre of classical music.
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The Enshittification of…Everything
A few days ago I wrote about the enshittification of the music industry by apps like Spotify. But I neglected to mention what enshittification actually is. Enshittification is a term coined by writer Cory Doctorow in 2022 in this blog post titled “Social Quitting”, and expanded upon the idea in a blog post titled “Tiktok’s…
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Think Twice Before Downloading DeepSeek
If you’re at all into technology, you’ve been bombarded by the release of an incredible open-source AI chatbot by the company DeepSeek. The DeepSeek chatbot has (rightfully)put all the big American AI players (OpenAI, Google, Meta, Nvidia, etc.) on the back foot. The DeepSeek models (there are two primary models and six smaller ones) are…
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Ghost Artists – The Enshittification of the Music Business
This article in Harper’s Magazine about the phenomena of “ghost artists” capturing real attention (and taking real money) from already-underpaid artists is both fascinating and disheartening. The general idea of ghost artists is both depressing and fairly simple to understand: Spotify, the rumor had it, was filling its most popular playlists with stock music attributed…
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Car Privacy
With all the technology talk about AI over the past year, some of the weirdness in auto technology (and privacy) seems to have fallen by the wayside. Mercedes First, this Mercedes ad essentially brags about how much a father can learn about his daughter only from her car. While these features are marketed as “helpful”…
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Free Apps and Data Breaches
I’ve talked about the danger of “free” apps before. In short, while there are free apps that are great (primarily open-source software), most free apps are only free because the monetize their users in non-obvious ways. Often times this means having an ad platform (or multiple ad platforms) integrated into the app. Often times the…
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The Honey Browser Extension
The Honey browser extension – which offers to find you coupon codes for online retailers – is being accused of a massive scam that both fails to find the deals it promises for its users and hijacks affiliate revenue from online creators that depend on that revenue to support their content channels. A years-long investigation…
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Bing Now Trying to Trick Users
In what is surely going to be a short-lived “experiment”, Microsoft’s search engine Bing now tries to “disguise” itself as Google when users enter Google-related search terms within Bing. From The Verge: If you use Bing right now without signing into a Microsoft account and search for Google, you’ll get a page that looks an…
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Finale’s Unforseen Farewell
With Finale’s sudden and disruptive departure, there’s a big hole left in the music notation software sector. However, there are lessons to be learned for the next surprise shutdown.
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Locked Out of WordPress Dashboard – Database Editing Not Working
I have been doing some extensive work with client sites (and my own) that involve moving sites across the internet. Now, moving a standard site consisting of simple files is relatively easy. Simply copying and pasting the directory (and then adjusting any DNS settings) is all that is required to get these up an running.…