AM sometimes considered a contrarian because I focus on many things that are bad or became bad. I go against the “PR”. I want to fix the bad things or get rid of them. That’s just me. I think if more people did the same thing, the world would become a better place for more people.

Contrarians have harder lives; they typically go against “monied interests”, which subject critics to resistance, abuse, harassment, and sometimes lawfare.

have long been fascinated (in the “annoyed” sense) by/with people so cold-hearted that they would do anything for money, even utterly illegal things. Some of them would not even deny it to themselves; they just simple don’t care.

The first time it was made abundantly clear to me was in 2003. I met a person who worked towards an MBA and he said the darnest thing out loud. He was a sociopath of the worst kind.

A world without love and empathy would be a dark place. Sadly, many of the largest and most powerful companies out there are run by sociopaths who lack empathy.

grew up in the 1980s and back then chatbots did exist and some of us experimented with them on a computer screen. They were not too sophisticated, but they didn’t need nuclear power plants to work, or some dumb shareholders pouring out trillions into a deep well.

LLMs do not work, they cannot even properly summarise text (the way a human would, based on actual comprehension).

“An old online acquaintance (who is quite internationally famous),” one friend has told me, is among the fools who fell for this scam. He “has also swallowed the bullshit hook, line, and sinker,” I am told. “He has come the closest to making that LLMs bullshit look useful but it’s sad to see him turning a blind eye to all the problems and shortcomings and spewing marketing noise.”

Lots of people try to fake not “being behind”, so they adopt whatever crap the media promotes, even if it doesn’t have potential, only hype.

“He used to be no-bs,” I am told of the person above. “I see what he is doing and can guess why. I’m no sure if he is a centimillionaire but he is trying to join the “club”; they have, either way… I hope he is able to repent, while he has time.”

To those of us who never use LLMs for anything (it’s not needed) the above looks like a person addicted to some drug. We don’t have any interest in this drug, we hope the person who is addicted will one day sober up.

ome years ago I reported about crimes in Microsoft [1, 2] and even crimes against women, perpetrated by Microsoft employees. Days (or about a day) later I got SLAPPed by associates of these people (who are also connected to Microsoft).

Years earlier the same happened after I had reported crimes at the EPO.

Right now I report on some more Microsoft crimes and substance abuse at the EPO. Crimes at Microsoft are routine, but some are more personal than others. Sometimes the companies can ‘personify’ matters to make the disputes seem like anything but corporate muzzling (like Philpott at EPO).

As a result, there is more heat and costs.

That does beg the question: how safe is it to be an investigative reporter in the UK?

Put another way: is it possible to really report on crime in the UK?

Or only the crimes detested by the state?

Back in 2009 we saw how the UK Ministry of Defence was classing Investigative Journalists among “Terrorists” or something to that effect.

Society where crimes cannot be reported – or cannot be safely reported on – would look something like Putin’s Moscow. We do not want that, do we?

Crossposted from Techrights

Mentioning someone was in prison for bad things isn’t a crime, it’s a public service (he’s not even from this continent!)

Yesterday: They’ve Already Spent Close to a Million Dollars on Lawyers and Sent Us About 50 KG of Legal Papers (Sponsored by Mysterious Third Party) to Try to Censor Techrights, Without Success

As a little bit of an introduction, this article concerns a firm that breaches rules and admits this [1, 2]. Breach of confidence included. We’ll come to this in a moment. It’s so bad a reputation that around here in Manchester very small law firms already know that London firm for being one of the worst and they were sued by their own clients last month [1, 2, 3]. Having dealt with SLAPPs for many years, this one was lousy to begin with, resulting in a firm counter-suit (almost 200 pages long), just months after two more counter-suits [1, 2]. Both cases involve Americans [1, 2] who merely ‘visit’ Europe via the lousy law firm in London, egging on women to attack other women on behalf of men who attack women. No wonder this law firm is seemingly ‘selling the office’ already (its contents) and is happy to misuse data, despite it claiming to be an expert in data protection. This month their staff was passing around in legal documents and to third parties photos of our home taken for purposes unrelated to the matter (couriers giving photographic evidence of delivery), so we’ve reported the matter to British authorities. Those photos are clearly misused. Imagine me getting proof of delivery photos, then starting to spread such photos around, blogging photos like these to an audience they are not intended for (with the faces of people that I delivered parcels to, without any consent).

