06.23.21

Gemini version available ♊︎

First I Came

Posted in Antitrust, DRM, GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 5:49 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Why Did Amazon Web Services Shut Down WikiLeaks?
Why Did Amazon Web Services Shut Down WikiLeaks? Because Amazon doesn’t care about Wikileaks, and moreover it does not wish to help expose the crimes of the rich

Summary: Time after time people will be reminded — or learn the hard way — that self reliance and avoidance of disappointment typically requires self-hosting, proper standards, free software, and simplicity, not outsourcing, large frameworks, and other kinds of unnecessary complexity

First I came to ActiveX
But Microsoft lost the Web wars, so my Web site stopped working

Then I came to Flash
But it was a security dumpster fire and total catastrophe, so it’s abandonware now

Then I came to AMP
But it didn’t accomplish anything useful, except spying by Google

Then I came to ClownFlare
But my Web site became unavailable at times, due to their systems, not mine

Then I came to Twitter
But my account got banned, for mentioning where Elvis Presley died

Then I created a YouTube channel
But it turned out my subscribers could no longer see my videos

Then I joined a large IRC network
But my channel was taken over by its true masters

Then I hosted on Amazon
But it turned out I was just a transient tenant to them

Then I created a GitHub account
But it turned out that Microsoft could take it down without notice or due process

Then I joined Google+
But I didn’t know I’d soon lose all my “friends”

Then I joined the Fediverse
But it only worked OK until the site shut down

Then I got a Chromebook
But everything I bought it for became unavailable after 24 months of system updates

Then I bought some music
But it stopped working when they shut down the DRM servers

Then I wrote in Blogspot
But the interface suddenly changed, without first consulting me

Then I donated to the Open Source Initiative
But later I realised they were sending my money to Microsoft

Then I bought a fitness tracker
But instead of improving my health it sold my data

Then I decided to read e-books
But Bezos decided to remotely delete some of them

Then I bought a printer to print my e-books
But HP remotely controlled my printer to curtail ‘unauthorised’ ink

Then I downloaded Chrome
But it turned out Chrome was downloading and uploading my data

Then I bought a car
But later it turned out it came with listening devices I was unable to remove or disconnect

And then I bought a smartphone
But it turned out the only intelligent thing about it is the intelligence agencies

Then I downloaded GNU/Linux
But my ISP sent me threats for that █

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  1. Some Memes About What Croatia Means to the European Patent Office

    Before we proceed to other countries in the region, let’s not forget or let’s immortalise the role played by Croatia in the EPO (memes are memorable)

  2. Gangster Culture in the EPO

    The EPO‘s Administrative Council was gamed by a gangster from Croatia; today we start the segment of the series which deals with the Balkan region

  3. The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XXI: The Balkan League – The Doyen and His “Protégée”

    The EPO‘s circle of corruption in the Balkan region will be the focus of today’s (and upcoming) coverage, showing some of the controversial enablers of Benoît Battistelli and António Campinos, two deeply corrupt French officials who rapidly drive the Office into the ground for personal gain (at Europe’s expense!)

  4. Links 23/10/2021: FreeBSD 12.3 Beta, Wine 6.20, and NuTyX 21.10.0

    Links for the day

  5. IRC Proceedings: Friday, October 22, 2021

    IRC logs for Friday, October 22, 2021

  6. [Meme] [Teaser] Crime Express

    The series about Battistelli's "Strike Regulations" (20 parts thus far) culminates as the next station is the Balkan region

  7. Links 23/10/2021: Star Labs/StarLite, Ventoy 1.0.56

    Links for the day

  8. Gemini on Sourcehut and Further Expansion of Gemini Space

    Gemini protocol is becoming a widely adopted de facto standard for many who want to de-clutter the Internet by moving away from the World Wide Web and HTML (nowadays plagued by JavaScript, CSS, and many bloated frameworks that spy)

  9. Unlawful Regimes Even Hungary and Poland Would Envy

    There’s plenty of news reports about Polish and Hungarian heads of states violating human rights, but never can one find criticism of the EPO’s management doing the same (the mainstream avoids this subject altogether); today we examine how that area of Europe voted on the illegal "Strike Regulations" of Benoît Battistelli

  10. The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XX: The Visegrád Group

    The EPO‘s unlawful “Strike Regulations” (which helped Benoît Battistelli and António Campinos illegally crush or repress EPO staff) were supported by only one among 4 Visegrád delegates

