Techrights Turns 18 in About 3 Months
WHEN Tux Machines turned 20 we threw 3 modest parties - same as when it had turned 15. We don't do big celebrations every year because they take lots of planning, preparation, and effort. It's better to invest scarce resources - such as time - in good (but rarer) events.
This year when Techrights turns 18 we don't plan a party, but we are grateful for many things. One very important thing about this past year is the solving of technical perils/debt (such as narrow theme for old monitors from 2006 and dependence on WordPress engine). This has preyed on our minds for so many years. This subject kept coming up in IRC.
We grew a lot as a site, as a capsule, and as an IRC community. Our IRC community turned 16 very recently. Microsofters envy that because they find IRC hard to control/censor/speech-police. Since we're not in social control media (we never will be) it's also difficult to undermine/troll us some other way.
Techrights is a humble story of resilience in the face of many challenges including cybercrimes. Over the decades there were many attempts to destabilise or shut down Techrights. None succeeded. None came close. If my memory does not fail me, the first potent attempt was the DDOS attacks about 16 years ago. At one point the DDOS became so bad that the site was unreachable for a few days. These days, having gone static, staging DDOS attacks against us isn't easy. It's not infeasible, but it can be difficult. We're adaptable.
DDOS attacks did happen recently (we wrote about that), but we coped with them quite easily and swiftly. Expect the site to be around for many years to come and also expect more Microsofters to be a thorn on the side - at great personal expense to them. Microsoft has mass layoffs almost every week this month and budget is so tight that they mess around with the hornets' nest. They clearly have budget issues. We don't. We're lean and mean, we've always been a very affordable operation and we'll continue to be fiscally resilient. Since we're a public interest operation, we typically get pro bono legal advice.
Techrights has become far too big (too many people involved) to interfere with. We may seem very small and/or modest-sized, but the army of volunteers - including leakers and whistleblowers whom we fully protect - grew a lot over the years. Nothing can stop us. One thing we've noticed is, the more people attack us, the stronger we become (maybe the "martyr effect") because that leads to more sympathy around a common cause. The biggest error Microsofters made was to attack women. People who lack common sense or basic tact may think it's funny, but most people in the world are women and billions of them are empowered. They're not stupid, they can see very clearly what's happening and who's behind that. Resenting women is always a losing strategy. It's just a hallmark of complete, utter frustration. █
