Internet Under Attack: Latest News Stories
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-03-21 16:29:16 UTC
- Modified: 2014-03-21 16:29:16 UTC
Censorship
Traffic
While Google Fiber has managed to get ISPs to compete in the areas it's deployed, the project has also managed to spawn a new, misleading but entertaining phenomenon I've affectionately labeled "fiber to the press release." In a fiber to the press release deployment, a carrier (usually one with a history of doing the bare minimum on upgrades) proudly proclaims that they too will soon be offering 1 Gbps broadband. The announcement will contain absolutely no hard specifics on how many people will get the upgrades, but the press will happily parrot the announcement and state that "ISP X" has suddenly joined the ultra-fast broadband race. Why spend money on a significant deployment when you can have the press help you pretend you did?
Europe
In what some industry observers are calling a "Back-to-the-Future" moment, the need for faster and wider pipes to deliver video and other data-intense applications is driving a raft of tie-ups between mobile and cable operators that is only expected to accelerate.
- iophk: "It's not so much that it would create a fast lane, but that it creates artificially slow lanes which make once normal service look fast in comparison. Can the proposal be pruned of noxious riders or is it a poison pill for the otherwise consumer-friendly proposal?"
- iophk: "Looks like certain interests are learning now to use riders on legislation."
Control
Community leaders in Lexington are the latest to stand at a fork in the broadband road. In September, the franchise agreement between the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government (LFUCG) and Time Warner Cable expired, resulting in a month-to-month agreement continuation. As they negotiate a new contract, local citizens have called for consideration of a municipal network.
On a sleepy Friday afternoon last week, the U.S. Department of Commerce dropped what seemed, to many, like a bombshell: It intends to transition its coordinating role over the Internet’s domain name system—those web addresses you type into your browser—to the global Internet community.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- Mass Layoffs at IBM, But Mostly in Secret (PIPs and 'Voluntary' Redundancies)
- Gerstner laid off a record number of people; Krishna tries to find 'innovative' new ways to cause workers to leave
- Secret Layoffs at Microsoft, Apparently More Sites Will Shut Down Entirely
- vindicates us and serves to affirm what we've said for over a month
- SLAPP Censorship - Part 156 Out of 200: Brett Wilson LLP Becoming Wilson FC
- Now acting almost like one-person shop (lots of staff has fled this past year)
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- Sources-First Publication
- Thank you for keeping us on track
- Ubuntu is Not Linux
- I was one of the first users of Ubuntu
- Links 21/08/2026: Outrage Over Politicians Who Support Slop-Feeding Data Centres, "America Is About to Get More Expensive"
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 21/08/2026: Rain Coming Back and "Small Internet"
- Links for the day
- Slop-ware: Nobody Knows What Code Goes Into Linux and Most Developers Cannot Understand the Rust Code (Even If They Tried)
- So nobody is in charge
- The Slop Pyramid Scheme (Not Boon!) Isn't Good for GNU/Linux, Even If the Plagiarism Engines (Framed as "Training" or "Intelligence") Almost Always Run GNU/Linux
- We need the slop pop - we need the bubble to pop
- North America: GNU/Linux Measured at 13%-15% Every Night
- many (north) Americans use GNU/Linux at home and are using it to access the Web in the small hours of the morning
- Links 21/08/2026: "Silicon Valley’s Billionaire Cults Are Coming for Democracy" and "Who’s Raking it in as the National Debt Explodes?"
- Links for the day
- SLAPP Censorship - Part 157 Out of 200: What is a 'Defamation Troll'?
- "Defamation Mill" also
- Northern Europe Leads the Pack in Abandoning Windows After Threats Made to Greenland (Says Clownflare Data)
- Clownflare has a vast trove of data, so it cannot be easily dismissed as pure nonsense
- Clownflare: In Past 12 Months Microsoft Windows Fell From ~80% to ~75% on Desktops/Laptops in Asia
- Microsoft is deep in debt
- The State of Slopfarms About "Linux" in August 2026
- The Web needs serious cleanup, which curation can help deliver
- IBM Offers Workers Some Money to Fire Themselves, It's Called "Next Step" and It's Allegedly 'Extended' (Not Enough Fools Have Fired Themselves)
- Will IBM executives - including the CEO - ever be held accountable?
