he ‘video sharing’ [sic] site YouTube is getting more aggressive over time and it tries to block people from accessing videos in a way that suits them.

Similarly, x.com now blocks and sends threats to Nitter instances.

Any time we access or link to such sites (x.com and YouTube) we reward such behaviour and signal to them that acting this way is acceptable or tolerated.

HE other day I was contacted by Christine from FOSS Force. I thought the matter was worth documenting in public and I carefully checked that no personal information would be divulged in the process, not something embarrassing anyway (if told otherwise, I’d modify accordingly). Regarding FOSS Force ownership, she told me, “I notice that you identify articles on FOSS Force as being on Unicorn Media, which is an identity that hasn’t existed in about 10 years down.”

It wasn’t until then that I realised she ran another site, which I took a look at. It turns out to be a very old site.

“It ceased to exist after we shut down The Unicorn Shoppe,” she told me, “a neopagan-focused retail store that we started in 2001 (ten years before FOSS Force existed). The store was an offshoot of AlternativeApproaches.com, a new age website I started in the late nineties that at one time had about 10,000 articles. A much smaller version of that site is still online, although we’re not not doing much of anything with it.”

That site is still active, it looks a bit similar to FOSS Force, and some of the articles are quite decent.

Christine made a polite request: “I would prefer that you reference FOSS Force as “FOSS Force.” If you insist on wanting to reference us by our legal, banking name, that would be AlternativeApproaches. Thanks.”

“Thanks for illuminating this,” I said, “I’ll pass on to the TR person who put “Unicorn” in the Perl module.”

This has since then been corrected, if “correction” or “correction” is the right term rather than rectified or updated or whatever.

The team said: “Thanks. (Though their site does still say Unicorn Media at the bottom of the main page.)”

It has since then been updated.

“I am grateful for the update directly from Christine,” said the team. “And I am doubly glad that Foss Force is still up and running and doing great work.”

It is indeed.

It’s nice to be able to have such exchanges with peer sites, which act amicably. They’re not competition but allies.

oday we are one week away from September and I will soon ‘push to live’ the new version of “Today in Techrights” and “Over at Tux Machines…”

There seem to be no bugs in these. We still test a number of other things.

There’s also room for more scripting to lessen the manual work.

have just taken a look at 12-month trends in Clownflare. It’s not hard to see how in the past year GNU/Linux steadily gained. Another year or two like this and the international average might show 10% or more for GNU/Linux.

In statCounter it already says 9% or more.

2 days ago: In Defence of Physical Tickets

any people actually think or genuinely believe that “going paperless” (i.e. no more paper receipts, bills etc.) makes them look smart. In reality, they typically surrender to brainwash from greedy companies that try to avoid manual labour, shipping costs, and materials. There’s a good reason to have (both get and keep) a paper trail. It’s not surveillance, it is for you to control, even shred if so you wish.

Last week I was almost completely away from the computer for three days and I didn’t miss the computer, the Internet, my inbox etc. Not at all. I didn’t check E-mail for half a week and didn’t miss anything critical. I did not use a phone either. In some sense, I guess that I became anti-computers in many contexts; I’ve noticed that some of the more senior judges seem to be like that as well, as some work 100% on paper (markers, sticky notes, handwritten notes, bookmarks and so on). It is a case of “the right tool for the job” and all that, a friend has explained to me, as “computers make sense in a lot of places but should not be shoehorned into workflows where they do not belong.”

In modern times the idea of “disconnecting” (from computers, not just the Net) became known as “Detox”, recognising the fact that digital things can be “Toxic”.

here are cyber attacks against our Web sites this week. These attacks take several different forms. These are clearly censorship attempts. We have paper trail to prove that.

Any attacks – no matter their form – tend to indicate fear. In this case, the fear is that information that we published will be available and remain available for many years to come.

Sustaining attacks is one thing; reporting them is another. What’s happening is illegal. It will be treated as such.

We’ll carry on publishing as usual. Curtailing access to information is never a winning strategy for all sorts of reasons.

AM not sure who is doing this and why, but the server of Tux Machines is under DDoS attack. It impacts Techrights as well. I wrote about this back in April when it began, then again ~3 weeks later.

The Web is so chaotic on so many levels.

CDNs are not the solution. Access gatekeeping with JS is not the solution either, it’s another new problem.