Status-Q

  Today, I got yet more evidence that the web is sinking in a world of AI-generated slime.  

Our otherwise-fine Dualit toaster has, after many years, started to have occasional hiccups with its timer… I think the clockwork has become a little dodgy.  So I did a quick search to see if others had the same experience, and I got this page back as one of the top hits:

I quote: “Nowadays, there are so many products of dualit toaster timer keeps sticking in the market and you are wondering to choose a best one.”

There’s a danger that we may soon move past the time of useful online search — Peak Google, if you like — and the alternative approach of trying to ask questions of an AI will only make things worse, since studies have already shown that training AIs on AI-generated content quickly leads to madness (for the AIs, that is, not the users, though that too would probably follow soon afterwards). 

So making the most of online content in the future may depend, more than ever before, on being able to ensure that it comes from a trusted human source.  Who’s old enough to remember when the web was small enough that human-generated indexes were the best way to find things?

But this is also why, as John Naughton nicely reminds us in an Observer piece this weekend, the best human-generated and human-curated content out there is often available via your RSS reader, not your search engine.  (I happen to like News Explorer, and have used it for a few years.)

RSS — a system for telling you when your favourite sites, especially blogs, have been updated without you needing to go and look at each one every day — has existed since long before Facebook and these other trendy things now called ‘social networks’ existed, and I suspect will still be around after they’ve gone.  But if RSS doesn’t appeal for some reason, much of the best content — including, of course, John’s blog and this one — is also available via an even more time-tested channel.  Your email inbox.

About a decade ago, my friend Richard wrote a short blog post entitled “This is what the internet was invented for“.  In it, he linked to “Ian’s Shoelace Site“, his point being that if you suddenly realise you’ve always laced your shoes in a particular way without really wondering whether it was the best way, then there’s probably someone out there with sufficient interest in shoelacing that they’ll have compiled everything you need to know about how to lace your shoes… and this turns out in fact to be the case.  Ian Fieggen lives in Melbourne, Australia, and his site is wonderful.

Well, in a minor way, this changed my life, because I went and perused the Shoelace Site at the time, and so for the last ten years, most of my shoes have been laced using the Double Helix Lacing method.  

Now, it’s pretty rare that I buy a new pair of shoes, and after my latest purchase, I forgot about this undeniable improvement, and left them laced in the way they came from the shop, can you believe?   For several months!  Well, while polishing them at the weekend, I realised the error of my ways, and immediately pulled the laces out and re-did them, and now my tensioning and untensioning is smoother, easier and more satisfying.

There are so many ways in which the internet is getting worse, and making life worse, all around us, that it’s nice to be reminded, from time to time, of all the ways in which it can also make things better.

Do you use one of those ‘free’ email services, which make money by reading your emails so they can sell things to you, and sell you to others?  Or do you get it from your ISP, which makes it hard for you to change supplier and possibly quite complicated when you move house?  Or do you pay for a proper email account?

I’ve been doing the latter — using Fastmail for all my personal, family and business email — for a dozen years now, and have always been very happy with the service, accessing it through standard email programs on each of my various platforms. They’ve also always had a very nice webmail interface, but in general I prefer to use native apps rather than websites where I can.  

This week, though, I’ve been experimenting with some features that turned out not to be quite so easy using my particular favourite apps, but were available through the site.  One example is ‘Snooze’, which takes an item out of your inbox now but brings it back at a time you specify — this evening, for example, or next weekend.  Things like this are nice to have, but there was another feature that was becoming a bit more essential to me.

I have a pretty large array of email addresses, which I use for various purposes.  Some of them are just aliases on my main account, and some are separate email services provided by the university and other organisations.  But I arrange that everything ends up at Fastmail, where it’s under my control and can be centrally searched, managed and archived.   I either forward mail from each other remote service, or configure Fastmail to go and fetch it periodically.   

Aside: I was bitten once in the past by having an email account at one of my previous companies, to which I still had access through being on the board for a while after I left, but when the company was closed down rather suddenly, the GSuite account was deleted almost instantaneously before I knew about it, and quite a bit of my email from that period simply vanished into the ether.  I have the majority of my email stretching back as far as 1991, and I value that archive, so this was a bit of a blow.  If you also value your data, make sure you look after it yourself!

Anyway, it’s becoming ever more important, in the battle against spam, that when you send mail, you send it using a server that is properly configured to be officially associated with the ‘From’ address you’re using.  Some servers, especially GMail, are pretty fierce now about rejecting email purporting to come from, say, myuser@statusq.org but are actually sent using my account at the university.  (There’s a range of technical standards such as SPF and DKIM which help a receiving email server assess the claimed provenance of an email message.)

And I often do need to send using different From addresses, so I normally have my email apps set up to talk to all of my email accounts (currently whittled down to just Fastmail, iCloud, Gmail and University, though I used to have rather more), and once all of these are set up on all of my many devices, in general they’re pretty good about sending the right message through the right service.  But it’s a little untidy, and I end up with a lot of mail folders even if most of them are empty. And when I want to set up a new alias, I need to make sure it sends from the right place on every one of my devices…

This week, though, I hit one more issue.

There’s a service I’ve been using even longer than Fastmail, and that’s Pobox. This is one of those email-address-for-life services, and ‘quentin @ pobox.com’ has been the email address I’ve given out to people since roughly the turn of the millennium, ever since I realised how important it was to have an email address that would outlive any particular employer or ISP, but before it was easy to do so using your own domain (which is, of course, the best option now).  There’s also a great deal to be said for having an address that is easy to dictate to people: they’re always grateful not to have to copy down something like my.long.surname4356@hotmail.co.uk, as I am whenever I have to type or write it down myself!  (Even with my nice pobox address, I have keyboard shortcuts on all of my devices so that ‘qpo’ automatically expands to my email address. Highly recommended, if you don’t do something similar already.)