- £5 Million Unsolicited/Undisclosed Bribes and What That Means to British Politics
- It still remains unknown (disclosure denied) who helps fund the £1 million lawfare against us
- [Satire] Pocock, Binface & nobodies vs Farage: defamation before UK High Court
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- The IBM Censorship Team, PIPs (Silent Layoffs) in IBM Europe
- There seem to be many de facto layoffs going on at IBM right there
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, August 20, 2026
- IRC logs for Thursday, August 20, 2026
- Gemini Links 21/08/2026: "Ensmallening the BigWeb", "Rust Dependencies"
- Links for the day
- Links 20/08/2026: 'Linux' Foundation Promoting Slop Hype for Money (Hype as a Service), Malaysia’s Exports Jump 38% Year-on-Year
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 20/08/2026: A "Break From Routine" and "Modem Was the Problem"
- Links for the day
- Clownflare Reckons GNU/Linux is on Almost 1 in 10 Laptops/Desktops in Western Europe
- Western Europe and China are leaving more of GAFAM behind them
- Looking Ahead at September
- Rianne and I look forward to a productive September
- Links 20/08/2026: Facebook "Ran Ads for an App That Promised to Nudify Female Politicians" and Facebook Faces "Social [Control] Media Addiction Trial"
- Links for the day
- Clownflare Sees GNU/Linux at 16% Market Share on Desktops/Laptops in Tajikistan
- in Tajikistan it seems like adoption of GNU/Linux is exceptionally high, based on a very large data set associated with Web access
- The Demise of Social Control Media Continues
- Entering (anew) social control media in 2026 seems foolish
- SLAPP Censorship - Part 155 Out of 200: Throwing Stones in Houses Made of Glass
- character-assassination-as-a-service
- Gemini Links 20/08/2026: Planners, Pantsing, Vinylyssee
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, August 19, 2026
- IRC logs for Wednesday, August 19, 2026
- Gemini Links 19/08/2026: "Big Boost in Autonomy" and "Answer of E-Mail"
- Links for the day
- Firefox in Trouble in the US, Down to Lowest Level in 20+ Years
- more sites will stop or intentionally neglect Firefox support
- Clownflare: More Than 1 in 5 Laptops or Desktops in El Salvador Run GNU/Linux or ChromeOS
- Clownflare Radar reckons it's more like 20%+ now
- SLAPP Censorship - Part 154 Out of 200: Computer-Generated Legal Filings From Men Who Are Salaried by Mass Plagiarism Companies in Another Continent (America)
- This isn't the behaviour of a moral person but of some sort of "crypto bro" or "slop bro"
- Fired by IBM for Medical Leave, Rampant Censorship of IBM Critics Explained
- We've already caught and showed many cases where thelayoff.com deleted comments that were not even remotely racist
- Links 19/08/2026: First Amendment Under Fire by White House of Cards, "Universities Were Forced to Pay Up" for Not Censoring
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 19/08/2026: What Friendship Means, Sm0lNet/SmolNet, and New Feeds
- Links for the day
- Omarchy is Already Dying
- Same as the life cycle of slopfarms
- No, WSL (Windows With Fake 'Linux') Isn't Growing Faster Than Ubuntu, This Was Disinformation Spread by a Microsoft Propaganda Site, Then Spread by Slopfarms
- Be sceptical; Microsoft is truly desperate for anti-Linux spin right now, seeing that Windows is in a freefall
- Microsoft's Mass Layoffs Impact the Ability to Run Microsoft
- Can Microsoft still run Microsoft?
- Microsoft's Active Directory ("AD") and "Entra" Are National Security Threats
- Even the US government concluded Microsoft could not be trusted for security; it issued a formal report about it in April 2024
- Instant Impact: GNU/Linux Skyrockets to 10% in China Days After Policy Changes
- Let's see what the 'aftermath' looks like by year's end
- Links 19/08/2026: Timothy James King (AmigaDOS) Dies, GitHub Goes Offline, Finland Wants to Shun Social Control Media
- Links for the day
- Slop's Achilles Heel: It Increases the Workload, Not Just Costs
- Set aside its inability to scale well
- Improving techrights.org
- Technical debt (like 17 years with WordPress) is something that's better to address early, not later
- Mass Layoffs at Dropbox, Blame the Debt, Not Slop Hype
- The debt of Dropbox Inc., which isn't an imaginary (estimated) thing, is over 4 billion dollars
- Microsoft is 'Angel of Death' to Developers (Even Its Own), 'Voluntary' Layoffs Happening Again
- From what we are hearing and reading, there are 'voluntary' layoffs again
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, August 18, 2026
- IRC logs for Tuesday, August 18, 2026
- Gemini Links 19/08/2026: Shirts, Handwriting, and Fights in Geminispace
- Links for the day