𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐤 𝐖𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐚𝐦𝐬-𝐂𝐨𝐨𝐤'𝐬 𝐛𝐥𝐨𝐠

Scraping and identifying faces on Twitter with Python #FaceApp

28th July 201918th July 2019 by Mark

There’s been a lot of very worried people tweeting about FaceApp after a story broke that it is ‘uploading all of your photos’ to Russians. Despite the story shrinking, realising that their terms are no different from any other app and they’re not actually uploading photos there are still some very worried tweets like this: …

Google’s crazy leg counting in featured snippets

26th June 201912th May 2019 by Mark

I saw this thread about Google answering number of leg queries and thought I would expand to see how many I can find Google is getting wrong: Google is really, really bad at counting legs. pic.twitter.com/yM67Wy5Nan — ⓂⒶⓁⓉⒺ ⓁⒶⓃⒹⓌⒺⒽⓇ (@MalteLandwehr) May 11, 2019 Here are the examples I can find, including the ones in the …

Does noindex in robots.txt work with Google?

2nd July 201922nd April 2019 by Mark

Post updated: 02/07/2019No, not as of September 2019, according to a Twitter update from Gary Illyes who announced Google will be dropping undocumented support for noindex in robots.txt As promised a few weeks ago, i ran the analysis about noindex in robotstxt. The number of sites that were hurting themselves very high. I honestly believe …

How to fix Windows 10 bootrec /fixboot ‘access is denied’

28th July 201925th March 2019 by Mark

If you’re getting the ‘access is denied’ error when trying to fix your master boot record (MBR), this fix will have you going in a few minutes.

Google appears good at ignoring canonical tags on non-equivalent pages

20th March 201920th March 2019 by Mark

TL;DR SEO test

I created two key phrase unique pages and tested if I could get one to rank for the other by using the canonical tag. Google completely ignored it.

Svertorobotingle – PHASE ONE of indexing (no javascript)

21st February 201928th January 2019 by Mark

TL;DR SEO test

New pages can appear almost instantly in Google SERPs for keyword searches. It appears it takes longer for Google Search Console to report these pages as indexed and that operators such as site: info: and cache: do not work immediately.

Catan Universe: Friend online but can’t join or invite to game fix

31st March 201926th September 2018 by Mark

I recently had an issue with the phone app version of the Settlers of Catan game, Catan Universe. My friend and I could see each other online but could not join each other’s games.

I checked 106,852 email addresses and 20% were compromised

24th October 201812th September 2018 by Mark

Over the period of two years, I checked 106,852 email addresses that were contained in public tweets against known lists of compromised credentials. The results showed almost 20% were compromised.

Why tvlicensing.co.uk are processing millions of customers’ data insecurely

25th October 20185th September 2018 by Mark

Despite the claims on their website, tvlicensing.co.uk are sending personally identifiable information and bank details in plain, unencrypted text.

How to bulk delete Twitter likes instantly through Chrome

22nd July 201930th August 2018 by Mark

You can quickly and easily delete all of your Twitter likes through Google Chrome, without having to use an app.