No need

he coming “Birthday” or “Anniversary” of Techrights is only days away and I didn’t prepare anything special because the team at Techrights still believes that it’s better to spend a year building as a form of celebration.

Birthdays are typically a “kids’ thing” – a special day for a child to feel special or the “centre of attention”.

Birthdays are more important at numbers like 10 or 20…

Techrights is turning 20. Birthday? No.

he heavy traffic is mostly from bots, but the frequent blogging seems to have paid off and this month brought a lot of activity – to the point where I had to increase bandwidth thresholds.

SSL, schestowitz.com:

* Not viewed traffic includes traffic generated by robots, worms, or replies with special HTTP status codes.

No SSL, schestowitz.com:

* Not viewed traffic includes traffic generated by robots, worms, or replies with special HTTP status codes.

20+ years ago it looked very, very different.

The aim is quality

raffic is something everyone online wants, aims for, even craves.

Not road traffic. Traffic on the Web.

However, slop scrapers/bots are a major nuisance that eats away at underfunded sites.

Days ago I had to ask the webhost to increase my bandwidth quota. They did so free of charge, gratis. I’ve been with them for over 22 years!

Traffic in tuxmachines.org and techrights.org also grew recently. In Gemini, for example, gemini.techrights.org served 682695 requests in the past 5-6 days. In gemini.tuxmachines.org 209418 requests. On the Web, techrights.org served 507210 yesterday and 422396 the day before that. In tuxmachines.org it was 1028214 yesterday and 1285718 two days ago.

For those sites our community does not have bandwidth limits, but that might change in the future. Thankfully we are funded by an eager collective.

Keeping traffic down, especially undesirable traffic, is a desirable thing.

HTTP:

HTTPS:

wenty-two-year-old sites or blogs are rarely still active (or online at all). My personal site (not in this domain) turns 25 next year, but this blog is 22.

With about 7 days left in this month, the traffic this month is the heaviest (or highest) this year. The blog’s readership has also gone up, as I write here more regularly again.

When I resumed regularly blogging (here, not elsewhere) I didn’t know if it would catch on. It’s no longer 2004 and many people waste away their lives in social control media.

I wish more people would start or resume blogging. It takes more time (to choose words carefully, add links and so on), but it tends to pay off.

There’s nobody to talk to

ARLIER this week I said I would visit (in person) Manchester City Council to discuss issues with browser compatibility in their Web site.

I finally did so yesterday afternoon. As planned, I brought pen and some papers in order to take notes.

I arrived at about 1PM. Prior to that I went to Heron House (registration office) to ask for directions. As a slight divergence, because Heron House also houses GCHQ, I couldn’t help but notice about 4 people, some with heavy firearms, at the front entrance (I assumed due to high perceived threat from Russian or Islamic terrorists). I don’t think I saw anything like that before in Heron House. Worrying? Maybe.

Back on topic, so the folks in Heron House kindly and politely directed me where to go (another building, just across the road). The person at the entrance was just some useless (unaware of what his job was) contractor, but once at the first floor their staff was very helpful. There was hardly a queue. That’s good!

Heron House was OK, unlike before. The other building was more hostile, as they seem to interpret complaints (about service/disservice) or unhappy customers as a threat and then prematurely escalate in order to intimidate ‘dissenters’. To their credit, they quickly deescalated owing to staff that realised they had over-reacted. I’ll come back to this point at a later point. Also to their credit, there was no queue and quite a few people at the desk (3 ladies).

The “final destination”, Manchester City Council Customer Service, wasn’t technical and that’s fine. I tried to ask where I can speak to technical staff or, if feasible, file a report about the site. They insisted this was not possible and that was obviously a lie. It was either laziness or obstruction.

I explained to them, politely, that both my wife and I didn’t use Chrome or Chromium-based browsers and thus, like “disabled people”, we were excluded or left out. I explained to them that tens of thousands of people in Manchester alone probably find themselves in the same position as us and being technical and willing, I wished to do something to correct this. I moreover explained that what the Manchester City Council does – even if by contracting a rogue or clueless third party – leads many people to frustration and forces many users to abandoned perfectly capable Web browsers. I added that unwittingly the Manchester City Council helped American monopolies cement monoculture on the Web and this was easily fixable (if only I could raise this issue with the correct person/department).

This led nearly nowhere. I told them that those companies were “hiding” from feedback as it would be “costly” to handle it. I said that certainly someone at Manchester City Council (which is where I already was) could handle this but layers or bureaucracy or procedures prevented them from being contacted.

In the next parts I’ll explain two attempts to reach the right department and why it’s anything but assured.

Customer services everywhere have deteriorated. Impersonal authorities and companies would become the ‘norm’ unless challenged.

80 users online

HE tracker has been back up for over a week and it shows that we have a steady community that after 18+ years is still online and still chatting in real time.

This has significantly lessened our dependence on E-mail. I probably send out an average of just 1-2 E-mails per day, closer to 1 than to 2.

IRC has always been relevant and it still is.

I wonder what RMS thinks of it

ix years ago, in October 2020, I worked on making a text-only (bulletin) version of Techrights. The sister site would have the same thing 3 years later.

In the same month I experimented with putting these bulletins in IPFS, then I looked into more protocols (like Gemini Protocol, which I had already explored before but did not adopt).

So there’s a sort of anniversary in late October. It coincided with the COVID-19 stay-home directives.

Free software (like IPFS) has since then stagnated somewhat. Like blockchains, we barely hear about it anymore.

It still exists, but how many people use it?

I don’t think RMS knows much (or anything) about IPFS. He’s not a fan of fake-coins, so he would probably find IPFS off-putting.