SLAPP Censorship - Part 16 Out of 200: Detailing the Actors and Explaining Techrights' Own Internet Relay Chat (IRC) Network
[Last night] SLAPP Censorship - Part 15 Out of 200: Background and Particulars of Truth Regarding Techrights and Tux Machines
[Earlier tonight] Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) Admits Failures and Criticism of Inaction on SLAPPs
The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) is a misnomer. It's just solicitors (or failed solicitors settling for lower pay in the public sector) guarding solicitors while pretending to regulate them. We should know, having dealt directly with the SRA for 12 months.
For those who have not followed our story, in just a nutshell two SLAPPs (connected to one another) were filed against myself and my wife in 2024. The hired guns who did this for Americans funded by third parties repeatedly defamed me for correctly pointing out what they were doing (this was reported to the SRA; cross-examination at the trial vindicated us) and, to make matters even worse, they repeatedly lied to several High Court judges about it (they can potentially lose their licence to operate over this). That's setting aside slop, apparent financial irregularities, privacy violations etc. They cannot afford to let me speak about what they did to me and to my wife, so they try to use several other parties to threaten and bully both of us. They try really hard to censor what I wrote about what they had done. They try to stop me writing any more. They engage in abuse of process to protect themselves from sunlight, to protect an American who pays them to hide how he was arrested for strangling women, and to protect another American whose American spouse calls him "rapist" [1, 2]. They target my wife in particular because they know she's thin-skinned compared to me and they try to suppress articles about real computer security (not back doors marketed as "security") while engaging in behaviour that can cost a lot of money to British taxpayers (to protect abusive Americans).
2 years ago I explained to our barrister who we were; this barrister (from Ofcom originally) felt very strongly about this case (he said it was the most outrageous case he ever dealt with, having already done hundreds before) and urged us to write about it once it's over (the case is over now).
Below we include the 2-year-old explanations of who we are, what we deal with, and what IRC is.
Who Are Roy and Rianne?
Roy and Rianne married in 2012 and Rianne changed her surname months later. The Claimant had the audacity to use her past surname in legal documents, probably as a form of intimidation or scare tactic (trying to drag in her family or to humiliate the marriage).
Bad faith from – or exercised by - a litigating party may not be obvious at first (or exposed/naked for the crude eye to see), but a mean-spirited approach was never unforeseeable. The Claimant has demonstrated a rather poor view of women and, based on his own words (his own words and also the women's own words, which he tactlessly repeats in private communications with peers), they don’t have a positive image of him, either.
Rianne is the chief editor of Tux Machines, Roy is the chief editor of Techrights, but they have always helped one another with the sites (either site, both Techrights and Tux Machines). It’s not some formal “rota” system, but they seek to balance the needs of the sites or split the workload associated with activities, not limited to authorship (many tasks are associated with running a site other than editing or adding new material).
Who is the Claimant?
In short, widely known as he is a serial harasser and serial defamer. And yes, he is widely known as one, based on public sources and statements, not limited to the Web. Many people, including very high-profile people, can attest to that experience. They too were targeted and have been among his "targets" or his past (sometimes present) victims. This serial harasser and serial defamer can go on and on targeting the same person for as much as 20 years (we have seen one example of this), never relenting and sometimes even expressing – openly – a desire to engage in violence. Thankfully there’s public evidence of this. An outside observer can moreover give evidence of it, as it seems to directly refer to very specific people whom he wishes to hit, punch, hurt etc.
One must follow this up to make his desire for violence clear and so that way, it doesn't look like he is not expressing such a desire. His thoughts are poorly and rudely expressed, so it’s hard to assume those are mere jokes.
