oday I received yet another SPAM E-mail from BT, this time too promoting censorship of my connection under the guise of “Parental Controls” (which I guess means Cameron and his cronies are our parents who try to control us). The key content of the E-mail was as follows:

Hello,

We take online safety very seriously, so we’ve designed BT Parental Controls to help you stay in control of what your family accesses on the internet. It lets you block unsuitable websites and filter content you don’t want your children to see. And it’s free for all BT Broadband customers.

Setting up BT Parental Controls is quick and easy, and there’s no software to download. You can choose from three pre-defined filter levels: strict, moderate or light. Or you can customise it and pick individual websites you want to block.

To set up your filters, click ‘yes’ below, and you’ll go through to My BT where you can also update your settings at any time.
If you don’t need this service, click ‘no’ and we won’t send you this message again.

This mail did not specify what would happen if I did not press “no”. One day they might change the wording further to make censorship enabled unless requested otherwise. Worse yet, maybe new BT subscribers now have censorship on by default, as some sources seem to suggest. One sure thing is, Internet restrictions are on the rise here, and this has nothing to do with crime prevention or even decency. It’s all about control and maybe this is why the term that they use (“control”) is appropriate. It’s not you who’s in control. It’s BT and the government which it serves, also when it comes to surveillance and drone strikes (assassinations), as recently confirmed by the mass media.

T lies in many areas of its business, ranging from DPI (sniffing) to alleged back doors in its equipment (for surveillance). Well, BT support, both the technical and non-technical side that is, also makes some false promises and utters sheer lies that serve an agenda, usually covering up misconduct and incompetence. I have given numerous examples over the years.

My latest encounters with BT show that it is negligent and incompetent at the core, going all the way up to management. As pointed out some while ago, BT is still failing to send something it says with great clarity that it is sending (false promises which complicate things more than honest refusals) and when contacted two weeks later it has no record of the promise or any explanation. What’s more, a manager then fails to call back when (second lie) he said he would and when approached about it he merely makes another false promise (sending he would sent something, but never actually doing so).

If BT wants to lie to people to their faces (and managers do that too), what does that say about BT’s attitude towards clients?

The truth of the matter is that here in the UK swapping ISPs can involve weeks — yes, weeks if not a whole month — staying online (while landline changes assignment to brand of ‘choice’), so to drop one ISP for another is a big deal, especially if you work from home over the Internet (as my wife and I do). All I can do is warn others about BT. Avoid, boycott, ridicule. BT does not deserve to be in business.

raffic in schestowitz.com has reached high levels and as of December 5th there are over 5,000 “visits” per day (the quotes are due to the fact that some visits are misleading). The truth of the matter is, this year there was a struggle against bots and script kiddies, who seem to be interested in hammering on the site and increasing my hosting bills. Last month alone I had to pay an additional 15 pounds in bandwidth bills (almost 50 GB including the unlisted requests).

I once believed that having statistics at the high figures was the goal; then I realised that not all traffic is quite so desirable. Some parts of the sites are permanently disabled due to script kiddies who flood them with rogue requests. Those requests are being sent from zombied Microsoft Windows systems. The headers sometimes give that away.

The Web has become a mess because people’s computers are getting hijacked. Given what we know about the NSA’s war on secure computing, there is a party or two to blame here.

If one was to ask me what proportion of the traffic above comes from people, from bots (like search engines), and from zombies, I’d struggle to give an answer. The Web is a big mess now.

HERE is some good news for me to share. Yesterday I did something which I had never done before. I bought an existing Web site.

The decision to buy this Web site was motivated by the fact that it was one of my favourite sites (if not my most favourite site) and it was at risk of becoming inactive. That site is Tux Machines and it has received similar levels of traffic demand to those of Techrights. We are talking about over a million hits per week.

Compared to personal sites that I run, primarily Tobkes and Schestowitz, Techrights and Tux Machines are much bigger. They don’t even have AWStats installed, so it is hard to give meaningful statistics about them (other than cruder numbers derived from logs that include bots).