  11. [Meme] IBM Has Paid ZDNet to Troll the Community

    Over the past few weeks ZDNet has constantly published courses with the word "master" in their headlines (we caught several examples; a few are shown above); years ago this was common, also in relation to IBM itself; clearly IBM thinks that the word is racially sensitive and offensive only when it's not IBM using the word and nowadays IBM pays ZDNet — sometimes proxying through the Linux Foundation — to relay this self-contradictory message whose objective is to shame programmers, Free software communities etc. (through guilt they can leverage more power and resort to projection tactics, sometimes outright slander which distracts)

  12. [Meme] ILO Designed to Fail: EPO Presidents Cannot be Held Accountable If ILOAT Takes Almost a Decade to Issue a Simple Ruling

    The recent ILOAT ruling (a trivial no-brainer) inadvertently reminds one of the severe weaknesses of ILOAT; what good is a system of accountability that issues rulings on decisions that are barely relevant anymore (or too late to correct)?

  13. Links 22/10/2021: Trump's AGPL Violations and Chrome 95 Released

    Links for the day

  14. [Meme] How Corporate Monopolies Demonise Critics of Their Technically and Legally Problematic 'Products'

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  15. Links 22/10/2021: Global Encryption Day

    Links for the day

  16. [Meme] Speaking the Same Language

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  17. António Campinos Thinks Salary Reductions Months Before He Leaves is “Exceptional Social Gesture”

    Just as Benoît Battistelli had a profound misunderstanding of the concept of “social democracy” his mate seems to completely misunderstand what a “social gesture” is (should have asked his father)

  18. IRC Proceedings: Thursday, October 21, 2021

    IRC logs for Thursday, October 21, 2021

  19. Links 21/10/2021: MX Linux 21 and Git Contributors’ Summit in a Nutshell

    Links for the day

  20. [Meme] [Teaser] Miguel de Icaza on CEO of Microsoft GitHub

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  21. Gemini Protocol and Gemini Space Are Not a Niche; for Techrights, Gemini Means Half a Million Page Requests a Month

    Techrights on gemini:// has become very big and we’ll soon regenerate all the pages (about 37,500 of them) to improve clarity, consistency, and general integrity

  22. 'Satellite States' of EPO Autocrats

    Today we look more closely at how Baltic states were rendered 'voting fodder' by large European states, looking to rubber-stamp new and oppressive measures which disempower the masses

  23. [Meme] Don't Mention 'Brexit' to Team UPC

    It seems perfectly clear that UPC cannot start, contrary to what the EPO‘s António Campinos told the Council last week (lying, as usual) and what the EPO insinuates in Twitter; in fact, a legal challenge to this should be almost trivial

  24. The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part IXX: The Baltic States

    How unlawful EPO rules were unsurprisingly supported by Benoît Battistelli‘s friends in Baltic states; António Campinos maintained those same unlawful rules and Baltic connections, in effect liaising with offices known for their corruption (convicted officials, too; they did not have diplomatic immunity, unlike Battistelli and Campinos)

  25. Links 21/10/2021: GIMP 2.99.8 Released, Hardware Shortages, Mozilla Crisis

    Links for the day

  26. How Oppressive Governments and Web Monopolists Might Try to Discourage Adoption of Internet Protocols Like Gemini

    Popular movements and even some courageous publications have long been subverted by demonisation tactics, splits along unrelated grounds (such as controversial politics) and — failing that — technical sabotage and censorship; one must familiarise oneself with commonly-recurring themes of social control by altercation

  27. [Meme] Strike Triangulations, Reception Issues

    Financial strangulations for Benoît Battistelli‘s unlawful “Strike Regulations”? The EPO will come to regret 2013…

  28. [Meme] Is Saying “No!” to Unlawful Proposals Considered “Impolite”?

    A ‘toxic mix’ of enablers and cowards (who won’t vote negatively on EPO proposals which they know to be unlawful) can serve to show that the EPO isn’t a “social democracy” as Benoît Battistelli liked to call it; it’s just a dictatorship, currently run by the son of a person who actually fought dictatorship

  29. IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, October 20, 2021

    IRC logs for Wednesday, October 20, 2021

  30. [Meme] EPO Legal Sophistry and Double Dipping

    An imaginary EPO intercept of Administrative Council discussions in June 2013...

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