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).

irc.linux.org

rowth of IRC space was noted earlier today in Techrights and I’ve joined the IRC network of linux.org.

Unlike the site linux.com, this one has nothing to do with the Linux Foundation and years ago in IRC I spoke to the person who ran linux.org.

The address for the network is irc.linux.org with default port numbers.

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.

still remember when this site was new more than 2 decades ago. In the summer of 2004 I think I was in London for a sort of “summer school” focused on computer vision. I’d log in to check AWStat after ‘classes’ (lectures rather) and be happy if this site got like 100 visitors in a day whilst I was away from home. To me, 100 people were already a good accomplishment and back then bots were easier to tell apart, hence estimating the number of daily visitors (real human visitors) was feasible.

Fast-forward many years and now I speak to millions, not hundreds. With exposure comes envy, however, and envy leads to litigiousness.

I’d rather choose the latter (with the price of litigiousness) than remain an obscure Ph.D. student who attends lectures.

No “manners” anymore

ots and scrapers are ruining the Internet, not just the Web. Today I read that Geminispace too is targeted by them (the LLM plagiarism engines). Earlier today they engaged in de facto DDoS against us, though it’s hard to know what those rogue bots are actually for and who runs them. Maybe their purpose is purely malicious.

Either way, Web traffic will become meaningless without some further context.

In today’s Web, like with E-mail, it is about merely surviving online (because of the many predators online).

Who will be left to clean up the mess?

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?