His classic modus operandi has long been something along the lines of "hit and run", e.g. calling someone rapist in public (no charges, let alone conviction, is apparently necessary for him to make that bald accusation, at least from his own perspective), then anyone who disputes this and any others who do not agree or do not accept the labelling of the target as "rapist" also get called "rape apologists" in public (at which point a lynch mob forms in social media to "brigade" the target and his/her defenders). In due course, more people become afraid to even challenge the defamatory statements, for they don’t wish to become the next target of obsession, being likely innocent all along, and be publicly flogged or flagged as “rape apologists”. This makes for, suffice to say, a very toxic methodology and an unacceptable discourse. Since the Claimant does not actually have some of the formal credential he claims to possess, these threatening tactics are often leveraged to silence his critics. As discussed later, he married a person who practices the same methods. In case this needs re-phrasing with more detail, one may wish to look at how he publicly describes himself, as if he is some world-renowned guru, then examine and compare w.r.t. to his actual achievements, e.g. education and awards. A lot of his claims about himself are trivial to disprove.
This sort of serial defamation has gone on for a very long time. It’s of great importance to grasp the magnitude of time as it matters and that serves to illuminate something of a mental nature – possibly a tendency that cannot be cured or won’t be stopped unless or until he is served an important legal and moral lesson that he’ll never forget. He joked that maybe, according to him, 2023 would be the year he finally faces a moment of reckoning and he was probably right. Though disputed this karma may seem, the outcome remains to be seen (or the exact year).
What is IRC?
The case needs to be judged not by an IRC guru but by someone who at least understands how IRC works in principle. It’s non-conventional, but it is not complicated. If it seems nonconformist, it’s because it’s not centralised like many modern messaging platforms.
A lot of the abuse happened in Techrights' own Internet Relay Chat (IRC) network. Techrights directly controls the IRC network that is used both by Techrights and by Tux Machines and the channels within that network. Channels are like “rooms” or “groups” or “ guilds” in analogous terminology for other technologies. There are no third parties in IRC, unless one chooses one rather than deploy the technologies for oneself.
A lot of the evidence, therefore, i.e. material to be used against the Claimant, comes from IRC. Techrights can supply upon demand, as it maintains full logs of conversations or transcripts of the groups conversations (and other activities) there and so can most people who attended IRC channels at the time of the abuse. IRC client software tend to log things locally, so corroboration can be provided by other parties that logged the same things separately and independently.
The channels are attended by many people from all around the world. Some of them have known each other since the dawn of the site (that is, way back in 2006) and the online relationships can be quite strong. A lot of these people grew up together, online at least. Some use anonymous user accounts and may leverage connections that conceal the location of the user. This can be crucial as there are not many other ways to protect oneself from online abuse and IRC receives its share of abuse due to its open nature.
IRC does not mandate that users identify themselves – that is primarily a feature, as it can help protect whistleblowers by hiding who they are, even from the recipient of information provided by them. If the receiver is aware of the identity, rather than assessing (assessment by human judges) the supplied information based on objective criteria, informed opinion, tact and underlying merit, then there is risk that under conditions of extortion (e.g. legal threats or threat of costly legal action) the informant’s identity will be divulged. As a matter of practice, journalism works best when sources can transmit information and the information is judged without knowing the exact identity of the potential leaker or whistleblower (and whether it’s an insider or not). It serves all parties best and reduces the risk to reporters while disseminating information safely. IRC is a very old protocol (its inception is in fact going back to the 1980s; it first established, developed and deployed in the 1980s in a university in Finland) and Roy has used IRC since the early 1990s when he was about 13 or 14.
2026 clarification: As noted before, nothing above is impacted by injunctions and as we'll show later in the series, there are some well documented examples of IRC abuse by the Claimant, who got sued [1, 2] not in relation to IRC but a variety of things dating back to 2012. He in fact admitted - under sworn oath this past October - some of the abuses such as hijacking other people's names to defame them. To bring forth witnesses to testify against him we'd need more money however; unlike him and his litigation buddy (who was in prison), we did not spend close to $1,000,000 on lawyers (he borrowed money to do this and unnamed third parties gave him money to sue us). █
Image source: The first IRC server, tolsun.oulu.fi, a Sun-3 server on display near the University of Oulu computer centre
