Bonum Certa Men Certa

Techrights and Modularity

The downtime was not scheduled; but it was long needed

Techrights in limited mode



Summary: Why the Web site was down most of yesterday and why we focus only on a particular set of key topics, which we've assessed closely for many years

LAST night we rebooted the site's hypervisor for the first time in over 500 days, i.e. since the site's epoch on this server. Software updates and upgrades were applied and it now run the latest Linux kernel. It's Alpine Linux by the way. We also set up a container for the databases (Techright has three) and distanced it from the main site, which will also be moved to a container some time soon. With automatic/unattended updates we hope to enhance security; performance is already improved as abstraction layers are changed and components separated. Downtime should be reduced. Some time later this month we may also add "https" (TLS) support -- something which was hard to do over the years because the CentOS version we use lacks some key packages, which would be risky to install forcibly.



"It helps to have some redundancy and modularity."The long downtime yesterday was not planned; but since we've long encountered reliability issues -- partly if not mostly due to lack of disk space -- the migration was well overdue. We planned to do it this past Christmas, but instead it got done on Easter (Sunday). We'll do further work later this week, so more maintenance-related downtime will be very likely (we can't tell the exact time). In case the site is down, the latest articles (with up to 3-hour time gaps) can be found here. Better to have a mirror than nothing at all, right? This mirror is under our control (privacy), but it is separated from Techrights. It helps to have some redundancy and modularity.

Interest in our work is growing; over the past month a lot of people have linked to our investigations of Bill Gates (because he's running a PR campaign, piggybacking a pandemic for self-promotional purposes although he's not a doctor, not an expert in that domain and he never even graduated from college). We also received inquiries expressing interest in doing internships with Techrights. The number of people involved with the site continues to grow. Last week the site became unavailable about 10 times, mostly around the middle of the week, due to what seemed like a deliberate sabotage effort or DDOS. We have good defenses in places and intend to improve these later this month with packet-level filtering.

"What's most important is accuracy."Many sites write about the pandemic at the moment; it's estimated that over 90% of news and 'air time' this past month was devoted to COVID; we try not to write too much about it -- not because it's not important but because it's an area already widely-explored. For instance, TechDirt did some good work -- publication on how patents that came from the EPO's favourite fraud were used against COVID tacklers in France. It's like the EPO wants to help COVID spread faster and further. There's also that COVID 'Pledge" (in effect openwashing patents), national exemptions from patents (using emergency provisions) and various other interesting developments that we file under "Monopolies" in our Daily Links. We intend to focus on areas we know best, such as internal affairs of the European Patent Office (EPO) and Software Freedom. We always focus on matters we understand very well as it helps keep our record of accuracy. What's most important is accuracy. We're not COVID experts; we don't rely on cranks with a YouTube channel to explain it to us, either. Heck, we don't trust anything the famous criminal from Microsoft says about it. If he says something that the experts told him, then why don't TV channels invite those experts to be on the air instead? (Clue: those experts don't have the budget to bribe the media, giving it money with strings attached)

As noted hours before the downtime (maybe some readers missed it), in my 'home office' I've settled things. I moved everything to another laptop as my 11-year laptop had died a week beforehand. I probably wrote well over 10,000 posts using that laptop; it wanted to rest in peace and I could no longer salvage it (too many components thoroughly damaged with no pragmatic workaround).

Recent Techrights' Posts

Real Life Should be Offline, Not Online, and It Requires Free Software
Resistance means having the guts to say "no!", even in the face of great societal burden and peer pressure
 
