Bots are chewing up way too much ‘traffic’, hoping to ‘monetise’ it at someone else’s expense

t has gotten gloomy again, so the hopes of going to the park are deflated again and this likely means lots of original articles, instead. Tomorrow we’ll exchange cards and celebrate with Jim Beam 14 years of happiness and teamwork. I said more about that in another site [1, 2], envisioning we’ll be too busy to write about the anniversary tomorrow.

Today I checked the progress in the blog in terms of visitorship, as it was not regularly updated in the past two decades because in 2006 I focused on non-personal sites.

It’s sad to see how much junk traffic comes from totally useless bots (not even search engines’ spiders). So much has changed, not just because of LLM slop. It seems like many people choose walled gardens such as social control media and many young people never heard of RSS feeds.

This predates the slop frenzy and it’ll make the population poorly informed, exposed to state-connected propaganda, and unfit to handle social life.

Techrights still growing

recently remembered that next month it is Wikileaks’ 20-year anniversary – one month before Techrights’.

Techrights is not a site anymore. Techrights is many things, including a community. The community is probably as old as its IRC presence, i.e. it goes back to 2008.

The Cyber Show (cybershow.uk) has been very active in techrights.org IRC (irc.techrights.org) lately and we forge alliances with groups whose missions overlap ours.

Seems broken/dead

have been told that “Osservatorio Nessuno ODV seems to have been pulled offline completely,” alluding to another apparent act of deplatforming, this time in Europe and due to actions of a fascist government in another continent!

“Perhaps that has to do with the removal of the other Italian group which has been fighting fascism for over 25 years?” (referring to Autistici/Inventati, as it was also a webhost)

I am very familiar with attacks on webhosts and ISPs. This was attempted against me many times.

Slop (not “AI”) is a scam

am hardly shocked that more and more people: 1) hate slop; 2) recognise slop does not work as advertised (media hype and FOMO); 3) know it’s just a bubble, a passing fad.

This is just the beginning, they’ll try to re-inflate this bubble, but it’ll be costly (more debt).

Hours ago:

simply would not use the ‘trans card’ if:

• My spouse who is trans criticises me and I say that this is due to craziness (something to the effect of, “I am perfect, my trans critics are crazy”; he has other trans critics who say he misuses/exploits the trans community)
• I admitted saying “transphobic shit” (in conversations)
• The “law” firm that I chose thinks punching trans people is “funny”
• I believe I can just call someone “nazi”, then it’s OK to punch ‘em
• I have no concern for or no respect towards women

What we can tell future generations and why many of my generation can probably relate

still vividly remember when I was 21 and began my Ph.D. degree at the Victoria Uni. of Manc. (before the UMIST merger).

The Web was just over a decade old back then. There was a lot of stuff people could not find on the Web. Spamfarms did exist, search engines certainly worked, but no slop was taken seriously (yes, it could be produced even back then, maybe it would be called “chaff” rather than “AI”).

Nobody would take slop seriously back then. There was no justification for the costs, either.

I remember looking through old archives of mine looking for things I can scan and upload. I wanted to add material to my personal site. To a certain extent I did. Some was already digitalised.

Now, in 2026, the Web is a junkyard. There’s little need to add anything to it unless it’s unique and of real value.

New stuff can barely be considered discoverable, unless it’s outsourced to some social control media and the user “mines” (wastes time on) ‘friends’.

The Web has generally been devalued not because of “bad people” who joined it. Bad companies are filling it with trash and erecting walled gardens.

RIP, Web.

High-profile publisher

n some sense, today was a special day.

It’s about science, not football.

I did not watch this London match, I only followed the score, hoping both teams would lose points (more so Arsenal).

While keeping an eye on the score I noticed having been cited in a major publication. As it turns out, an old article of mine has just been cited in ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) and it’s about Gemini Protocol where my writings became more prominent in recent years: