My Stuff

https://umass-my.sharepoint.com/:f:/g/personal/rwolff_umass_edu/EkxJV79tnlBDol82i7bXs7gBAUHadkylrmLgWbXv2nYq_A?e=UcbbW0

Coming Soon:

The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.
Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON THE THOUGHT OF KARL MARX. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for Robert Paul Wolff Marx."





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Thursday, January 9, 2020

TECH ISSUES


I have been using Google happily forever, until suddenly, maybe a month ago, when I put in a search term, up would pop a page of sponsored ads before any of the regular sites.  I hate this.  I work around it by using only Advanced Search [apparently not worth anyone’s money to advertise on], but still.  Have others had this problem?  Is there a solution?

15 comments:

Dean said...

I haven't had that experience, but I have given up on Google as a primary search engine. Instead, I use DuckDuckGo, which doesn't track my searches. It incorporates a number of other features, such as checking for trackers, that sometimes interrupt a website I'm used to using seamlessly. For example, DuckDuckGo will block some pop-ups that a site requires for smooth user interaction. I've also toyed with Startpage.com, which describes itself thus: "You can't beat Google when it comes to online search. So we're paying them to use their brilliant search results in order to remove all trackers and logs. The result: The world's best and most private search engine. Only now you can search without ads following you around, recommending products you’ve already bought. And no more data mining by companies with dubious intentions."

s. wallerstein said...

No, it doesn't happen to me. I googled Robert Paul Wolff first in Spanish and then in English and both times the Wikipedia article about you was the first site which appeared. I didn't know that you were in Wikipedia in Spanish. You're also there in German, Swedish, Greek and Arabic by the way.

Then I tried googling Crime and Punishment, the first book title that occurred to me, imagining that an Amazon ad would appear, but once again, the Wikipedia article appeared first and Amazon much further down on the page of search results.



Jerry Brown said...

I think it is the Iranians who hacked Google to retaliate on our President by making Google as annoying as possible to use. Wish they hacked Twitter instead. But maybe it could have been China. Or the Russians. God knows it wasn't the people making the decisions at Google. Maybe the North Koreans?

Well it wasn't me- I'm barely smart enough to use my own computer to write a comment. And obviously not smart enough to realize when I shouldn't.

Anonymous said...

Do you know what web browser you use? I would recommend using software that blocks ads. It's pretty simple to install.

Anonymous said...

If you don't know, go here and post the results: https://www.whatsmybrowser.org/

Anonymous said...

You may have picked up a browser extension, which can be a form of malware, serving you ads inside of your web browser to try to get you to click on products that will make money for the offenders. Try using a different web browser to see if the behavior continues. If not, you probably need to remove your extensions / reset your browser.

If it's happening on all browsers and all web pages it maybe something more severe that you need to find with an antivirus scan.

Dean said...

Anonymous, I think RPW is describing a situation unrelated to pop-up ads that an ad blocker would prevent. He's talking about the sponsored ads that appear among the Google results themselves. I referred to pop-up ads, because DuckDuckGo actively tries to prevent those, but in so doing creates ill effects I need to work around. I should mention, too, that even DuckDuckGo produces sponsored ads among results, but I haven't seen an excessive number.

LFC said...

Totally off-topic, but I had occasion the other day to be looking at E.H. Carr's *What is History?*, a book based on lectures given about 60 years ago, and toward the end he makes some brief remarks about Hegel and Marx that I think some here, prob incl RPW, wd find amusing and/or interesting. But don't have time to quote now -- maybe later. Carr wrote a lot incl a multi vol history of the USSR, but perhaps best known in some circles for *The Twenty Years' Crisis*.

David Palmeter said...

I have a new HP laptop to replace my Windows 7 Toshiba. I'm getting ads when I want to play spider solitaire or free cell. I can sign up for premium and pay a monthly charge to be ad free. This is some kind of rip off. HP demands that I pay extra to be free of ads on the machine I just bought from them.

Anonymous said...

That's what you get for buying an HP :)

Jerry Fresia said...

Off topic but topical:

So Pelosi caves. Too bad. She should have announced the reopening of congressional fact-finding hearings so that investigations of additional high crimes could be "news" throughout the campaign season. Then she could have held on to the articles straight on through election day in November - unless McConnell caved. The Dems just seem incapable of playing Republican hardball.

Jerry Fresia said...

About Susan Rice....

You may have seen this if you watch Rachel. So Susan Rice, when pressed by Rachel about the Church Committee's ban on assassination, came up with another loop hole...(not the one that James Risen used to call Trump a murderer in his Intercept article, the one where he says the Church Committee's ban on assassination was limited to "state actors." Rice said that the Church Committee ban was only a ban on assassinating "heads of state." Phew! Rice's due diligence protects Obama (and herself).But according to Wiki, Executive Order 11905 (the order that came out of the Church Committee) states that the ban is quite broad:

"No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination."

Political assassination! Sorry Susan. Obama's a war criminal just like Trump. As are Pompeo, Rice, and a dozen
other people, no doubt, who had a hand in "conspiring to engage in...." the many political assassinations post February 18, 1976 when the order was signed.

David Palmeter said...

Jerry,

I suspect Obama's argument would be than Bin Laden was an enemy combatant. The line could be a tough one to draw. When does a political leader become an enemy combatant? Had the allies been capable, in WWII, of targeting Hitler, would that have been a political assassination?

Jerry Fresia said...

David,

I don't think Bin Laden is the contested example; rather I think the assassination of American citizens (two at least) are what crosses the line, at minimum.

s. wallerstein said...

I've always believed that they could and should have arrested Bin Ladin and tried him. I'm sure that they have gases which they could have fired from the helicopters which would have put everyone in Bin Ladin's compound to sleep and then they could have entered, taken a sleeping Bin Ladin prisoner and then given him a public trial, inviting international observers from human rights groups, giving him the right to a good attorney, etc. That would have reflected much better on the U.S. and would perhaps have earned Obama his Nobel Peace Prize that was awarded without any real merit.