Tonight I asked AI to summarize the theme of my blog in two paragraphs.
Meanwhile I have had zero feedback or demand for my company's INDIUM bearing panels
Showing posts with label blogspot. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blogspot. Show all posts
Google Warning - retroworks.blogspot.com losing 592+ Posts
Well, it was a depressing email in my gmail box this morning. Google will stop indexing a huge number of posts from this blogspot.
I've always been aware of my mortality, and of the mortality of my ethical recycling messages. I have books on my shelf which are long, long out of print, which are both central to my morality and my thesis, and which I know are unlikely to ever be read again, much less appreciated by mentorees.
But the first one I looked at in the Google Indexing purge kind of stung.
It was from autumn 2009, when I had been a background check source for CBS Sixty Minutes producer Solly Granatstein, about Scott Pelley's notorious "wasted" minutes flying around with BAN.org's Jim Puckett, who was describing huge imports of CRT desktop monitors (purchased for $10 apiece, bearing only $2 of scrap copper) as being "primitively" mismanaged in Guiyu.
http://retroworks.blogspot.com/2009/08/cbs-60-minutes-wasteland-unseen-footage.html
Solly and Michelle Rey had stopped responding to my emails asking them to run a follow up or correction to the story, which had shown no evidence of CRTs processed in Guiyu, despite the claim "we followed the trail".
So I checked that one, and because the film evidence of the factories that had actually purchased the monitors circled by helicopter were posted in picasaweb, a google product offered to bloggers like myself for photo uploads, and Google has since stopped supporting picasaweb, that the blog will no longer show up in searches. So if you are a journalism student looking for CBS Wasteland's Polk Award on CRT disposal allegedly occuring in China in 2008, you won't find me.
A lot of people I met - "Swordfish" - in my career met me through the circulation of that specific blog. Author Adam Minter for example asked what to look for when he visited Guiyu (the three-story integrated IC chip market - Guiyu was a reuse-of-CPU and chips market, not a CRT monitor refurbisher. And what is upstream of the river where BAN's "samples" showed poisons more associated with textile manufacturing than e-waste). Adam later visited CRT remanufacturing factories. He's a journalist with actual knowledge of recycling. But the blog that connected us is now gone unless Google accepts my correction (now linked to photos.google not picasaweb).
But am I going to take the time to re-edit 520+ blogs? I had to find the one on CBS Wasted Leads via the Wayback Machine site to locate it and find the dated address to correct it on blogspot.
5 Bells: Blogger Declares "E-Waste Hoax is Dead"
Shaba Kahamba, the Artist formerly known as Prince, and the E-Waste Hoax are dead.*
The second of the list, Prince, the incredibly famous purple dancer, was found passed out in an elevator, and declared dead at age 57. Shaba Kahamba, the Congolese Soukous bassist legend, died peacefully in retirement in the Netherlands on Tuesday... in somewhat undeserved obscurity. And the E-Waste Hoax will be remembered only by its silence. There is no "correction" forthcoming from BBC, Economist, NYT, NPR, etc. But I predict no further national or international coverage of any "e-Waste" emergency this Earth Day, one year after the news "jumped the shark" in declaring a small scrap metal pile in Western Africa to be the largest E-Waste Dump on Earth.
After a decade of NGO hype, what makes me think that "ewastegate" is over? And not with a clang, but a whimper?
There may be some residual stories about "e-waste exports" cropping about here and there, but mostly they are coming from rank amateurs like Kevin McElvaney, people in their 20s with a camera. But the source of the hoax statistics is running out of funding, and not a decade too soon.
*homage to "the Oxford Comma"... Shaba K and TAFKAP are two different people.
The second of the list, Prince, the incredibly famous purple dancer, was found passed out in an elevator, and declared dead at age 57. Shaba Kahamba, the Congolese Soukous bassist legend, died peacefully in retirement in the Netherlands on Tuesday... in somewhat undeserved obscurity. And the E-Waste Hoax will be remembered only by its silence. There is no "correction" forthcoming from BBC, Economist, NYT, NPR, etc. But I predict no further national or international coverage of any "e-Waste" emergency this Earth Day, one year after the news "jumped the shark" in declaring a small scrap metal pile in Western Africa to be the largest E-Waste Dump on Earth.After a decade of NGO hype, what makes me think that "ewastegate" is over? And not with a clang, but a whimper?
There may be some residual stories about "e-waste exports" cropping about here and there, but mostly they are coming from rank amateurs like Kevin McElvaney, people in their 20s with a camera. But the source of the hoax statistics is running out of funding, and not a decade too soon.
*homage to "the Oxford Comma"... Shaba K and TAFKAP are two different people.
