SLAPP Censorship - Part 15 Out of 200: Background and Particulars of Truth Regarding Techrights and Tux Machines
Published yesterday: Microsofters' SLAPP Censorship - Part 14 Out of 200: Men Who Strangle Women (and Worse) Trying to Force Us to Write Public Apologies to These Men
The notorious agency (with industrial agenda) that looked the other way when an American strangler of women, who spent time in prison as a Microsoft employee, threw a SLAPP our way to help Garrett deny us access to justice:
He did so within only a few days... after we had sued Garrett and a High Court judge green-lit our lawsuits [1, 2] (also, after repeatedly lying to several judges, Garrett and the people he literally hides behind finally admitted the coordination between their American clients - and that's what we reported to the SRA, whose handling of the complaint will shock readers)
2 years ago I needed to explain to our barrister who we were and what had happened. As noted this afternoon, he has since then: 1) urged us to write about what was done to us and 2) said that after doing literally hundreds of cases he never before saw a case as outrageous of the one against us (Claim No. KB-2024-001270). He felt passionately about it.
The text below is old, but it explains the basic facts (this has aged well, except the times/ages/numbers).
Background
This document presents additional information regarding Claim No. KB-2024-001270, which both Defendants consider to be frivolous, an overt act of harassment by process, and SLAPP. The main intent seems to be saddling the sites with legal bills, wasting their time, reducing their focus (dealing with people, not technical issues), demoralising the principal authors, and getting “revenge” having already sought cheap or cost-free revenge for a very long time.
The Claimant is no stranger; this Claimant has already spent well over a decade harassing the First Defendant. The Claimant’s character and the full context are thus very much essential to the complete understanding of this frivolous claim and how (or why) it came about. Without context, an outside observer would easily fail to grasp what’s happening, why it is happening, and moreover falsely assume that the Claimant is the subject of obsession rather than the source of morbid obsession, which implicated various parties and has targeted many other people over the years too.
The reasons why this claimant became the subject of a series of articles include actions of bad nature and the Claimant running afoul of British law (the Claimant is not based in the UK). Sometimes the court of public opinion can metaphorically step in and compensate for inadequate systems of law or cross-Atlantic enforcement loopholes. Justice is not cheap, but justice can be attained by information when unfair, disproportionate, and asymmetric systems exist, e.g. one country enabling, allowing and even encouraging bad behaviour, whereas another does not. There is no universal law; some people are happy to exploit this fragmentation (or issues inherent in it). Such as the case here.
The breakdown here or the overall goal of this document will be apparent later and is twofold or of a binary nature (wherein there are a couple of parts); on the one hand it speaks of background information and on the other it explains why the Claimant was publicly accused of bad things and essentially called out for his bad action. Section-wise, the last section provides an outline of the evidential substance. A separate document, where the Defence is outlined, goes into further details and accompanying screenshots provide raw, original, supporting documents.
First, some basics.
What is Techrights?
Techrights is a non-profit, ad-free Web site, Gemini capsule ("Gemini" needs disambiguation due to the recent Googlebombing of the name with another technology, which isn’t a protocol but pure hype), and a community of people. It moreover has other functionality such as chat, Git (for computer code), IPFS (decentralisation), storage, and more.
Techrights was always a pro bono site shedding light on abuse (despite risk of retribution) and seeking to expose the abuses by the powerful - typically corporations - using exclusive or suppressed information. Since its start in 2006 it has maintained a 100% source protection record and it didn't have to retract articles. It has published close to 50,000 articles and about a quarter million files (images, PDFs etc) that are freely available via numerous different domains and several distinct protocols, not just the World Wide Web.
All these articles published tend to be wholly or partly original. Guest articles are common and some are composed in collaboration with other people (many of whom need anonymity for their protection).
Being exclusive articles much of the time, the importance of keeping these articles available to all cannot be overstated. One of the merits of Techrights is its uncompromising resilience, resistance to censorship, and being robust in the face of technical and legal attacks. The site staved off many such attacks over the years. The mainstream media wrote about some of these attacks (citations needed, but some are old and offline by now; some remain online), so the subject is well documented. The site derives its credibility from its long and consistent track record.
What is Tux Machines?
Tux Machines is a community service-type news aggregation site that has been around since June 2004. It didn't have severe issues and hasn’t faced much disruption except Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks (i.e. a classic technical attack on its capacity to deliver pages upon request), but its main editor, Rianne, came under vicious attacks in recent years.
Rianne spent a considerable amount of time trying to hold accountable the person or people responsible for this.
She always did her best and has always done the site on a pro bono basis, she even shouldered the costs of hosting the site (in other words, she lost money running it, intentionally so rather than by misfortune because she is driven by ideology and altruism), so these attacks on her are totally unwarranted. Their lack of veracity and their toxicity is severe enough that quoting examples would make this document unsuited for professional, formal proceedings.
As Tux Machines never uses any obscenities or controversial language, these attacks on Rianne seem like a simultaneous attack on the public image of Tux Machines and the general atmosphere in its community of volunteers.
This isn’t just an assault on the reputation of a site or a person but on more than 20 years of volunteers’ labour of love and sweat, which included sleepless night, site updates while on holiday, in airports etc.
As Rianne often put it, “someone needs to pay for it” (for what they did to her and are still doing to her at present).
Tux Machines became famous for reviewing distributions of BSD and GNU/Linux (since its early days), but most of its pages are not original articles these days. It promotes topical picks from other sites. The tally of pages exceeds 200,000 and spans 2 decades. It therefore boasts rather high historical value, for its "catalogue" of pages includes material that no longer exists online (in the original place/s). Put another way, Tux Machines contains the “last copies” of many tens of thousands of publications.
Tux Machines is a very technical site and, unlike Techrights, it is less about personal opinions. It is not opinionated, it merely catalogues news, reviews free (or in other words, gratis, i.e. free of charge) software and/or libre (freedom-respecting) software, and generally strives to keep its readers well informed every day. It’s a public service and it was always like this. It’ll never change. There is no motivation to change that.
The site is sometimes referred to as “baby tux” because to the people who run it the site is like family, not just some bits on a disk or a corporate asset. Decisions made by the site aren’t of a commercial nature because the site is not a business and it never will be. It’s harder to crush families than businesses because devotion to the latter is volatile and transient; typically businesses perish if they fail to become profitable after some ‘grace period’.
Despite not being very “famous” in the traditional sense (like, say, being featured on BBC), it is very popular, exceptionally stable, and does not seek to appease the “mainstream” (which is probably why it does not reciprocate with public recognition).
2026 note: To be very clear and to avoid any misunderstandings or misinterpretations, the behaviour alluded to above does not refer/allude to IRC sockpuppets and does not relate to injunctions in any way whatsoever. Not only will we cover it soon; the accused has already admitted culpability for those things under sworn oath this past October. █