Bonum Certa Men Certa

Self-Hosting Where Feasible, Decentralised (P2P) Where Practical, World Wide Web for the Rest

Video download link



Summary: Hosting a site and disseminating vital (but potentially sensitive or suppressed) information isn't easy; we now use several protocols in parallel and in conjunction (part of a largely automated workflow) to make censorship more difficult, both technically and legally

THIS month has been very productive compared to last month. If we didn't write as many stories as we had planned and hoped, that's mostly because we were busy porting the site over to Gemini (similar to Gopher but better), creating new programs/code in the process (it's in self-hosted Git), and speaking to people in "Gemini space" while customising our capsule to have feeds and getting it listed, indexed etc. So far this week more than half a million connections were made to our Gemini capsule, mostly to scan and index it. We still have about half the site to covert to the capsule -- a process that takes about half a day for each year (there are 15 years in total).



"Those justifying the censorship are a lot more powerful than us (some even write books about climate change while owning and flying four private aircrafts; they also try to ban encryption, except when they use it), so we need technical means to stifle their agenda. The political means are bought and paid for."Digital independence and technological simplicity remains key to durability of information. As we noted earlier this year, Groklaw had gone down in October and only came back online some time in January. This is the sort of scenario we hope to avoid. There's a lot of planned obsolescence in software and complexity -- sometimes artificially-introduced -- contributes to it. It's not a made up or a 'superficial' problem; it's very widespread even outside the realm of software. Companies want to sell and sell... (even the same thing, again and again)

The above video isn't much but an extension of a video taken with an external webcam to show an ARM laptop and SBC which manages IPFS and Gemini for us. This video shows the remaining 3 computers (3 dual-head laptops), which make a total of 5. My wife uses a dual-head laptop, but I'm not counting that. She mostly runs Tux Machines, which shares the same physical server as the Techrights site. Almost every night this past week Tux Machines was under DDOS attacks, with times of attack varying somewhat (I assume to catch us asleep, off-guard). We cannot serve 30,000 pages in 30 seconds, sorry....

Seeing the nature of attacks on the World Wide Web (ClownFlare is not a solution but part of the problem) and growing levels of censorship (typically justified by the mass media by associating the censored with "threats", "violence" and so on) we need to put our eggs in more baskets. Those justifying the censorship are a lot more powerful than us (some even write books about climate change while owning and flying four private aircrafts; they also try to ban encryption, except when they use it), so we need technical means to stifle their agenda. The political means are bought and paid for.

Recent Techrights' Posts

[Meme] EPO Targets
Targets mean nothing if or when you measure the wrong thing
The EPO is Nowadays Trying to Trick Staff Into Settling Instead of Solving the Underlying Problems of Corruption and Injustice
This seems like a classic case of "divide-and-rule" or using misled/weak people to harm the whole group (or "the village")
Richard Stallman 'Unveils' His January 20 Talk in Montpellier, France
It's free (gratis)
Links 19/01/2025: Gaza Ceasefire and PR Stunt by Fentanylware (TikTok), Faking It by "Going Dark" to Incite American Addicts (Users)
Links for the day
They Won't Buy Vista 11 PCs or "Hey Hi" Copilot+++++++ PCs of Microsoft (With TPM)
Windows at 8%
No Time Left for President Biden to Pardon Julian Assange
At least they tried
Total Lock-down Ambitions - Part IV - The Latest Examples and the Perils (in Summary)
For further reading take a look at Musial's nice outline
 
Links 20/01/2025: Indonesia to Prevents Kids' Access to Social Control Media (Addiction and Worse), Climate News Catchuo
Links for the day
EPO Union Says Monopoly-Granting Targets at EPO "Difficult to Achieve Without Compromising [Staff] Health, Personal Time or the Quality of the Final Products" (Products as in Monopolies, Not Real Products)
To those of us (over 99.999% of people impacted by this) who do not work at the EPO the misuse of words like "products" (monopolies are not products) should be disturbing
Links 20/01/2025: More PR Stunts by ByteDance and MLK’s Legacy Disrespected
Links for the day
Gemini Links 20/01/2025: Magnetic Fields, NixOS, and Pleroma
Links for the day
BetaNews Spreads Donald Trump Propaganda, Promotes Scams, and Publishes Fake 'Articles' About "Linux"
This is typical BetaNews
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, January 19, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, January 19, 2025
[Meme] Hardware RAID and Hardware Raid
We're expecting attacks on the press in Trump's second term (no need to impress anyone for another election cycle) to be far worse than the first
What's Running on the Laptops
12 months have passed
[Meme] 404, Not Found
Kuhn: I'd like to interject for a moment, we made an alliance with the Microsoft-dominated LF to outsource projects to Microsoft GitHub and rich people gave us money to do this
FOSDEM is Called "FOSDEM" Because of Richard Stallman (RMS)
The overlap there seems timely; yesterday RMS spoke in French-speaking (in part) Switzerland where questions in French were accepted
Links 19/01/2025: TikTok (Fentanylware) Now Banned in the US, Convicted Felon Talks to Fentanylware CEO and Pooh-Tin About Undoing the Ban Despite the Supreme Court Unanimously Upholding It
Links for the day
FTC Realises Microsoft Buying Fake 'Clients' to Fake "Revenue" (Microsoft 'Buying' Services and Products From Itself!)
Ponzi scheme
Total Lock-down Ambitions - Part III - The Web Browser as DRM Pusher
A lot of "streaming" stuff is DRM
Video: University in Peru Honours Richard Stallman
Tomorrow, January 20, Richard Stallman speaks in France
IBM Termination Story and Information From Microsoft About Mass Layoffs
In 2 weeks of 2025 Microsoft already had 2 waves of layoffs
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, January 18, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, January 18, 2025
Links 18/01/2025: Restoring the Great Wall of China and Economic Expansion in China
Links for the day
Guardian Digital (linuxsecurity.com) is Spamming the Web With Microsoft's Promotional LLM Slop About UEFI 'Secure' Boot (Which is Against Real Security)
This is an attack on honest journalism
Links 18/01/2025: TikTok's Endgame, "Car Freedom", and Spying in Cars 'Fines' GM (Settlement)
Links for the day
January 20: Richard Stallman Talk in Europe
evening time in Europe, around midday in the United States and Canada
Links 18/01/2025: Apple Getting Out of Hey Hi (AI) Slop (Too Much Misinformation), Chaffbots/Chatbots Try to Settle Copyright Infringement Lawsuits
Links for the day
What Fake News Sites Are Doing to GNU/Linux
The LLM slop about Linux serves two purposes
Links 18/01/2025: Microsofters Upset at Microsoft's Ridiculous Rebrands (Excuse for Massive Price Hikes), Chaffbot Company ('Open'AI) Faces More Lawsuits
Links for the day
Gemini Links 18/01/2025: Surge in Illnesses, ctags, and Gemsync
Links for the day
Slopwatch: Too Lazy to Write Real Articles, Offloading to Chatbots Instead (LLM Slop About "Linux")
The Web was already full of garbage before the LLM frenzy. Now it's even worse.
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, January 17, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, January 17, 2025