LAST summer, when things were a little calmer, we repeatedly said that we had developed a bunch of software to improve the site's reliability and generally increase our output. The effort paid off as site traffic nearly doubled in a matter of months. Now that there's lockdown we once again have more spare time to make improvements. Additional RSS feeds are added, as news circulation was lowered (it's all about COVID these days and there's no EPO news; António Campinos is probably in Portugal right now) and on Sunday night we moved our three databases to a dedicated container. It's not perfect, the database software has just crashed for example (needed a manual restart), and we had issues moving Tux Machines databases to that same container.

"In the long run we'll likely migrate the server to another location and add encryption. Those are well-overdue tasks."Adding the recent death of a laptop to the lack of news and site-related shuffling, it's possible that at least temporarily our volume of output will be reduced somewhat. The upside though is that we're improving behind the scenes. This morning there was a sort of DDOS attack (similar to last week's), but we tackled it within a few minutes. In the long run we'll likely migrate the server to another location and add encryption. Those are well-overdue tasks.

The site contains over 27,000 posts from various authors and among these leaks can be found, which are exclusive and took great risk for whistleblowers to bring out. So we have a duty to them as a platform -- a duty to stay online, to ensure security and guard the reputation. We've often been the target as smear campaigns -- the smears of course coming from those whom we criticise. That's predictable and it should be expected. Sites that give a voice to whistleblowers tend to make many 'enemies'. Their goal is to distract from the substance by demonising the messenger, the motivations and so on. It's quite possible that over the coming few days there will be occasional downtimes, hopefully just short ones, but those won't affect the availability of underlying data as we make plenty of backups and keep these secure.

We ask readers for patience at these times; it's not the quarantine that makes life harder for us but our investment of time in modernisation and technical improvement. Running this site isn't just a matter of logging in and writing stuff; a big chunk of the time is spent doing technical work, maintaining the site from the back (server) end. We don't outsource or do any of that "cloud" stuff which harms privacy and makes us susceptible to censorship. We don't even participate in social control media; it would be missing the point. ⬆