Bonum Certa Men Certa

Self-Hosting Parts of Techrights and Experiments With IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) for Distribution

Chair

Summary: Things are changing around here because it looks like the Internet approaches a tipping point (rebellion against bloat and surveillance)

THE Internet is fine. It's not great, but it's mostly OK. UDP is still used a lot (it is perfectly OK for a lot of things where packet sequencing isn't so essential a factor), but Web sites or pages reject it. See, nowadays it's considered normal to serve people up to 50 MB for a single article/page (videos, proprietary fonts, and full-scale photographs about 4,000 pixels across), not to mention loads and loads of JavaScript from as many as 50 different domains to occupy 4 CPU cores to their full capacity. That really sucks. So-called 'Web applications' make it hard to escape (they would not work without such JavaScript) and old computers are considered unfit for purpose, causing ewaste and spurring unnecessary sales of increasingly user-hostile hardware. Nowadays most browsers also come with blobs for DRM; they encrypt and decrypt things for no purpose other than serving so-called 'holders' of copyrights (never mind how easy it is to work around such restrictions).



Screw this. We need change. It has gone too far. The days of 'collaborating' by sending around -- back and forth -- E-mails with 5 MB Microsoft Office attachments are long gone (the Web served to eliminate such practices), but we're walking into even worse territories of endless surveillance -- down to one's mouse movements -- and limitless bloat. This is a ticking time bomb.

"The days of 'collaborating' by sending around -- back and forth -- E-mails with 5 MB Microsoft Office attachments are long gone (the Web served to eliminate such practices), but we're walking into even worse territories of endless surveillance -- down to one's mouse movements -- and limitless bloat."Every day around midnight (depending on timezone), Techrights produces a text-only version of all articles, including Daily Links. We started doing that just over a week ago and we've received only praise for that. Many people are sick and tired of how the Web works. The text-only bulletins can be opened and read without a Web browser, even directly from some plain text editors, command line tools and so on. They're fast to access, cheap in the CPU/RAM sense (both server and client side; those are static files after all), and they're easy to archive even at the reader's (or user's) side. They are, after all, just a collection of singular text files (images are converted into descriptions of the pictures and/or the text in the pictures). When we started the whole thing we had torrents, gopher and several other things in mind. But soon came IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) experts, enthusiatically offering to help us with the technical side/aspect (here's Wikipedia's introduction to IPFS). Last night we set up a new Raspberry Pi machine that had arrived just hours earlier. Someone sent it to us and we've set up remote access so we can explore more self-hosting (from home). Time will tell how this evolves or turns out (we envision transport of text-only files, which are more self-contained than Web pages with loads of files in each).

WordPress will still be used for this site (we've almost exceeded 30,000 posts in WordPress) and we don't plan to go "static" or serve cached pages any time soon (WordPress scales fine given the hardware we currently have, except when we hit the front page of some very major Web site). We'll still upload loads of files (see below) whilst always ensuring that blind people (or image-blind people who read text only) miss nothing that each image provides.

Wordpress closeup

Long term, we'd like to think that the majority of people will read this site without the World Wide Web (or a Web -- as in WWW -- browser). We need to look past all that. Pleroma already supports gopher and someone said to me yesterday in Pleroma about the FSF: "they should just not renew it and switch entirely to GNUNet for distributing its website or something" (the context being FSF "let[ting] its SSL cert expire. You'd think they should have this in the diary and renew in advance if they're run properly.")

"The growing complexity of the Web (and Web browsers that actively block access to those who reject such complexity) is partly to blame for downtime (of services that are actually up albeit blacklisted by centralised CAs)."Yes, the FSF's site was not accessible or barely accessible for a while because somebody forgot to renew certificates. The growing complexity of the Web (and Web browsers that actively block access to those who reject such complexity) is partly to blame for downtime (of services that are actually up albeit blacklisted by centralised CAs). We need to explore something else, potentially something a lot better and a lot less bloated.