With that little introduction out of the way, today we deal with this person.

His lawyers are acting like assassins or Mafia, to use the metaphor those firms earned for themselves (in my opinion, some of their managers literally look like assassins, maybe they fancy themselves that). They sent an Hells Angels-like motorcyclist to our home. It was the delivery person whom they paid a lot of money to ride up to Manchester. Don’t they know sending big men with helmets and dark overalls can scare people? Thankfully, I myself am a big person, so it didn’t startle me; he chatted with me for a long time about the truly ridiculous things this law firm does for an American against Brits who reported, correctly, what he did to other Americans.

He totally sympathised with me, saying what they had done is “ridiculous!” (Direct quote; he said more things to that effect, dismissive of what he helped deliver)

He was actually very nice to me, borderline apologetic for what he was doing. He agreed that I ought to be seeking compensation for what they did to me and to my family.

Job insecurity compels people to do things without caring “too much” about the consequences or whose interests are served (e.g. Americans who spent about a million dollars to harasses not only a reporter in Europe but also his whole family).

Imagine a society where workers think about and care about the ethics of what they do for a living, and then act accordingly instead of just following orders.

This man put his life at risk on a motorcycle with super strong gusts (and heavy rain, hence wet surfaces on the road) to come here on a day like this and I still find it ironic that at the end he was more like a friend to me, and not scary at all.

“Pawn” of the lawyers…

Since Graveley was paid by Microsoft (an American from an American company) and his American litigation buddy is funded by some shadowy rich people (or corporations) by his own admission I’m led to believe that they don’t get their money’s worth, they just try to intimidate my wife and I in vain.

At the end, this ugly and clearly coordinated effort is doomed to backfire because we’ll write everything they did to us and report to the correct authorities, including politicians.

When law firms take any unscrupulous person as a client they end up being known in distant cities for how bad (low success rate) and evil they are. The only thing that can compel firms to do this is financial trouble, hence low standards or low thresholds (it doesn’t seem to matter where the money comes from, but that is very risky). ?

nshittification is not a term that I used, but here it is for everyone to see:

Some time ago I wrote to you regarding a cyber issue. I appreciated your response and it seems like you took my input seriously and changed accordingly so as to alleviate concerns about online scams and communication over E-mail.

Today I want to give some input regarding your branch at Manchester City Centre (Market Street).

In a nutshell, my wife and I had a 9:30 appointment and spoke to an employee whom we liked and has been very helpful to us in the past. We appreciated how she solved an issue and even communicated with us several time, by landline, to ensure the issue had been solved.

Today it seems like when handling us she was being supervised from the desk to us (accompanied from afar), where a person we assume to be her manager eavesdropped on our communication and threw mildly demeaning remarks our way (if not microaggression, definitely micro-managing the lady who served us, based on our intuition). The lady we sat with wanted to offer the services that we scheduled the meeting for, however this was interrupted by the other lady, who insisted we needed to do it using an “app” (which we don’t have) on our own. It was rather unpleasant, probably not only for us but also for the lady who served us.

After this appointment my wife and I spent some hours discussing this matter in a coffee shop down the road and decided to write to you about it. We want to be heard and we amicably ask for our input to be humbly considered. We write with good intentions, no bad faith here.

To keep this tidy, I wanted to take this opportunity to raise a number of pertinent concerns only partly related to this appointment (some are more general). The appointment started OK, but ended with some disappointment, not appointment per se.

1. Online Pressure and Discrimination Against ‘Offline’ Banking

When online banking was phased it more than 2 decades ago we were assured it would mostly enhance services rather than exclude or discriminate against people (e.g. things exclusive to some customers, not available to those who don’t opt in; some cannot feasibly opt in, see point (3) below).

