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.

ake a look at the tweets below, as recent as hours. I added green highlights.

Why does he still bother with x.com (at all) at this point?

adopted Gemini Protocol 6 years ago, a year after it was conceived. It has since then worked OK and several of our team nowadays manage capsules. The community has grown and people who read Geminispace have joined IRC (which is also nowadays managed by several of us; it is a neat little project of ours).

Last week Techrights served 305,682 Gemini requests – that’s more than the usual – and I began thinking about having a Gemini capsule for this blog as well. This is still something I’m seriously considering as a project.

At the end it’ll probably boil down to how often I update this blog. I could host the capsule from home on a Raspberry Pi 4.

oday I became aware of a site that goes a long way back and is run by a person I know and follow. It’s “a new age website I started in the late nineties that at one time had about 10,000 articles,” she told me. Along the side, in the sidebar, it says “Now on FOSS Force” (so the connection is not hard to see).

It’s good to see how she separated political writings or personal opinions from her coverage of FOSS.

HREE years ago we kickbanned a number of connected individuals from Techrights IRC because illegal things had been done. 2 years later a judge at the UK High Court acknowledged that bad things had been done; the issue was, there was a burden of proof put on us to show evidence of attribution and Tor was used by the perpetrators (several of them in the mix).

Just because you do not have a Code of Conduct (CoC) does not mean you must tolerate every online vandal in your network.

Freedom of speech does not imply a freedom to vandalise without consequences.

T was almost 14 years ago that I created this gallery (using Gallery, the software) for us to upload our photos after the main page mostly contained this dreary long list of photos to be shared. Sharing lots of photos by E-mail is just poor netiquette, E-mail is not a file-sharing protocol.

One point to make was, we “don’t need no stinkin’ Facebook” (or similar). It’ll soon clock over 8 million views.

Yes, on average it’s less than a million a year, but we don’t update that gallery much anymore (got better things to do).

O almost 3 years ago Google hijacked the term “Gemini” (in relation to Web/Net stuff), which makes it hard to find information online about Gemini Protocol, pretending Google’s slop brand by 4 years!

Despite the attack on the “brand”, i.e. on Gemini Protocol, Geminispace continued to grow.

What next can GAFAM do to derail alternatives?