Bonum Certa Men Certa

Techrights Statement on Paths Ahead in the Era of News Drought and Widely-Waning Web

Summary: We're striving to get into a habit of publishing about a dozen blog posts per day; in order to do this we change our strategy with immediate effect

YESTERDAY we wrote about the need to pause and rethink how we do articles and how we curate Daily Links. We've since then experimented with a new approach and published about half a dozen articles with many recent references in each.

This site is turning 17 in a few months. It did change (it evolved) a lot over the years. Daily Links turned 15 this past February and IRC turned 15 about a month ago.

It is with that in mind that we:

  1. Pause our old approach of gathering news links (too low a signal-to-noise ratio in them).
  2. prioritise writing new articles, even if that means fewer batches of Daily Links
  3. Prepare videos where video presentation is more suitable and desirable than textual form


We're in the privileged position of enjoying greater personal freedom than ever before (when this site started in 2006 I was still a Ph.D candidate working on my thesis, later I worked part time and then full time). We'd like to make best use of time to promote Software Freedom and to advance justice, with greater focus on science and technology matters rather than "pure" politics.

Social control media is in disarray at the moment (several large platforms are collapsing, not exactly for the same reasons). We hope that many of the escapees will end up self-hosting and, better yet, adopting Gemini.

In recent years we've been producing over 3,000 blog posts (with analogous GemLog posts) per year and we should be able to do over 4,000 a year if we adopt the correct strategy. Priorities need to change somewhat. We have some exciting (to me us least) plans for the next 5-10 years; they're not limited to the World Wide Web, so the fate of the Web does not matter so much to us (we're resistant to the Web's demise; all our articles are in IPFS, GemText, plain text and more). We have hitherto identified where a lot of time was being (mostly) 'wasted' and we will work to correct those older habits and hopefully exceed a dozen blog posts per day once the dust settles.

The Web is getting smaller (yes, we've provided evidence over the years that it is shrinking over time), search engines rapidly deteriorate in terms of quality (the reasons for this merit a discussion some other day, in isolation), and newsrooms collapse at an alarming rate, with editors forced to resign from widely-known news sites almost every week. These trends seem irreversible for "business reasons". There's no point fighting those trends. No single person or company can change that.

Recent Techrights' Posts

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Links for the day
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barristers are expensive
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Over at Tux Machines...
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IRC Proceedings: Friday, March 27, 2026
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Things aren't looking well when one considers revenue is acquired, not earned
"Linux" Slop Turning Rarer, New York Times Nowadays Contaminated With LLM Slop
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Please do pay attention to how the media treats these strikes in Europe's second-largest institution
Slides From the Presentation Discussing EPO Strikes Until End of June or Until End of 2026 (Maybe Next Year Too)
More to come soon (later today)
IBM Cuts Are Everywhere (Global), the Aim is to Lower the Pay
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Mozilla is Not a Privacy Company, Mozilla is Run by GAFAM Executives and Managers Who Came From American Surveillance Companies
Would you trust a VPN they claim to be "free"?
SLAPP Censorship - Part 25 Out of 200: That Time Matthew J. Garrett Got Temporarily Banned/Suspended From Twitter
That he gets banned from large social control media platform is hardly surprising given his combative communications
Ubuntu Started as Free With ShipIt, Now It Becomes Payware That Exploits Debian Volunteers (Slaves)
"Ubuntu" the distro now replaces the GNU components inherited from Debian with a bunch of Microsoft GitHub (proprietary) things that reject reciprocal licences
Last Night The Register MS Published a Fake Article. It Mentioned "AI" 27 Times.
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Links 27/03/2026: Google Executive (GAFAM, US, Surveillance) "Named the New BBC Head", Prominent Climate Scientist Resigns From NASA
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Slop Plunge
we can already "smell the blood" of the so-called 'AI industry'
IBM Media Puff Pieces While Layoffs Go On and On
Has the PR industry absorbed the press?
Media Says Microsoft Hiring Freezes, But There Are Already Microsoft Layoffs
They want the public to talk about Microsoft as if it's just not hiring when it is actually firing
Richard Stallman lynchings: Sruthi Chandran splitting Debian
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Over at Tux Machines...
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Links 26/03/2026: Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) Closes 101 Law Firms in 2 Years, "Please Compensate the Work You Appreciate"
Links for the day
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Has Greenland banned Microsoft and 'secure' boot yet?
IBM Pushes Workers Out, It Does Not Count Them as "Layoffs"
The number of IBM layoffs can be as large as tens of thousands per year
Hard to Find a Job After Working for Microsoft (Back Doors Giant, Bribery Hub)
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Microsoft Lost 31% Of Its Alleged "Value" in Five Months, Then It Got Downgraded
In 2026 Microsoft focuses on keeping the layoffs silent
Altering Perceived Reality to Make It Seem Like Microsoft is Thriving, Not Failing
pretend XBox did not die
SLAPP Censorship - Part 24 Out of 200: The Failed Effort by Brett Wilson LLP to Strike Out My Lawsuit and My Wife's Lawsuit Against Garrett (the Master Allowed Our Lawsuits to Proceed)
This is lawfare
Official New Figures Show That Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) Sees Rise in Dishonesty Among Law Firms Forcibly Shut Down ('Euthanised' Due to Misconduct)
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Back to Normalcy
In our datacentre at least
IBM is "Increasing Its Temporary and Part-time Headcount" While Net Headcount Falls (Despite Buying Many Companies and Their Workforce)
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Confluent Insiders: IBM Laid Off Over 800 at Confluent, Not Just 800
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EPO Union Decides to Continue Industrial Actions, Next Strike in Four Days
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Over at Tux Machines...
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