My wife and I are both Computer Scientists and prefer for banking to be done in person. We know why. We know how computers work. Herding clients into “apps” and Web sites is not only unsafe; it’s also a risk. It is possible that things will not be done correctly, then blamed on the customers. Instead of saving time it might end up costing the customers a great deal of time, even distress.

2. In-Branch Services

We were told that there is guarantee of access to a branch, however the branch where we both opened out accounts more than a decade ago literally became a casino (the branch got closed, only to be replaced by a gambling shop near Piccadilly Station) and it looks like senior staff – i.e. people who know us and vice versa – was removed over time, only to be replace by much younger people who are less experienced and very dependent on colleagues. That slowed things done. Things that can (or could) take just 5 minutes would take up to an hour, sometimes even longer.

It moreover seems like every year more things become “online-only”, thus we are led to assume the end goal is for the bank to just become some “app” and Web site with no physical presences, no staff to approach, and no collaterals or assets with which to back savings. This seems like a risky gambit and a worrying trajectory that does not inspire confidence.

With banking, it all boils down to trust and confidence. People need to sense that they can confidently withdraw their money. They need to feel like the money is in safe hands.

3. Accessibility

For the sake of people with disability/ies (all of us are likely to become at least partly disabled at one point our our lives) it is crucial to maintain in-person services and imperative that assurances to this effect are given. Contrary to this, the impression given to us today is that such a commitment is gradually being phased out and banking with a human touch (as such) will be only temporarily available, leaving clients grappling to face persons who are qualified and familiar with the particular processes.

Please, can you investigate and clarify these matters? Our aim is not to belittle or insult anybody; we just try to do our best to improve the service or the perceived customer experience. We felt like we witnessed today competing interests: the profit motive against the clients’ genuine interest.

4. Customer-First Approach

In 2000 I was already a very early adopter of online banking, but now I partly regret what became of it; it seems to be means of outsourcing labour from bank staff to the clients, both at the expense of staff and clients and at risk (accountability) to staff and clients, for neither stands to benefit from this role-passing, i.e. it’s detrimental to us all, even your own staff, whose future seems increasingly uncertain. There is no lack of manpower (there are many people out there eager to find a job), there is just a race to the bottom in terms of filling up positions (or simply deprecating them altogether).

NFLATION is not a new problem. It is a problem that’s “always there” – sometimes just worse (higher) and therefore more visible. It’s also a form of hidden tax. To make matters worse, it’s part of false promises made by banks and economies built mostly upon debt, not wealth. There’s no “quick fix”; the best solution is to avoid debt altogether.

But there are still some people out there who are debt-free and actually save money.

People of that latter group like to talk about securing assets or “diversifying investments” etc. People with a ‘survivalist’ mindset or survival instincts do not look ahead or foresee danger; instead they wait for something to happen and then respond to that, putting out fires instead of preventing fires (to use a metaphor if not a real scenario).

Some people like to believe that hoarding money will make them very safe, even if the process of making that money harms their physical and mental health, not only shortening the life but also lessening its quality. Some processes of hoarding money increase the risk of getting arrested. How’s that for safety?

Some people make bunkers because of an assumption of looming war/s; some lose money to classic scammers, including the fear-mongering “bunker industry”. Some become drug addicts. Some try to “spread” the assets/money, but that often focuses on: 1) multiple bank accounts. 2) multiple banks. 3) like (2) in several countries. 4) gold/silver 5) fakecoins (‘crypto’). 6) a safe at home. 7) car (loses value fast). 8) home (endless maintenance). 9) jewellery (value lost immediately once purchased).

Yes, a car is a liability and constant cause of unforeseen expenses, including several annual bills, never mind the wear and tear. It is a truly terrible form of investment. There is no “magic” or “perfect” option.

Here’s another: purchasing future supplies – inevitable or unavoidable commodities – years in advance (some not perishable), especially when inflation rates are high and financial rewards for savers are low. This option relies on ample storage space. Does that pay off? Maybe.

Inflation is still high; governments changed what they measure.