Rick's b.log - entry 2025/12/24

MAGA on the march

It basically boiled down to a lot of screaming about "freedom" and "left lib-tards".

So, of course, I had something to say:

It amuses me how they have the army on the streets, banned books, a growing lack of body autonomy, and employers outright hostile to the idea of unionisation...and yet they talk about "freedom" like they think they have it.

America does not have freedom and its citizens are not free. What America has is a ridiculous amount of propaganda that tells them that they are, promoted by some rather odious people who buckle down on freedom of speech because without that crutch to hang on to their words may well contravene numerous laws (false accusation, hate crime, antisemitism, to name a few). You should not be exonerated from consequences just by yelling "free speech!" and you must understand that other countries will have different standards as to what is and isn't permissible.

If nothing else, this is certainly helping to highlight the dangers of our dependence on tech solutions provided by a foreign power that used to be friendly but is now acting more and more hostile and erratic.
I, personally, feel that the EU needs to get up off it's arse and start looking seriously at the amount of personal data held by US based companies that are subject to the whims of the American administration even if that data is held in other sovereign nations (as Microsoft recently had to admit in a French court - that they would willingly break EU laws because the consequences would be far less severe than refusing Uncle Sam).
The EU also needs to set up and fund a serious plan for data sovereignty. What American cloud services are people using? Why? And when can the EU offer something similar that is entirely hosted and controlled in Germany, France, Sweden... whatever? And if not, then why not? Proper serious responses, not paper shuffling and hoping that we all only need to make it though another two and a bit years of this nonsense.

International supply chains? Good, useful. Trade works in both directions and as long as one side isn't abusive then it opens up the world.
Dependence upon international technology solutions to make your companies run? Bad, very bad. Let's just say France's CNIL got upset about Microsoft making EU-hosted data available to Americans (despite their GDPR policy stating otherwise) and fined Microsoft a billion euros... and the Trump administration responded to that by ordering Microsoft to pull the plug on the entire EU.
Exactly how many businesses do you think would crash and burn? How many use Office, have all of their information "in the cloud", and utterly depend upon all this stuff just working?
This point may be why the EU is watering down its plans - especially with AI regulation - so as not to antagonise the American administration too much. Because they are aware that so much stuff is tangled up in this way.
If the EU wants to have a purpose, then their purpose should be this: EU data for EU citizens in the EU. No bullshit, no subterfuge, no Schrems VII, VIII, IX... just a solid, responsible, plan to provide hosting solutions managed and funded by the EU (so some multibillionaire doesn't buy it to undo all of the plans) to wean everybody off of what we're currently using.
And Ursula von der Leyen needs to shut up blathering about AI. There is, effectively, NO EU-specific tech company that can match anything American that people use. Name the EU Twitter. Name the EU Facebook. Name the EU Google. Name the EU Microsoft Office. Name the EU AWS.
There are companies that can offer possibilities, like OVH. But none of the tech things that most people and companies use on a daily basis are EU home-grown. This, Ursula, is where the EU should be concentrating its effort. Let the AI bubble burst, preferably before you've wasted a hundred and fifty billion, and instead invest in the sorts of things that real people really need. And, trust me when I say, "LLMs" is not something anybody really needs. It's simply a technological arms race that you have already lost because you don't have the infrastructure to support it.

AI being AI

Only, DuckDuckGo's AI for "how many ants per human" gave me this joyous response.

So, two and a half million....or twenty...?

Not only that, but it is utterly and completely and demonstrably wrong.

Twenty quadrillion is a twenty followed by fifteen zeroes. That is to say: 20,000,000,000,000,000.
The population of the earth is nearly eight billion people. We'll call it eight billion to make the maths simpler. It is: 8,000,000,000.

And... 20,000,000,000,000,000 ÷ 8,000,000,000 = 2,500,000
Oh, look, it's the two and a half million that I started this with.

Even if you use the antiquated long scale definition of a billion that nobody uses any more...
20,000,000,000,000,000 ÷ 8,000,000,000,000 = 2,500

Either way, there is no sensible way to arrive at a result of twenty.

This, my friends, is part of the reason why we shouldn't be putting all of our eggs into the "AI is amazing" basket. Not only can it be wrong, since there is nothing that even remotely resembles "intelligence" by any useful measure, it won't know it is wrong. In fact, it will be quite confident in its wrongness even when one sentence directly contradicts the other.

I have provided feedback to DuckDuckGo about this, but for now if you want your AI search assistant to tell you something useful, you will need to provide the search input "how many ants per human, and the answer is NOT twenty". ☺

HOLIDAY!

I have no plans other than these two:

On the 29^th I am driving over to Bain to get my car seen to. Nothing wrong, just the habitual 5,000km service. I just wish I didn't have to do it in the cold, because it is forecast to be anywhere from 10°C to -1°C (because the weather is a bit nuts) and in the cold the battery isn't so good.
I hope it's my habitual mechanic. The last time he offered to loan me a car so I could go shopping. I'd take him up on it this time, in order that I don't have to drive all the way home in the dark. I picked the afternoon (2pm) appointment. I would have much rather gone for a morning one, but - like I said - the battery behaviour tails off rapidly as we get to freezing, and it's quite a long way. At least by afternoon there should be a smidgen of warmth.