In order to show what Tobkes and Schestowitz are getting in terms of traffic, here are bar charts that omit all the bots (which account for about the same amount of traffic as real people):

Tobkes

Schestowitz

There are a dozen more sites that I manage, but their traffic is less than the above.

I am still not sure how I will run Tux Machines (this is being debated by core Techrights people), but the plan is to keep the spirit of that site and serve its valuable community as if nothing change since the site was born about a decade ago.

Over time I tend to find ways of making myself more efficient and productive, so maintaining many sites is not a daunting task anymore (it was a bit too much to handle a decade ago, almost leading to burnout). Suffice to say, if it weren’t for the Techrights community helping out with finding links, making suggestions, etc. it would have been much tougher to get this far.

I hate terms like “information economy” (suggesting that knowledge is only valuable if monetised). I never built sites because of greed; it’s about expressing oneself and helping others. All the above sites are run in the interest of sharing — not hoarding — and hearing from people who find these sites helpful if what motivates me to carry on.

“Richard Stallman Speaks About Back Doors After NSA Documents Leak” is the title of a submission that I summarised as follows: “Companies such as Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, and Google are scrambling to restore trust amid fresh litigation over the PRISM surveillance program. Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation and a newly-inducted member of the 2013 Internet Hall of Fame, speaks about not only abandoning the cloud, which he warned about 5 years ago, but also escaping software with back doors. “I don’t think the US government should use operating systems made in China,” he says in this new interview, “for the same reason that most governments shouldn’t use operating systems made in the US and in fact we just got proof since Microsoft is now known to be telling the NSA about bugs in Windows before it fixes them.””

The text for the next part of the interview is not ready yet. I’ve just released this second part (now in the front page of Slashdot), but I need to do some fact-checking on SELinux (NSA-developed) before releasing the next part. Busy times since the NSA leaks…

Identi.ca becomes part of the ‘Internet rot’ problem

“Wait, What? Identi.ca Doesn’t Care About My Data???”

ell, it just had to happen sooner or later. Face the facts. So-called ‘Cloud’ (or Fog as I prefer to call it) Computing is hype and it is dangerous not just in the security sense. Your data, or even your sentimentally-valued information, memories, etc. have no value to others, those who merely provide hosting for self gain or ego or whatever.

Over the years I have seen many so-called ‘clouds’ collapse, whereas with my stuff, almost everything is in tact, even what was online a decade ago (maybe IP addresses changed a little, but it is all still “up there”). This is because to oneself, data matters and data has value. It’s my data. To Fog Computing providers, your data is just mere “content”, something for other users to “consume”, potentially for “monetisation” by the managing party.

Even if the ‘cloud’ is built on Free/Open Source software, and even if that software is made available for download, there is no guarantee that data will be exportable from the database. Identi.ca is a good example of this point (more on that later). What a travesty!

“Why Are You Surprised?”

I previously wrote about my experience losing all my data and work at Digg and Netscape (see the posts “Digg Stabs All Users in the Back, Deletes All Their Content, EVERYTHING!” and “With ‘Cloud Computing’ You Can’t Keep Your Data Under Your Control“).

One could rename and do a rendition of “never fall in love again” as “never fall in cloud again”. Fog Computing is toxic, and the more years go by, the more people (and businesses) will recognise this. From losing access to new binary releases or newly-updated source code people are now losing access to actual data, which they never even retained on their own devices in the first place. What a suicidal decision that would have to be…

“Backup? Export? Where’s the Profit in That?”

Some days ago I made an effort to advise Identi.ca to preserve content and make old URLs accessible, for the sake of preservation. About a week earlier I enquired about the backup feature (experimental) being broken and not allowing me to export my data; this had been broken for years! I never receives a response Right now it says it “provides an incomplete backup” and finally I can actually export some data, but only the past month’s data (I have posted there for over 4 years).

Recently, having suffers another major ‘cloud’ data loss, I made a local copy of all my tweets. Twitter’s archive dump is well-formatted after Twitter announced the feature (months ago) and refined it over time, making it available to all users and not just select few, taking minutes to generate an archive and then sending a notification by E-mail, indicating an archive is ready for download (I have posted nearly 85,000 tweets). This is a commendable move by Twitter, but still, given that Twitter traffic declined 20% in the past 3 months alone (based on Alexa.com), how long will Twitter be hosting the tweets itself and thus keep URLs in tact?