Recent Techrights' Posts

Speed of GNU/Linux
The media seldom speaks of the dangers of "proprietary software"
Proprietary Windows Versus "Linux" News (Trying to Keep People on Windows, Never Exploring GNU/Linux)
Good editors know better how to recognise threats and not give them lip service
Ensuring That Every Computer User Anywhere in the World Can Take Control of All His or Her Computers
We must fight the people who attack general-purpose computing, in particular those who push this agenda very aggressively inside Linux
Gemini Links 28/04/2025: Autism and Structural Navigation
Links for the day
What Happened to the Open Source Initiative (OSI) Elections: The Purge, the Cover-up, and the Witch-hunts
OSI has gone "full Microsoft"
 
No, IBM is Not Investing $150 Billion in the US and It Doesn't Even Have That Kind of Money
Here we go again... media as a vehicle of lobbying and misinformation
Leak: The EPO's General Consultative Committee (GCC) Does Not Consult Staff on Crucial Matters and Bypasses the Administrative Council (AC) to Do Illegal Things
violations against the EPO's very staff
New Leaks Coming Soon, We Maintain 100% Record of Successful Resistance to Censorship
We won't be told what we can and cannot say (especially when it's true)
Central African Republic (CAR): Vista 11 is Only ~0.2% Market Share
99.8% to go!
BSD and GNU/Linux Replaced Microsoft in Secure Servers, All Microsoft Has Left is LLM Slop for Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD)
the FUD machine never rests
Gemini Links 28/04/2025: A Simple Task Tracking and Auto-Prioritization Tool and Other Programs
Links for the day
Links 28/04/2025: Canada's Election, Pakistan-India Conflict
Links for the day
Glue Inside Your Pizza (or Why People Will Get Fed Up With Slop)
People are given "answers" from non-intelligence word dumpsters
Links 28/04/2025: Cyberattacks Happening, Chatbots Disappointing, and "Free Speech Under Fire"
Links for the day
Phone Adoption Very Low in Vatican, Windows Usage Fell Nonetheless
Even in places where people still use desktops/laptops most of the time (and have access to these) Windows is gradually losing ground
GNU/Linux 9% in Cuba, Vista 11 Waning, Android Dominant
Microsoft has pretty much lost Cuba
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, April 27, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, April 27, 2025
In 24 Countries Observed by statCounter Vista 11 is Still Less Than a Quarter of Windows Users Despite All Other Versions Being 'Expired'
They ought to move to GNU/Linux
Links 27/04/2025: Pope Goodbyes, "Politics of Fear", Slop Redux and More Google Shutdowns (Google Debt Had Grown This Year)
Links for the day
Links 27/04/2025: Serenity Dialectics, Hockey Jersey Ethics, and More
Links for the day
Links 27/04/2025: Death of Nest Thermostats, Death of Metaverse
Links for the day
Links 27/04/2025: Projects Workflow and Discovering Technology
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, April 26, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, April 26, 2025
Microsoft Isn't on the Map in USSR
To them, it's either Google or Yandex
In Central America Windows Became a Small Force
These are countries where Windows used to have well over 95% of the "market"
What's Very Vexing to GAFAM, EPO and Others Is That It's Incredibly Hard to Censor Us (and Nobody Ever Successfully Did That Before)
resist, do not capitulate
Site May be Even Faster Now
It basically takes less than a tenth of a second to serve the page
Receiving SLAPPs and Collecting Them Like Trophies (the SLAPPs Always Fail)
People who file lawsuits bring even more attention to themselves (or to embarrassing statements about them)
Year of GNU/Linux on the Laptop?
It's not happening only in Lenovo
What People Must Understand About the Open Source Initiative (OSI)
some facts about the Open Source Initiative (OSI)
Many of the Scandals Are Interconnected (Overlapping People and Corporations)
We're only getting started
More Copyright Lawsuits Against LLM Slop Providers and Suppliers of LLM Slopfarms Would Benefit Society
It's not just bad for the Web and for society; it's also legally dangerous
Links 26/04/2025: General Assassinated in the Town of Balashikha, US Promoting Seafloor Mining
Links for the day
Links 26/04/2025: Facebook Layoffs Again, Remembering What's Real, and Say No to Mass Surveillance
Links for the day
Links 26/04/2025: NOAA Budget Cuts and "Dog Days Ahead"
Links for the day
In defence of JD Vance, death of Pope Francis
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Three Years in Prison for Disney Employee’s ‘Menu Hacking’: The Economic Fallout of Digital Menus
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, April 25, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, April 25, 2025