A hard task

he noise on the Web has grown to the point where human traffic (not trafficking) can go undetected, not trivially discernable from botnets at times.

A visits spike like the above was likely a combination of real (legit) visitors and bots, but good luck finding which % was junk traffic.

Today’s Web is such a sad mess.

he site of RMS (online since the 1990s) has been offline for about 3 days. We don’t know what’s taking so long for it to come back online.

To RMS, his site is like Social Control Media but a lot better. He controls everything there and it’s in plain HTML, in static files.

Read on…

Science and technology as codified in caselaw

erman media (DW) reported how Julian Assange was granted permission to appeal at the High Court, but this didn’t mean going to the Court of Appeal, which we are going to pursue this month or later (soon). This is important for future cases. It’s about precedents.

The Net is not the Web and being able to distinguish between the two is critical. There are many hundreds if not thousands of protocols on the Net. Some are for videos, some are for devices to transmit messages. Experts can explain that in simple terms, but bringing experts to hearings is not cheap (not just flight ticket and hotels).

How to measure impact

hat is “worthless traffic”?

Suppose you’re a girl and you upload bathing suit photos. I need to chose this gender for analogy’s sake (as will become apparent later).

Upload photos.

To Facebook.

To Instagram.

Whatever.

You get many “likes” for it.

So f—ing what?

Who cares?

Will you look back, in your deathbed, recalling how many “likes” you received for a photo that is not artistic?

“Momma would be so proud of these likes!”

If you wanted more “likes”, you could expose a nipple or two.

Does that make it a great accomplishment? No.

Because it’s already erotica.

Few people would conflates accomplishment with some people lusting based on indecency.

There are male versions of the same (but different metaphor needed).

In social control media, you see people who can get a lot of “likes” for calling people insulting stuff, for using foul language and riling up a mob.

What sort of accomplishment is that?

Worthless traffic is like the above “likes”.

If you want a lot of traffic, you can published mindless garbage for “the masses”.

Quantifying things in “likes” and “traffic” is a mirage.

Ask more about “quality” or “relevance”; that takes actual work.

They pretend to

ids of the 1980s did not have computers at home, except those born in the late 80s or mid 80s. People born in the early 80s seldom had a PC at home unless a parent needed one for work or was working in the “IT” or similar industry/occupation. Mobile phones did exist, but very few people had them back then. To us, the kids, phones were “on the hook” and TV was the thing to watch things on (with a remote control; some TVs didn’t have that yet).

Now, by contrast, kids grow up with skinnerboxes and computers, such as tablets. They’re being spied on, they get exposed to loads of rubbish, and politicians who grew up in the 60s get to decide if it’s OK or not OK.

Politicians don’t represent the public interest.

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.