“Sites Go Dark? Never!”

Well, actually it happens all the time, usually financial considerations being a major factor for the operator/s. Consider all the third-party image hosting services and link shorteners such as http://ping.fm/ that I used a lot in 2009-2010. These latter services are a nightmare even in the eyes of the founder of the World Wide Web as lacking any contextual information like link/page, the URLs are worthless; they are utterly dead and useless links, they cannot be recovered even through the Web Archive. Often enough this renders the tweets too rather useless. If people use shorteners in blogs, then they are truly misguided and they too will suffer the consequences.

“Didn’t Identi.ca PR Say it Was Just a Conversion

Identi.ca is trying to call this a “conversion”, but the only thing such sites seem to be planning to convert is user accounts, and not even many of them. Reading “Identi.ca conversion to pump.io” again, it seems clear all user data will be deleted (not left online, thrown away). As manual backup is trimmed/incomplete, this leaves users like myself unable to even pull the raw data while the site and the database are still online. What incompetence; what a betrayal!

“So New Software Platform Means Starting From Scratch?”

It sure seems to be the case. “The Identi.ca social network service will be moving to a new software platform on June 1, 2013,” says the announcement. This is a nice way of saying that the site is reassessing the way it operates and perhaps the business/operating model, neglecting all that was put into it by many users. It started by stating the migration would occur in one of the secondary domains and now this is coming to Identi.ca, as some people feared.

In a month-old post titled “Identi.ca conversion to pump.io” says:

Active accounts will be converted automatically to the new platform. Active users don’t have to do anything to continue using the service.

Accounts that have not been used since May 1, 2012 will not be converted. If you have friends or people you like on Identi.ca that you think should keep being users, please let them know. Just posting one notice will mean their account gets converted.

If you’re interested in seeing how pump.io works right now, you can set up an account by going to http://pump.io/ and clicking the “try it” button.

pump.io has a very different API than StatusNet. If you use a desktop or mobile client for Identi.ca, please check with the software developer to see if they’re planning to port to pump.io.

Backups of all public data will be available on archive.org after the switchover. You can also make a manual backup.

pump.io is under active development; some features you’re used to from StatusNet will be unavailable or will be implemented by third parties. There are a lot of things that pump.io does better, though. Social games, sharing pictures, and web-wide social buttons are just part of the new fun.

How hard would it have been to just keep the old CMS in tact, even for the sake of old URLs being accessible? Probably trivial bar space and CPU concerns, right? Identi.ca should reconsider its position on this. Maybe Evan (Identi.ca founder) can ‘kickstart’ a fund-raiser to help sponsor this; I would put my money in to preserve my data. Maybe others would, too.

New Identi.ca means the following: Heaps of broken URLs, disregard for people’s work which was posted online (essentially just like in the case of Digg, Netscape/Propeller, etc.), and elimination of many connections like “Followers”/”Following”. It was bad enough when theme-related information got dumped as part of the previous software upgrade. Not the same is being done with post data. Only user data is preserved (name, E-mail, etc.). Imagine if YouTube did the same thing, throwing people’s videos out with the bathwater… YouTube did throw away people’s theme-related information when it applied some updated, but these are often restorable with some effort. The same goes for Facebook with its layout tweaks. Imagine the outrage resulting from a Facebook announcement that it is dumping all old posts and photos…

“So It’s All Gone in a Few Days?”

Seems so, unless Identi.ca decides to keep the StatusNet setup in tact, as least for legacy purposes (I have thousands of links to Identi.ca URLs out there, and they are needed for context).

I have some mirroring of selected Identi.ca accounts in a IRC channel, which I back up and make available online for good. Alas, that is hardly a substitute.

“What Can I Learn From This Disaster?”

When your online work (including Facebook, Twitter, etc.) will no longer align with someone else‘s business model, say goodbye to it all. Yes, seriously. This is not a charity.

Yesterday I wrote about self-hosting one’s photographs. No guarantee of export options in Flickr, eh? Are you listening, Flickr MicroHoo! users? As my friend Tract put it in “Tracy’s photo album,” this is “better than flickr! I won’t lose all of my pics when flickr disappears.”