And I shall be eating well because it is getting hard to slide out the compartments in the freezer. How do these two things relate to each other? It's because I am eating stuff in the freezer to go through what's in there. Then, maybe on the 26^th or 27^th I can put what's left into the coolbox with some ice bricks, chuck out or eat what remains, and then unplug the thing to defrost it.
The last time I did a full defrost was the 18^th of February when the power was off for a chunk of the day (in order to switch over how it was being supplied).
It looks like manual freezers (that is, ones that don't have automatic defrosting) should be done every 6-12 months, and at least annually. So there's nothing unusual about this.

Then, once that is done, I'll need to rinse and repeat with the fridge. Because the chilled compartment (fake freezer) in the fridge is a real demon for icing up. The ice in there is several inches thick on the left and is almost meeting in the middle. I know I shouldn't let it get that bad, but if I was to defrost it properly I'd be doing the stupid thing monthly...
Due to the design of the fridge, it also takes a lot longer than the freezer.

Beyond that, no plans really.

Chasing spam

I fired off a GDPR request, and they confirmed that my email was going to be blacklisted and it would take effect within 24 hours - during which time two more spams arrived.

Interestingly, they said:

Please note that The Value Factory acts solely as a data processor, managing email deliveries on behalf of the data controller who originally collected your data and obtained your consent.
For any further information or to exercise your data rights, please contact the data controller, whose details can be found in the privacy policy of the website where you registered. The information of the data controller and the privacy policy can also be found in the links located in the footer of all our campaign emails.

So, okay, let's look at the footer of an email. This is from the first, a Blissful Finds on behalf of Pharmacy2U:

This email is third party marketing communications sent on behalf of Pharmacy2U and does not imply that Pharmacy2U hold your details. Promotional emails are managed by third-party publishers and sent under their control to subscribers who have given their consent to receive marketing messages. For the sender's details and/or their general unsubscribe link, please see below. If you do not wish to receive third-party promotional emails sent on behalf of Pharmacy2U please unsubscribe here.

You have subscribed with your e-mail address [redacted]. You are receiving this e-mail because you have given permission to receive commercial communications to one of our PARTNERS according to applicable data protection laws. You can read the data controller's privacy policy here. The email is sent by Thevaluefactory S.L, Pg. de Sant Joan 6, Pral. 1º, 08010, BARCELONA. As Data Processor. If you do not want to receive further commercial communication anymore, click here to unsubscribe. The unsubscribing process will be done within a period of 24/48 hours. You may also contact us at privacy@thevaluefactory[.]es.

In short, it seems everybody likes to refer to "a partner" but this isn't actually disclosed.

Usefully, however, the response to my GDPR request resulted in the following:

The information we have on file for your registration is as follows:
— Email: [redacted]
— IP address: 134.151.224.90
— Source: https://www.subscribepage.com/propositions_copy2
— Date/time: 2025-10-17 17:04:00

That IP address resolved back to Aston University in Birmingham, UK. I put together everything I had and forwarded it as a complaint to them. Whether or not they'll do anything, I don't know. But it seems to me that either one of their machines has been compromised and is trawling for info to sign people up for spam, or somebody did it intentionally. Either way, if that IP address genuinely is them (and several IP lookups say it is), then it's not a good look for them.

Following up on the URL given, it appears to be UnicornLeads from Chambéry, using Hyperion Solutions SL in Madrid to send the junkmail, and it is all hosted by MailerLite Limited in Dublin. Reading through UnicornLeads' privacy policy, I can request to be deleted by contacting [redacted-at]purprestige.com. Pur Prestige offers a "Copywriting Ebook" which appears to simply redirect people to a Spanish language version of the document on subscribepage, so I think the whole thing is a big pile of bull in order to harvest people's email addresses by promising them something for free.

But I know for certain that I didn't fall for it as I've not been to the UK in nearly a quarter of a century, and I have never been to Birmingham.

I have just sent an email to purprestige, which seems to be the only email address for UnicornLeads that I can find, informing them that - due to being in an entirely different country - they do not, and never had, my consent to receive this junk. I have asked them to remove my email from themselves and any and all of their partners, and since the company is French I followed up by stating that any of this rubbish received after the 1^st of January that points back to them (namely, if any GDPR request gives me that same subscribepage.com link), then I will be making a formal reclamation with the CNIL.
[the CNIL is France's version of the ICO, and unlike the utterly useless ICO, the CNIL have teeth - just ask Google]

This also raises questions about the giving of consent. It proves nothing at all when there's a form that asks for an email address and has a "Spam me with shit" checkbox underneath.
At the very least, as a bare minimum, the system should send an email to the given link with a "Click this link to be spammed with shit" in the email itself. This, then, means that receiving the advertising is a conscious choice undertaken by somebody who has access to that email account. Granted, it isn't 100% reliable as accounts can be hacked, but it's a hell of a lot better than an anonymous form that anybody could fill in. I could, right now, go to that form and put in addresses of people I don't like: potus@whitehou...you get the idea. ☺ Me ticking the box doesn't imply any sort of consent, whatsoever, because there is no meaningful way to associate an email address (which is often public information) with the person that ticked the box.

Oh, and before you ask "Why do you care, just delete it". This isn't about me getting irritated about spams - god knows I get enough junk on my old yahoo! account that yahoo! does a rather poor job of marking as spam. No, I'm doing this because I fell into a rabbit hole, a maze of twisty little websites, all alike.

And it makes great blog fodder.

Merry Christmas

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C Ferris, 25th December 2025, 13:01

USA = America??    Merry Xmas

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