Hunting YouTube Crypto Scams
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 /…
Google outage article by The Express ‘This could be 9/11 of hacks’
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…
2020 Election, Registered voters misinformation #voterfraud?
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…
Your own Wikidata Query Service, with no limits
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. You can find a great write up introducing SPARQL, Wikidata, the query service and what…
Google Assistant & Wikipedia
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…
Add Exif data back to Facebook images
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…
Wikidata references from Microdata
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!