Recently, speaking to relatives or mine, I advised them to access Friendster to export or save their accounts’ contents before it’s too late to do so. A stampede to export would cost a site in the process of shutting down a lot in terms of bandwidth, reducing incentive to provide such an option, especially when there is no brand/reputation to protect anymore. And if you think Twitter and Facebook are any different, think again. The only difference is, those sites are probably quite a few years away from shutting down and throwing the content down the drain. Why else would the Library of Congress already amass tweets of everyone? Spying concerns aside (profiling people based on their posts from decades in the past), this shows that the US government too recognises that all Fog Computing ends up the same way — it ends up down. Not up, down. Offline, probably stored on some magnetic tape/disc in some warehouse owned by some company which had nothing to do with the data and not making accessible online, even to those who provided all this data. In due course this storage media too will erode, collect dust, and become inaccessible (incapable or getting salvaged), in essence destroying the data for good and not even giving data contributors a chance to preserve/curate the data themselves.

“What Should Identi.ca Do?”

It’s simple. Keep the data up. Keep the old URLS in tact. Make the privately-owned database accessible one way or another. If the backup feature permits complete download of all data for a given user, then it doesn’t resolve all the issues, but it may resolve some.

Y BT Internet connection has been faulty since the beginning of this year. I have spent no less than about 10 hours speaking to support representatives in an offshore call centre, all of whom go through the script and a list of steps that “test” the connection, never mind if a dozen people before them ran the same tests. I have been polite but assertive, especially after these issues persisted for months. But never ever did they send out an engineer (meaning, a UK-based person paid at UK rates) to address the issue. At one stage they sent out a replacement router, but unsurprisingly this did not resolve the problem.

Imagine having a flaky connection when you work from home (in the employment sense). Calls are dropping, SSH sessions are dropping, IRC logging and conversations are choppy, and even Web browsing is very erratic. Imagine this going on for about 4 months. Imagine having your ISP refusing to just fix the issue by sending an actual person to the site for investigation.

My issue have been escalated internally numerous times and I have just spoke to their manager about it. No compensation can ever recover or make up for the time and work lost due to BT’s systemic incompetence. But wait, it gets worse. Not only is BT too ‘cheap’ (must increase shareholders value!) to send out an engineer; it is unable to even follow up with calls that it promises to make. The automated phone reminder which says they would call works correctly, even phoning me to wake me up at 7 AM on a Sunday. But the actual representative ‘forgets’ to call. Oops. I guess the customer does not matter enough to inform. If the customer stays home for a 2-hour time slot allocated for a call, they can just be left out in the cold, right? Well, that’s BT.

My issues with BT were serious back in 2011 when they were unable to simply set up my connection, incurring weeks in delay. I should have taken the hint and taken my money elsewhere, but BT has a monopoly on the lines. So I stayed with BT, only after their cancellations department was very insistent and successfully persuaded me to give them another chance. They also compensated me which was an admission of guilt more than it was a compensation for all the time lost and the agonising experience lasing weeks.

BT’s issues are not technical. BT’s issues are systemic. The company assumes its customers are dumb. It insists on running simple tests rather than addressing low-level issues that have been ongoing for months. It would rather have you suffer for days and talking to poorly-paid employees than send out a person who — through direct physical contact with the infrastructure — can probably remediate the issue immediately.

BT is not a company that cares about people. It cares only about money to the extent where it forgets what customers actually mean and why bad service will give them bad reputation and discourage new customers from joining,

Today, after months of bad service, BT said they would send an engineer (at long last!) to my house, but only in two days from now (I stood firm on quick action), meaning that I would suffer from faulty connection for a couple more days until I go on vacation (Monday). I also need to wait at home for a five-hour time slot on Saturday. Great, eh? See how much bad service from BT impacts one’s life on a daily basis.

If you never relied on BT for anything, do yourself a favour and never do. BT doesn’t care about people, it will take your money and run up a tree, then tell you that you must be dumb and the fault must not be theirs. You are just a fool with his/her money…