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

SLAPP Censorship - Part 189 Out of 200: A Terrible Idea to Condemn Projects for Using Slop 'Code' When Your Own Employer Does This (and Profits From Every Company Doing So) or to Call Distros 'Not Secure' While You Advance Back Doors
"I don’t want a back door. I want a front door."
 
Links 19/09/2026: Many Patents Become Candidates for Annulment and Linux [sic] Foundation Takes More Slop Money to Promote Malicious Bots
Links for the day
Gemini Links 19/09/2026: The Fundamental Human Assets, The History of Gopher's "i" Type, and ROOPHLOCH 2026
Links for the day
Links 19/09/2026: "OpenAI and Microsoft Knew They Were Starting a ‘Doom Loop’ [of Mass Plagiarism 'Normalised' by Brute Force] for the web", Calling It "Hey Hi"
Links for the day
8 Series Going on at the Moment in Techrights
4 series about SLAPPs and related matters
Linux Kernel Becoming a Slopfest - Part 4 - Outsourcing to Microsoft, Approaching 10 Gigabytes
Can we blame Microsoft for those DDoS attacks? Partly.
Software Freedom Day 2026 is Today, Week-long Celebration in Brazil
In Brazil, Clownflare reckons about 1 in 20 laptops/desktops might use GNU/Linux already
Red Hat Lost 2,000 Staff (Net Loss)
Maybe by year's end it'll be a 20% reduction
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, September 18, 2026
IRC logs for Friday, September 18, 2026
Gemini Links 18/09/2026: Setting Goals, Tiredness, and Admissions From LLM Purveyors It Was All Along About Building Plagiarism Engines Sold as "Intelligence"
Links for the day
Links 18/09/2026: Microsoft Boasted Slop is Just Copyright Infringement/Plagiarism, Floods in Europe
Links for the day
Slop Ruins Development and Reverse Engineering, It Rewards Retarded "Slop Kiddies" (to Quote Andy ‘TheFlow0’ Nguyen)
Slop is just a fatal cancer that kills the body, then dies with the body it killed
Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and Mailing Lists Are Still Better Than Discord, Slack, and Discourse
Discourse is "open" "bossware"
Links 18/09/2026: Disgust Over LLMs and Why "Agents" (Bots) Are Nothing More Than "Spam"
Links for the day
Software Freedom Day is Tomorrow
events coming
Illegal and Unconstitutional Tribunal That SLAPPs Critics Does the Illegal and Unconstitutional: It "Rubberstamps Software Patents"
This is not a legal system. This is mafia.
Privilege in 'Linux' Foundation (Double Standards) and What the FSF Should Avoid Doing
If RMS can talk about politics, others too should be able to talk about politics
Seems Like Many Microsoft Layoffs Are Going On Right Now (Forever Layoffs)
Like IBM, Microsoft hopes shareholders will not know of morale and financial problems
More Threats From the Person of Restricted Boot Infamy
Remember this is the man who is the principal purveyor of restricted boot and who landed restricted boot in Linux
Snooping EPO Management, Sniffing Up Every Staff Action
It this a problem for whistleblowers? Of course.
Don't Do That
Options do exist. People should exercise freedom.
Iran Has Debunked GAFAM and Cloud Computing as Safety of Data
Cloud of smoke?
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, September 17, 2026
IRC logs for Thursday, September 17, 2026
SLAPP Censorship - Part 188 Out of 200: Used, Then Discarded, by Microsoft (as We Predicted All Along, It's Always Like That)
The longer they carry on with it, the more scandalous this will get
Linux Kernel Becoming a Slopfest - Part 3 - Besieged by LLM Bots, Now Hiding Behind a Wall of JavaScript
The series began 3 days ago
Gemini Links 18/09/2026: Modern Linguistic, Boxing, Turning 40, and Solar MiniServer
Links for the day
Links 17/09/2026: Studio Closures and Negative Rumours About Microsoft XBox Again
Links for the day
What's Wrong with Microsoft's GitHub, New Article by Jacob Bachmeyer and Richard Stallman
licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License
EBay is Going to Die Soon
Users will flee
Red Hat PIPs. The Only Question is, How Many?
Insiders know what's coming soon
This Week The Register MS Published a Page With "AI" 34 Times in It and It Was, as Usual, Paid SPAM!
Does The Register MS understand that it is doing harm to its audience (for temporary gains)?
43rd Anniversary of the GNU Project Announcement
Coming soon
General Assembly (Meeting of All Staff) Starts in Hour Ago to Discuss Strikes at Europe's Second-Largest Institution (EPO), Strikes to Last Until End of 2026 (If Not Further)
The media absolutely does not cover this and that's intentional
SLAPP Censorship - Part 187 Out of 200: Reminding Ourselves of the Great Damage Garrett Did to Linux (for Microsoft)
he rejects freedom
Cancel Culture is a Cancer That Harms Democracy, Justice, and Science. It's Designed to Help Corporations Vanish Their Critics.
"Codes of Conduct" sounds benign; in practice, however, it is not
Links 17/09/2026: Class Action Lawsuit Over GAFAM's "NameTag" and Automattic Hides What It Did to CEO Mullenweg (or Why)
Links for the day
Gemini Links 17/09/2026: Google Signals the End, ROOPHLOCH Coverage, EBay Uses Offensive Bots to Falsely Accuse Users of Stuff
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, September 16, 2026
IRC logs for Wednesday, September 16, 2026