Technical Specifications at Times of Tyrannies
Specifications (specs) must evolve with the times
Tomorrow night (starting Feb. 25 at 23:01 GMT) there will be risk of temporary hangups in IRC (it has been up without any interruptions for months already despite relying on one single node, without the redundancy large IRC networks enjoy). "During this time," says the host, "we will be doing some network maintenance to prepare for disconnecting some legacy IP transit providers. No customer impact is expected but due to the nature of the required configuration work we are announcing this as an at-risk period for the network."
This month and next month we expect things to be uneventful. We'll write articles whenever possible, but as weather generally improves more of us will be outdoors for longer time periods. This past week has been successful to us in terms of traffic. We served about a million requests in Gemini, stressing a strategic long-term shift to simpler and safer protocols. We also reduce cruft in the Web version of the pages.
We spent an enormous amount of time in 2020 rebuilding things to lessen the risk of censorship; that has clearly paid off. To date, we've never removed an article (since we started in 2006) and all our sources were protected. We intend to keep it that way. It's both feasible and desirable. Secrecy for sources is attainable while adhering to transparency principles.
Our uptime has been more than 10 times better (measuring total time down, cumulatively) since we moved to the UK. It's not that prior hosts were really bad; the site just had many "moving parts", including large databases. Lots could go wrong, especially under heavy loads.
Tomorrow morning we'll hopefully have some photos and coverage of the talk RMS is scheduled to give later today. As Daniel Pocock put it yesterday: "Dr Richard Stallman, however, is not one to give up. He was recently welcomed to events in France. If APRIL is to have legitimacy then it is important for people with a range of different viewpoints to join the association. Moreover, the French constitution includes a guarantee of pluralism which is the opposite of Code-of-Conduct gaslighting."
Long live Stallman (RMS).
We're living in tough political times (France and Germany included) where free speech is equated with swastikas and other nazi symbolism [1, 2, 3]. Don't be fooled by that.
This means that assuring free expression on the Web - even on nontechnical matters - will become increasingly challenging. We need to rebuild things according to correct specs, where some of these specs pertain to the political climate. To be absolutely frank, I would not trust any American host or software company at this point; they're all forced to serve a dictatorship or perish. █