IBM Took a Man’s Voice, Pitting Him Against His Own Work, While Companies Profit from Low-Effort Garbage Generated by Bots and “Self-Service”
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer
Links 26/09/2023: KDE, Programming, and More
Links for the day
Mozilla Promotes the Closed Web and Proprietary Webapps That Are Security and Privacy Hazards
This is just another reminder that the people who run Mozilla don't know the history of Firefox, don't understand the Web, and are beholden to "GAFAM", not to Firefox users
Debian More Like an Exploitative Sweatshop Than a Family
Wiltshire is riding a high horse in the UK, talking down to Indians who are "low-level" volunteers in his kingdom of authoritarians, guarded by an army of British lawyers who bully bloggers
Small Computers in Large Numbers: A Pipeline of Open Hardware
They guard and prioritise their "premiums", causing severe price hikes due to supply/demand disparities.
Microsoft Deserves a Medal for Being Worst at Security (the Media Deserves a Medal for Cover-up)
There are still corruptible/bribed publishers that quote Microsoft staff like they're security gurus
10 Reasons to Permanently Export or Liberate Your Site From WordPress, Drupal, and Other Bloatware
There are certainly more more advantages, but 10 should suffice for now
About 200,000 Objects in Techrights Web Site
This hopefully helps demonstrate just how colossal the migration actually is
Good Teachers Would Tell Kids to Quit Social Control Media Rather Than Participate in It (Teaching Means Education, Not Misinformation)
Insist that classrooms offer education to children rather than offer children to corporations
Twitter: From Walled Gardens to Paywalls and/or Amplifiers of Fascism
There's moreover a push to promote politicians who are as scummy as Twitter's owner
The World Wide Web is Being Confiscated From Us (Like Syndication Was Withdrawn About a Decade Ago) and We Need to Fight Back
We're worse off when fewer people promote RSS feeds and instead outsource to social control media (censorship, surveillance, manipulation)
Next Up: Restoring IRC Log Pipelines, Bulletins/Full Text RSS, Wiki (Archived, Static), and Pipelines for Daily Links
There are still many tasks left ahead of us, but we've progressed a lot
An Era of Rotting Technology, Migration Crises, and Cliffhanging
We've covered examples from IBM, resembling the Microsoft world
First Iteration of Techrights as 100% Static Pages Web Site
We want to champion another decade or two of positive impact and opinionated analysis
Links 25/09/2023: Patent News and Coding
some remaining links for today
Steam Deck is Mostly Good in the Sense That It Weakens Microsoft's Dominance (Windows)
The Steam Deck is mostly a DRM appliance
SUSE is Just Another Black Cat Working for Proprietary Giants/Monopolies
SUSE's relationship with firms such as these generally means that SUSE works for authority, not for community, and when it comes to cryptography it just follows guidelines from the US government
IBM is Selling Complexity, Not GNU/Linux
It's not about the clients, it's about money
Birthday of Techrights in 6 Weeks (Tux Machines and Techrights Reach Combined Age of 40 in 2025)
We've already begun the migration to static
Linux Foundation: We Came, We Saw, We Plundered
Linux Foundation staff uses neither Linux nor Open Source. They're essentially using, exploiting, piggybacking goodwill gestures (altruism of volunteers) while paying themselves 6-figure salaries.
Security Isn't the Goal of Today's Software and Hardware Products
Any newly-added layer represents more attack surface
Linux Too Big to Be Properly Maintained When There's an Incentive to Sell More and More Things (Complexity and Narrow Support Window)
They want your money, not your peace of mind. That's a problem.
Modern Web Means Proprietary Trash
Mozilla is financially beholden to Google and thus we cannot expect any pushback or for Firefox to "reclaims the Web" a second time around
Godot 4.2 is Approaching, But After What Happened to Unity All Game Developers Should be Careful
We hope Unity will burn in a massive fire and, as for Godot, we hope it'll get rid of Microsoft
GNU/Linux Has Conquered the World, But Users' Freedom Has Not (Impediments Remain in Hardware)
Installing one's system of choice on a device is very hard, sometimes impossible
Another Copyright Lawsuit Against Microsoft (or its Proxy) for Misuse of Large Works by Chatbot
Some people mocked us for saying this day would come; chatbots are a huge disappointment and they're on very shaky legal ground
Privacy is Not a Crime, Reporting Hidden Facts Is Not a Crime Either
the powerful companies/governments/societies get to know everything about everybody, but if anyone out there discovers or shares dark secrets about those powerful companies/governments/societies, that's a "crime"
United Workforce Always Better for the Workers
In the case of technology, it is possible that a lack of collective action is because of relatively high salaries and less physically-demanding jobs
Purge of Software Freedom and Its Voices
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer
GNOME and GTK Taking Freedom Away From Users
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer