Bonum Certa Men Certa

Holiday Greetings to Readers and Their Loved Ones

Freedom of Movement (FoM) ended not because of Brexit but because of other factors

Postcard from holiday



Summary: An end of year message (a tad early or premature, but we'll be busy changing datacentres in days to come); in short, stay safe, don't do anything too extravagant (it's risky)

WE DON'T typically prepare 'corny' posts about "top articles of the month/year" and "happy [holidays] everyone" because they're kind of purposeless. They don't say much that wasn't already obvious. No reason/s to publicly berate sites that do in fact produce such 'meta' articles; after all, we too occasionally write about our own operations, future plans, and even past accomplishments.

"The past year has been rather messy, more/most so because of coronavirus (as opposed to Brexit, as many predicted last Christmas)."The coming week will be potentially difficult for us because of a datacentre switch and overhaul -- possibly the biggest technical overhaul in the site's history. The site is expected to still look the same, but changes at the back end may be profound (and less visible to readers). Bandwidth limits aren't an issue, but capacity is expected to improve (over the past week we've served an average of about 3 megabytes per second). We want to become increasingly self-hosted, but at the same time decentralised (among peers that are trusted) because the latter makes us more robust to downtime, either for technical or for legal reasons (the EPO has a history of threatening to sue us; Benoît Battistelli repeatedly did that and António Campinos is still just "his master's voice"). Yesterday we did several hours of maintenance on the Raspberry Pi 4 that serves the site's contents over IPFS; that gave us the first real opportunity to properly test access to all the objects when one (and primary) node was offline (and yes, that worked really well; objects were served very fast in that node's absence, even while powered down for hardware upgrades). That node is serving visitors from our home, having been placed literally 2 meters from me. It's connected to a mouse, an old keyboard, optionally a screen (it's a headless server with two HDMI ports) and now a set of 8 versatile LEDs that we program to reflect status. Another Christmas project...

The past year has been rather messy, more/most so because of coronavirus (as opposed to Brexit, as many predicted last Christmas). We are apparently heading towards an even worse year because, as this article has just put it: "More than 40 countries have temporarily suspended some or all travel from the United Kingdom after British health officials announced a highly infectious variant of the novel coronavirus has been spreading in the country. South Africa has detected a similar variant."

People who say that a vaccine developed in just months (as opposed to years or as long as 2 decades) with expedited certifications is assured to restore order and economic stability are simply lying. Don't believe them any more than you'd believe Battistelli's "quality" talk.

OK, 'Boris'... Whatever...



Notice the dates above.

We've set our expectations extremely low this year. We put up the Christmas tree a month ago, turning the lights on every night, but at the dinner table it'll be just my wife and I. Having just recovered from 2 days of pain, the last thing I want during datacentre migration (with pressing and imminent deadline) is something like COVID-19 (or whatever number they choose next).

Holiday HouseThis coming week will certainly not be easy for us. But the work needs to be done and it'll likely mean less articles, erosion in uptime (we're testing things, so sometimes we shut down databases, HTTP daemons, even whole components of the filesystem). I've just run a script to count the number of files in Techrights (not including databases). It says it's over 170,000. That's almost 15 years' worth (we'll soon have 30,000 blog posts). Rigorous testing cannot be done on a page-by-page basis (to ensure everything was preserved perfectly following migrations/updates). Daily Links will be a priority because we don't wish to lose sight of what's going on in the world. When talk about panic buyers and rapidly-spreading viruses (not including Brexit itself) calms down a bit we'll visit town and check if better equipment is still available on shelves for recording. In the past 3 days the videos were fetched nearly 15,000 times, so demand for videos is definitely there.

Take care, keep the dinner small (in the sense of number of people attending), and catch you again in 2021. We'll still post articles, but probably not as much or as often as usual.

Recent Techrights' Posts

SoylentNews Grows Up, Registers as a Business, Site Traffic Reportedly Grows
More people realise that social control media may in fact be a passing fad
 
Garden Season Starts Today
Outdoor time, officially...
More Information About Public Talks That Richard Stallman Gave This Week in Europe
Two talks in Switzerland
Engadget is Still a Spamfarm, It's Just an Amazon Catalogue (SPAM/SEO), a Sea of Junk Disguised as "Articles" With Few 'Fillers' (Real Articles) in Between
Engadget writes for bots now, not for humans
Richard Stallman's Talks in Switzerland This Week
We need to put an end to 'cancer culture'; it's trying to kill people and it is even swatting people
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, March 28, 2024
IRC logs for Thursday, March 28, 2024
[Meme] EPO's New Ways of Working (NWoW), a.k.a. You Don't Even Get a Desk at Work and Cannot be Near Known Colleagues
Seems more like union-busting (divide and rule)
Hiding Microsoft's Culpability in Security Breaches and Other Major Blunders (in the United Kingdom, This May Mean You Can't Get Food)
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is vast
Giving back to the community
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Links 28/03/2024: Sega, Nintendo, and Bell Layoffs
Links for the day
Open letter to the ACM regarding Codes of Conduct impersonating the Code of Ethics
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
With 9 Mentions of Azure In Its Latest Blog Post, Canonical is Again Promoting Microsoft and Intel Vendor Lock-in, Surveillance, Back Doors, Considerable Power Waste, and Defects That Cannot be Fixed
Microsoft did not even have to buy Canonical (for Canonical to act like it happened)
Links 28/03/2024: GAFAM Replacing Full-Time Workers With Interns Now
Links for the day
Consent & Debian's illegitimate constitution
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
The Time Our Server Host Died in a Car Accident
If Debian has internal problems, then they need to be illuminated and then tackled, at the very least in order to ensure we do not end up with "Deadian"
China's New 'IT' Rules Are a Massive Headache for Microsoft
On the issue of China we're neutral except when it comes to human rights issues
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, March 27, 2024
IRC logs for Wednesday, March 27, 2024
WeMakeFedora.org: harassment decision, victory for volunteers and Fedora Foundations
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Links 27/03/2024: Terrorism Grows in Africa, Unemployment in Finland Rose Sharply in a Year, Chinese Aggression Escalates
Links for the day
Links 27/03/2024: Ericsson and Tencent Layoffs
Links for the day
Amid Online Reports of XBox Sales Collapsing, Mass Layoffs in More Teams, and Windows Making Things Worse (Admission of Losses, Rumours About XBox Canceled as a Hardware Unit)...
Windows has loads of issues, also as a gaming platform
Links 27/03/2024: BBC Resorts to CG Cruft, Akamai Blocking Blunders in Piracy Shield
Links for the day
Android Approaches 90% of the Operating Systems Market in Chad (Windows Down From 99.5% 15 Years Ago to Just 2.5% Right Now)
Windows is down to about 2% on the Web-connected client side as measured by statCounter
Sainsbury's: Let Them Eat Yoghurts (and Microsoft Downtimes When They Need Proper Food)
a social control media 'scandal' this week
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, March 26, 2024
IRC logs for Tuesday, March 26, 2024
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
Windows/Client at Microsoft Falling Sharply (Well Over 10% Decline Every Quarter), So For His Next Trick the Ponzi in Chief Merges Units, Spices Everything Up With "AI"
Hiding the steep decline of Windows/Client at Microsoft?
Free technology in housing and construction
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
We Need Open Standards With Free Software Implementations, Not "Interoperability" Alone
Sadly we're confronting misguided managers and a bunch of clowns trying to herd us all - sometimes without consent - into "clown computing"
Microsoft's Collapse in the Web Server Space Continued This Month
Microsoft is the "2%", just like Windows in some countries