Anyway, Pobox now offers various services, but the basic one I’ve been using for 23 years simply forwards my mail to wherever I ask them, after having filtered out the most obvious spam.  I don’t actually store any email there, and I don’t have an IMAP account with them.

And this is where I was starting to come unstuck, because I do now need to send email using their SMTP service, whenever I want it to appear to come from pobox.com, but my normal favourite Mac email app, for example, though amazingly powerful in other ways, only really understands the concept of email servers which have both incoming and outgoing services.  Perhaps understandably, it, like many other apps, doesn’t cater for a complete email server that’s only used for sending, can’t receive, and for which any incoming emails appear in another account!  Not yet, anyway!

All of which is a long explanation about why I’ve been using the Fastmail web interface again, because Fastmail does allow you to select a different SMTP/Outlook/Gmail/whatever server for sending depending on your outgoing From address.  And it does allow you to retrieve email from multiple accounts without having to set them up on each of your devices.  And it offers a range of features that should satisfy the requirements of most power users, all without having to sell your soul to, say, Google, or use nasty proprietary systems like Outlook/Exchange.  Yet your email is still completely accessible using standards-compliant IMAP etc when you want it.  And my Pobox emails do get sent using Pobox. And my university mails get sent using Exchange without me having to touch Exchange for anything else. Perfect.

But what about the fact that I prefer to use native apps instead of web sites for this kind of thing?

Well, there are official Fastmail apps for iOS and Android which work pretty well, and on the Mac I’ve been rather pleased to discover FMail2: a thin wrapper around the web interface but implemented as a local app, meaning it can be your default mail program, handle `mailto:` URLs, see an icon in the menu bar, etc.

All of which helps ensure that if I send you an email from my favourite email address, you’re less likely to have it filtered out as spam.

Lucky you.

I’ve been doing an experiment which I fear will end up costing me money.  And this is in response to the observation that so much of the online world we see is filtered through Google.  I have nothing against Google, but this means that the starting point for most online exploration is filtered  through Google’s business model.  

Suppose I viewed the world through somebody else’s business model instead?

Building a search engine is hard.  Building one that can come close to competing with Google is really hard.  

For a while, on some of my machines, I’ve been using the popular DuckDuckGo, and it’s been pretty good.  (The only way to try these things properly, I think, is to set them as your default search engine and then see how often you find them falling short.)  The name was a mystery to me, never having heard of the children’s game ‘Duck, duck, goose’ before, but the business model and the appeal is simple: they do run ads, but not as many; they do much less tracking, the ads aren’t targeted, and they help block other companies from tracking you as well.  It has many devotees.

But this weekend, I came across something better: Kagi.  No ads. No tracking. Nice and fast. Elegant layout, and lots of customisation options.  And, having used it as the default on my desktop, laptop and iPad for a few days, very good results!   But of course, there’s no such thing as a free search, so the catch here is that you have to pay.  For most people, the $5/month plan, which gets you 300 searches per month, will be sufficient, but there are lots of variations.  I think the Duo family plan, which gives two people unlimited searches for (effectively) £10/month, sounds appealing.

So, would I pay £120/year (or £42/year, for the individual basic plan purchased annually) for something which I could get for free? Well, their free trial, which got me 100 free searches, has made me think that I probably would.  Search is such a key part of day-to-day life, that this seems a modest premium to get a better version where you don’t have to start by scrolling past the sponsored links.

Here’s a short video showing a few of the extra bits you get for your money:

(Direct link)

Definitely tempted.

I’ve written before (e.g. in May) about the importance of the Internet Archive, which I was fortunate enough to visit in its early days. It’s a hugely valuable resource for many reasons, not least in giving some protection against link rot through its ‘Wayback Machine‘.

What I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t know until recently, or had forgotten, is that there is also a UK Web Archive at webarchive.org.uk . It’s a very nicely-done collaborative project of the UK Legal Deposit Libraries, and performs a similar task for UK-based websites.

It’s been going for 10 years now, which is a good span but not nearly as long as the Internet Archive, so if, say, you were feeling gloomy about the situation in the UK and needed to be cheered up, you could go and look at the old News of The World site and be grateful that it ceased to exist 12 years ago.  For that, though, you would need to go to the Internet Archive.

The UKWA is a great initiative,and worth supporting. If you have a UK-based site which isn’t already indexed, let them know. It’s another good way to try and ensure it outlives you, and they try to update their copy at least annually.

And if you want to know more about the UK’s Legal Deposit Libraries which are behind the project, Tom Scott (of course) has a nice new video.  

Oops. At the start of the holiday weekend, I managed to cut the optical fibre providing our internet connection. I realise that it’s one of our most important cables, one of the thinnest and most vulnerable, and pretty much the only one we have that I’m incapable of repairing myself!

In case you’re wondering, the hedge wasn’t there when the fibre was installed, and had since grown up to cover it. I would have been alright if it weren’t for the fact that optical fibres can’t be bent around tight corners, and so had to bulge away from the wall before going through it…

A day that shall live on in infamy. Though not as much infamy as it might have had in the absence of phone-based backup connections.

Like everyone else, I’ve been having a bit of a play with ChatGPT. There have been some nice examples recently of people asking it questions and getting answers that are grammatically correct, well-presented, completely plausible, and completely wrong.

That didn’t happen to me. There was one question I felt I ought to ask it, and it gave a mostly correct response, though its description of the Trojan Room wasn’t quite right. Overall, though, not bad. But it was the last sentence that took me by surprise:

Well, yes, I suppose it was a surveillance system, though no human has used that phrase to me before when describing it!

Perhaps it’s only natural, though, that a machine should think of things chiefly from the point of view of the coffee pot?