My Blog 10 Years Ago: 2005 Letter to Iraqi People
Realized this morning the tenth anniversary of the blog had recently passed. Because of a platform switch to google blogspot, I don't have direct links to the 2005 posts, but I did transfer them with original dates. The first few were on mining (alluding to the Lynn Scarlett and John Tierney anti-recycling first posts of the 90s), extinction, being an "Agent of Conscience" (AoC), and this one on the Iraq Invasion. It was written a bit after my dad's cousin, Jack Hensley (a contractor CNN), was beheaded on film by Sunni insurgents who went on to found ISIS / ISIL etc. in 2004.
It was interesting to re-read ten years later. I was 43. Maybe someday I can edit these things, if I trust myself to not rewrite my history in the process.
December 17, 2005
Letter to the Iraqi People:
May God bring each of you peace and justice, health and sustenance to you and your families.
My name is Robin, and I am a father of three, and I run a small recycling and parts company in the state of Vermont. It is a cold winter here, but the people are used to the ice and snow, as fathers and mothers have taught the kids how to live in peace with it for many generations. I can imagine, for your children, the desert sun must be less of a burden than it would be for me, but they would not enjoy playing in the ice and snow as much as my children do. Both the sun and the ice must be enjoyed but treated with respect.
continued...
Sincerest Form of Blog Hijack? Damageethical Zelig (Poonam Verma)
Sincerest Form of Blog Hijack? Damageethical Zelig (Not_by Poonam Verma)
Well... my search box widget in Blogspot keeps breaking down (known issue at google forums) and I have been using Google Search to find references to old blogs.
How's this for a doppleganger? Damageethical Blog, "by Poonam Verma". He may be from India, or from Sri Lanka, I see 22 pages accessed from Sri Lanka this morning.
It's registered as retroworksa.blogspot.com (notice the letter "a" affixed to retroworks). And it's a complete reposting of my work in this blog.
Except every post has a crap link advertisement in front. I haven't found any malware.
So... since I'm a mission oriented dude, do I see this as "getting the word out?" Or should I be outraged at the paid ads for water removal, sewage, etc. he's selling? It's like running into a cyber-Leonard Zelig from India.
"The question of whether Zelig was a psychotic or merely extremely neurotic was a question that was endlessly discussed among his doctors. ... his feelings were really not all that different from the normal, what one would call the well-adjusted, normal person, only carried to an extreme degree, to an extreme extent. I myself felt that one could really think of him as the ultimate conformist." - character Bruno Bettelheim, Zelig (1983, Woody Allen film)
The ultimate conformist copies a blogger who has been labelled, by many in the "E-Waste" industry, as a non-conformist. It's copycatting of a defender of tinkerers, knock-offs, shanzai, good-enough markets... He's probably making a lot more money on the blog than I am.
 |
| Mirror Effect Photo Screenshot |
How's this for a doppleganger? Damageethical Blog, "by Poonam Verma". He may be from India, or from Sri Lanka, I see 22 pages accessed from Sri Lanka this morning.
It's registered as retroworksa.blogspot.com (notice the letter "a" affixed to retroworks). And it's a complete reposting of my work in this blog.
Except every post has a crap link advertisement in front. I haven't found any malware.
 |
| Not that Indian |
"The question of whether Zelig was a psychotic or merely extremely neurotic was a question that was endlessly discussed among his doctors. ... his feelings were really not all that different from the normal, what one would call the well-adjusted, normal person, only carried to an extreme degree, to an extreme extent. I myself felt that one could really think of him as the ultimate conformist." - character Bruno Bettelheim, Zelig (1983, Woody Allen film)
The ultimate conformist copies a blogger who has been labelled, by many in the "E-Waste" industry, as a non-conformist. It's copycatting of a defender of tinkerers, knock-offs, shanzai, good-enough markets... He's probably making a lot more money on the blog than I am.
Europe Virus, European blog update
I think I picked up a virus in Sweden.
Not that. NO. I mean I used a wifi server to open my blog page, somewhere by cell phone, and now it's getting tons of incoming hits from an icky website and I have to go through it and see if I got something contagious. If I open the site at retroworks.blogspot.se (Sweden) it opens ok, but .com opens something different. Don't go to the website tao of bad donkey, it may have infected the Radisson hotel website (run by ESM).
Europe has not been easy for wifi. Most of the free wifi sites require you to enter a EU cell phone number and then a text is SMS'd to you to enter and validate. I've got no EU phone, had planned to make all my calls on internet while here.
I've got another Europe travel blog started but have to make it to the plane. I see a huge drop off in all visits to the blog in the past few hours except for my own and the SPAM icky site, so I hope I don't have to start over. I'm in Sweden by the way.
I can't say anything really meaty yet about this week's meetings with Interpol staff in Lyon or meeting former Basel Convention sec staff in Geneva and Fribourg, or today's meeting with Hurricane Joe Benson at Heathrow (my first such honor). There is a lot of meat on the stove. This was a big, big trip.
