Murky business

Over the past couple of weeks, I have been circling around animals which eat acorns, in particular pigs, and I hope that this will all come to the boil in the form of a substantive post shortly. In the meantime, a look at a curious corner of the Internet.

I should perhaps say at the outset that animals attract a lot of coverage on the Internet. There are plenty of people out there who want to write about animals, read about animals or both. Lots of clicks to be generated, lots of good homes for advertisements.

At one point I came across a list of animals which eat acorns at reference 2 and noted down the address for a proper look later. When I came to take a proper look, the address no longer worked and using the search button provided failed to turn it up. Plenty of advertisements though.

I then branched out with a new search, and that led to references 3 and 4. Reference 3 looked OK from a content point of view, apart from an oddly recent posting date. But there was no author. The start of the article is snapped above. And turning to reference 4, there seemed to be nothing about the site either. Just a lot of otherwise decent short articles on science and animals. And no advertisements. So what was going on here?

I turn to Gemini for help and have an interesting discussion with with him.

One possibility that this is a rather large chunk of vanity publishing, by person or persons who for some reason or another choose not to identify themselves. People who want to write about stuff who can't be bothered to wrap it up properly.

Another possibility is that this is some kind of loss leader. Generate a bank of committed readers, then start feeding in the advertisements to generate some revenue, hoping that you do not lose too much of your readership in the process.

Advertisements which may overt or covert. I associate to the women's magazines which used to include advertisements for stuff in material which was ostensibly an just article about something of interest, written by a journalist without an axe to grind.

I learn of a whole new technology called SEO or search engine optimisation (not the Senior Executive Officers which I used to know about), which is all about fiddling with your content or your website to get you higher up the search engine rankings without having to pay the search engine provider. This last being what a lot of perfectly respectable businesses out to sell their services settle for.

Fiddling with the dates is one wheeze to fool search algorithms, which apparently like fresh meat. So you tweak the dates, maybe tweak the content slightly. Which accounts for some of these sites having a lot of material with oddly recent dates.

Towards the end of the conversation - remembering that a large language model does not do irony - Gemini observes: '... The issues we've discussed—opaque authors, content optimized purely for SEO, and the intentional clustering of dates—all contribute to an environment where information quality is often secondary to visibility and profit...'.

I also came across reference 5, an acorn related post on another busy, natural history website. But here things are done properly with readily accessible information provided about the website and its author, a former student of elasmobranch (shark and ray) natural history.

Which is all well and good, but I have failed to find anything else about him and Gemini, for once, seems to have got indigestion.

But it does all go to show that one needs to have a care when using stuff you have got hold of by casual browsing. Ideally, one should have authors, affiliations, track record and references to supporting to related material.

Which makes me think a little of my own efforts, where much of this is missing. But I do have a name and an email address and I do supply references. I do have track record in the sense that the material is too varied and too bulky for it to be likely to be anything other than what it says it is; that is to say a bit of harmless vanity publishing - hopefully diverting or interesting.

Another murky business

A correspondent has drawn my attention to the piece in the New York Times at reference 6, which suggests that the whole crypto business is a wheeze dreamed up by more or less unsavoury characters to make money, to hide money or to to move hot money about. All mixed up with the long running libertarian, hate-all-things-government streak in the US. Some of this being the people who live off acorns and such like in the woods in case they catch COVID - or perhaps anthrax - from a burger from McDonald's. A business into which POTUS has climbed with enthusiasm. Regular people are right to be both sceptical and concerned.

Will I get around to reference 7?

Regarding unsavoury, Brunton writes: '... In 2013, the Drug Enforcement Administration’s analysis estimated that up to 90 percent of Bitcoin transactions that year were primarily used to facilitate illicit activity, including drug sales, blackmail, ransomware and illegal pornography...'.

While at a site called coinindex turned up by Bing I read that: '[in 2018] ... DEA (United States Drug Enforcement Administration) official Lilita Infante told Bloomberg that the use of Bitcoin for illicit activities has seen a steep decline relative to its other use cases and now represents less than 10% of its transactions. Bitcoin activity, she says, is now mostly driven by price speculation. In terms of absolute volume, however, Infante says the amount of BTC and other cryptocurrencies used for illicit activity has increased...'.

Tricky things statistics.

Ms Infante appears to have moved on to a company called CAT Labs, to be found at reference 9.

A rather different image, seemingly of the same person, from a Miami newspaper.

PS 1: a bit later: Gemini recovered to the extent of telling me a bit more about Mr. Baldwin, including quite a lot of material about the history of his website. But apart from a mention in an annual report from the British Deer Society, I have not been able to find out anything more about him. More or less non-existent outside of his own website. Which remains a little murky, which is a pity, as he appears to be well informed. While Gemini may have lost most of his record of our conversations about acorns, or at least withdrawn access, which would be more seriously tiresome as I have not kept one myself. Not a transcript anyway.

PS 2: a bit later still. Bother. Keeping my own record just in case is entirely possible, but it is a bit of a fiddle. A chore one could do without.

[a bubble waiting to burst?]

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/10/epsom-acorns.html.

Reference 2: https://animalofthings.com/.

Reference 3: https://scienceinsights.org/what-animals-eat-acorns-besides-squirrels/.

Reference 4: https://scienceinsights.org/.

Reference 5: https://www.wildlifeonline.me.uk/blog/post/pigging-out-in-the-forest-the-common-of-mast-in-britain.

Reference 6: How a Fringe Movement of Gun Nuts, Backwoodsmen and Free Marketers Paved the Way for Autocracy - Finn Brunton, New York Times - 2025.

Reference 7: Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists Who Created Cryptocurrency - Finn Brunton - 2019.

Reference 8: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin. A long running bit of crypto.

Reference 9: https://www.catlabs.io/. '... As former US Department of Justice crypto and cyber investigators, and US Department of Defense cybersecurity researchers, we know firsthand the challenges faced by our public service men and women when responding to technology-enabled crime.  Global crime syndicates, drug trafficking organizations, terrorist groups, cyber criminals and malicious nation state actors are now increasingly using new tools like digital assets and AI to further their illicit activities...'. Sounds just like all those people who jump ship from our own GCHQ to run security consultancies. Possibly selling their value-added services back to government...

Group search key: acornsk.