google – addshore

The day Google (almost) lost my timeline data…

March 26, 2025March 25, 2025 by addshore

On the morning of 22nd March 2025 I received and read an email from Google giving me an “update” on my “Google Maps Timeline”, little did I know this was actually telling me they had just lost some of my data…

The email read…

We briefly experienced a technical issue that caused the deletion of Timeline data for some people. We’re reaching out as your account may have been impacted.
If you have encrypted backups enabled, you may be able to restore your data. Make sure that you have the latest version of Google Maps, then go to your Timeline. Tap the cloud icon near the top of your screen, and choose a backup to import your data. If you did not have backups turned on, unfortunately you will not be able to recover lost data.
We understand that this can be frustrating if you use Timeline to remember places that you’ve visited, and we are taking steps to improve our systems for the future.

I have heard of Google loosing data before (drive files and or photos disappearing and such), or making it inaccessible for people, and so far I’m glad to not have been affected, and have never really dived into these cases before to see if it has happened.

However, it was easy to see in a matter of minutes that ~10 years of location data was indeed gone from my phone… With data only showing from the 6th or 7th of March.

Hunting YouTube Crypto Scams

September 5, 2022 by addshore

Back in April 2022 I got annoyed by how prevalent cryptocurrency scams were still on YouTube years after I had first seen them. I spent a few minutes going through the scams that I easily found with a search for live streams including either “ETH” to “BTC” and reporting them via the YouTube flag / report system. Many hours later there were eventually taken down, but not before more scam live streams were already running to take their place.

Really I wanted (and still want) YouTube to do a better job… They have all of the information that should make shutting these down in the first seconds of them being live. But I figured I’d see how easy this would be to automate as a system using only the public APIs etc.

This post covers the initial prototype, followed by the scam-hunter web app which ran for some months before I sunset it last week. TLDR; lots of money was stolen while I was looking at these scam streams.

Example of the scam

When running, these streams are very easy to find by just searching for them (Live streams that mention “BTC” or “ETH”. You’ll either end up with streams displaying charts of the values compared with other crypto assets, or scam streams.

The scam streams take a variety of different forms, but not of them make use of pre-recorded videos of conversations with folks such as Elon Musk talking about cryptocurrencies, while also promoting a website such as MuskLiveNow.Tech (I made this one up) which claims to be running a giveaway event.

Screenshot of a crypto scan on YouTube from April 2022

Google outage article by The Express ‘This could be 9/11 of hacks’

December 19, 2020 by addshore

I’m here after a certain Google outage lead to at least 1 sensational headline misleading some people that contact me asking for an opinion. I was aware of the outage at the time as I was trying to use Google products. The article headline that I dive into below just made me laugh at the time and I had to dive into it a bit more.

On the 14th December 2020 Google had a pretty large outage for nearly an hour due to problems with their User ID service, which makes up part of their authentication infrastructure. The postmortem of the incident is up explaining exactly what happened, as well as a less technical blog post.

On the day, and following the incident, there was quite a bit of media coverage on the topic. One article by The Daily Express stood out to me really aimed to mislead with its headline: Google DOWN: ‘This could be 9/11 of hacks’ Security expert admits grave concerns.

2020 Election, Registered voters misinformation #voterfraud?

December 19, 2020November 13, 2020 by addshore

https://twitter.com/bitchy_richy97/status/1324064895940308993

On November 4th 2020 I managed to get an overview of exactly how misinformation and “fake news” can start so accidently, and spread so rapidly.

While scrolling through Twitter during the 2020 US Presidential election, I spotted some tweets saying that more people had voted in Wisconsin than were originally registered in the state. You can find a bunch of them using this twitter search.

After performing a quick Google search looking for some data I found a worldpopulationreview.com list of states by registered voter count for 2020 as the first result, interestingly with the same value as included in the tweet, 3,129,000. Looking into the “Sources” of the page helpfully listed by the author I couldn’t see data being referenced for 2020, only for 2018 and 2016. This page has the wrong title!

Some more research lead me to what appeared to be the first fact check article also confirming that the number being circulated appeared to be from 2018, not 2020.

Rather than leaving it there, for whatever reason I decided to get more involved, dig a little deeper, talk to some people on twitter and see what I could change as this misinformation continued to be spread.

Your own Wikidata Query Service, with no limits

August 25, 2023October 23, 2019 by addshore

This entry is part 1 of 3 in the series Your own Wikidata Query Service

The Wikidata Query Service allows anyone to use SPARQL to query the continuously evolving data contained within the Wikidata project, currently standing at nearly 65 millions data items (concepts) and over 7000 properties, which translates to roughly 8.4 billion triples.

Screenshot of the Wikidata Query Service home page including the example query which returns all Cats on Wikidata.

You can find a great write up introducing SPARQL, Wikidata, the query service and what it can do here. But this post will assume that you already know all of that.

EDIT 2022: You may also want to read https://addshore.com/2022/10/a-wikidata-query-service-jnl-file-for-public-use/

Guide

Here we will focus on creating a copy of the query service using data from one of the regular TTL data dumps and the query service docker image provided by the wikibase-docker git repo supported by WMDE.

Google Assistant & Wikipedia

June 9, 2019October 6, 2016 by addshore

The Google Assistant is essentially a chat bot that you can talk too within the new Allo chat app. The assistant is also baked into some new Google hardware, such as the pixel phones. During a quick test of the assistant, I noticed that if you ask it to “tell me an interesting fact” sometimes it will respond with facts from Wikipedia.

Add Exif data back to Facebook images

August 10, 2019September 4, 2016 by addshore

2019 Update: This script now exists with an easy to use GUI 2018 Update: I touched this script again in March 2019 moving it to Github and updating it with Docker support I start this post not by talking about Facebook, but about Google Photos. Google now offers unlimited ‘high resolution’ images within its service where … Read more

Wikidata references from Microdata

August 10, 2019December 29, 2015 by addshore

Recently some articles appeared on the English Wikipedia Signpost about Wikidata (1, 2, 3). Reading these articles, especially the second and third, pushed me to try to make a dent in the ‘problem’ of references on Wikidata. It turns out that this is actually not that hard!