From the desk deck of the Scandilines ferry, facing west, it occured to me that a road trip in Europe, not by train or Ryanair or Virgin express or Easyjet, has been unique. I've driven from New England to Arkansas many times, and from Arkansas to Mexico, but this is my first multi-day (5 driving) trip through 6 countries in Europe.
Our Dane friends, the French family, the Swiss, the Dutch, etc. who I've spoken to it's funny how everyone things my road trip, by car, from Copenhagen to Perpignan and back, seemed a very American way to travel. FrWhat I can say is that it's the least American road trip ever in Europe. I meet no Americans, no one but Europeans, in the gas stations, on the roads, in the restaurants. I stop in tons and cities whiech either cont have trains or no gare close to the highway
OK, have to go rescue the car from European parking ticket spiders. At 9 AM they crawl out of alleys and behind bushes and simultaneously parking ticket 100% of street parked cars. Kidding, actually I haven't gotten a parking ticket. I don't think I got a speeding ticket on the autabahn, either, but my wife says they have speed cameras (like in Arizona two years ago) and snap you and mail you the ticket. If that's true, I may break the European banking system.
Not that. NO. I mean I used a wifi server to open my blog page, somewhere by cell phone, and now it's getting tons of incoming hits from an icky website and I have to go through it and see if I got something contagious. If I open the site at retroworks.blogspot.se (Sweden) it opens ok, but .com opens something different. Don't go to the website tao of bad donkey, it may have infected the Radisson hotel website (run by ESM).
Europe has not been easy for wifi. Most of the free wifi sites require you to enter a EU cell phone number and then a text is SMS'd to you to enter and validate. I've got no EU phone, had planned to make all my calls on internet while here.
I've got another Europe travel blog started but have to make it to the plane. I see a huge drop off in all visits to the blog in the past few hours except for my own and the SPAM icky site, so I hope I don't have to start over. I'm in Sweden by the way.
I can't say anything really meaty yet about this week's meetings with Interpol staff in Lyon or meeting former Basel Convention sec staff in Geneva and Fribourg, or today's meeting with Hurricane Joe Benson at Heathrow (my first such honor). There is a lot of meat on the stove. This was a big, big trip.
From the desk deck of the Scandilines ferry, facing west, it occured to me that a road trip in Europe, not by train or Ryanair or Virgin express or Easyjet, has been unique. I've driven from New England to Arkansas many times, and from Arkansas to Mexico, but this is my first multi-day (5 driving) trip through 6 countries in Europe.
Our Dane friends, the French family, the Swiss, the Dutch, etc. who I've spoken to it's funny how everyone things my road trip, by car, from Copenhagen to Perpignan and back, seemed a very American way to travel. FrWhat I can say is that it's the least American road trip ever in Europe. I meet no Americans, no one but Europeans, in the gas stations, on the roads, in the restaurants. I stop in tons and cities whiech either cont have trains or no gare close to the highway
OK, have to go rescue the car from European parking ticket spiders. At 9 AM they crawl out of alleys and behind bushes and simultaneously parking ticket 100% of street parked cars. Kidding, actually I haven't gotten a parking ticket. I don't think I got a speeding ticket on the autabahn, either, but my wife says they have speed cameras (like in Arizona two years ago) and snap you and mail you the ticket. If that's true, I may break the European banking system.
Blog Maintenance - Searching for the Poison Pill
UPDATE: After a couple of hours I found the "Search Engine Genie" XSS (cross site scripting) in the PAGERANK button at bottom (er.. formerly at the bottom, it's erased now). I have a headache from reading HTML now but hopefully this puts us back in business without (ironically) punishing our pagerank. The lesson learned in this case is not to borrow Gadget Script from third parties. What is interesting is that the pagerank button was there for a long, long time before I got this warning.
Dear readers, please be patient while we try to find the source of a report that an unsafe link has been found in one of the blogs. There are a lot of comments and a lot of postings to screen through and it may take time. This site may be taken down for several hours or days if we find the "search engine genie" hijacker is actually found here.
The good old days of letting any person comment with any link, or using links to other sites which may change ownership and become "link poison" years later, may be over. Or this may be a false flag. If I link to a site that I disagree with, I think of it as being transparent, but it also means that if the owner of the site I link to wants to get back at me, they can insert something at the link which poisons my blog on google.
Dear readers, please be patient while we try to find the source of a report that an unsafe link has been found in one of the blogs. There are a lot of comments and a lot of postings to screen through and it may take time. This site may be taken down for several hours or days if we find the "search engine genie" hijacker is actually found here.
The good old days of letting any person comment with any link, or using links to other sites which may change ownership and become "link poison" years later, may be over. Or this may be a false flag. If I link to a site that I disagree with, I think of it as being transparent, but it also means that if the owner of the site I link to wants to get back at me, they can insert something at the link which poisons my blog on google.
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