NTERNET services and the Web are not the same thing. There’s more to the Net than the Web browser and Google relies on many people using the browser and nothing else.

About a week ago Google introduced “Gemini Pro” or “Gemini” and it seems likely it was intentional – the aim being to hijack the name of Gemini Protocol [1, 2, 3], primarily a way of bypassing the Google-controlled or Google-dominated Web.

Google has become very malcicious. Don’t trust today’s Google.

BOUT a month ago I redid the site SciFitness to better align with the present. The site was over 12 years old and thus in dire need of updates. The content was very out of date (I was in my 20s when I wrote it) and my wife currently sells quite a lot of fitness products, so it was changed accordingly. The use of iframes is far from desirable, but eBay is funny like this and it’s also hostile towards being embedded within another page. Perhaps this is all just an interim “solution”.

If you wish to support my work online, one excellent way to do so is buy something from the store. At least this way you get something for the money.

HE situation at SoylentNews (SN) is not as bad as I was led to believe. As someone explained to me recently, it seems to boil down to ego and “bad communication”.

We (Techrights mostly) had similar issues with the host. I say host, as the core team was communicating OK. Let the SN situation be a cautionary tale. While I’m not sure much can be said about SN publicly to make up for the initial and perhaps a bit speculative assertion about bad faith inside or among SN folks (this assertion turned out to be correct), I do wish to put it on the record without any names:

“I’m willing to go into full details as much as I see it. I’m just one viewpoint but I’ve had the pleasure of lengthy conversations with everyone involved and it’s just my hot take. I’ve talked with NCommander more than anyone else by far. The staff just completely cut off for him. We spoke for hours a day at length for months during that time. Everyone’s right and everyone’s wrong at the same time. It’s quite amusing how it got here but everyone felt like they were doing the right thing or protecting something. A bunch of false starts, ego, bad communication, and bad faith from all parties.”

Thanks and deep gratitude go to this person for illuminating this for us. There’s a lot to be learned from that gruelling ordeal and one can hope that SN will indeed go on for decades to come.

Sadly I find myself targeted more and more by harassers who resort to criminal activities, trying to seed discord and hostilities.

started this site in 2001 or in 2002. The domain schestowitz.com was registered in 2004 because the site had grown large enough to merit an independent server.

But years later I became busy with other sites and activities, even predating social control media like Digg.com.

In more recent years the sites moved to their very own system, or a static site generator that is simple and flexible enough to extend without an upstream project (always racing to break stuff and impose bloat you neither asked for nor needed).

In summer of 2022 we migrated a site founded in 2004, based on Drupal, to a new perl-based static site generator. The project was a success and the site is growing by about 50 pages per day. The site is tuxmachines.org.

This past September, just over a year later, we did the same to techrights.org, a site that turns 17 tomorrow. techrights.org ran Drupal, WordPress, and MediaWiki.

Not only was the migration successful; it resulted in page delivery times about 10 times faster and we’re able to produce more a lot faster. Details about the perl-based static site generator were presented in a conference this past summer.

Both sites are composed and edited by an international team. A lot of the editing is managed via ssh with UNIX-style permissions/access control. The scale of the perl code is a few thousands of lines of code, plus bash wrappers and aliases to simplify usage.

The code is AGPLv3-licensed and available via Git or Gemini Protocol.

don’t typically check Web statistics (I stopped checking for this site over a decade ago because it was a waste of time that did not help meaningfully improve anything, except ego or vanity), but this past week in Techrights 4 million requests (hits) were served over HTTP/S and since the start of this month almost 400,000 requests were served over Gemini. IPFS does about 40 GB of traffic per day, circulating Techrights content in a peer-to-peer fashion.

This coming December it will be one year since I resigned from my job (after nearly 12 years). The decision to leave likely came later than it ought to have come; I thought about it since 2018, but it finally happened last October when they were trying to force everyone to adopt a work mobile phone.

Techrights has grown not only on the Web. It is growing outside the Web and this is very important because this means the site’s relevance isn’t tried to the relevance of the Web itself.

Video download link | md5sum 2b05fb5773a9dbb62489443cea324fe4
BT and the Vanishing Discounts
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

ESTERDAY when I checked E-mail I saw a message with the subject line “Driven from template” (yes, it’s a mistake, they mass-mailed perhaps millions of people and forget the set a subject line).

They said “line rental” costs would, in effect, rise by yet another 8% or something like that. That’s after the price had already been raised several times in recently years.

In addition, BT intentionally slows down connections.

The video above documents a call and show how I managed to keep the price lower. You really have to negotiate quite hard with them, especially if you don’t want to be ripped off. It’s a real nuisance at times.

As Ryan just put it in IRC: “ISPs play the “We’ll raise your price after a promo but if you bother to call us every year we’ll lower it again. That way they get to gouge people who are not sensitive to price, embarrassed to ask, or too busy. You just chat with a customer service person in the Philippines or something over a pop up box. They don’t give a shit what you pay for your internet account. They get a bonus for retaining customers.”

All about bundling and complicated structuring for tiers (artificially-degraded services)

moved to fibre-optics earlier this year. It was already possible in 2021, but following a series of blunders I decided to delay the transition by nearly 2 years.

The thing about it this year is, BT lied about various things. It also lied about speeds (downstream and upstream) of the connection. How do I know? Well, the other day I did large uploads and then BT all of a sudden phoned me. It was a sales rep. He almost immediately started asking me if I wanted to upgrade speeds. I politely declined and explained why.

But now it’s changing some more. It now ‘feels’ different; now they seem to be severely throttling my uploads (probably to upsell again after a ‘free trial’ which lasted a fortnight; after this trial they tried to upsell it several times). How desperate are they for extra money?

Everyone knows that fibre should not be 100kB/sec upstream, no matter what (unless there is something wrong at the other end, the receiving end).

They want more money, so they hobble/throttle by upstream speeds and then phone me to ask me to pay more. They want me pay yet more money to get what I ALREADY paid for. Not nice. Will they be doing so more aggressively once they’ve transitions almost everyone to fibre-optics, under-delivering intentionally?

Your misery and impatience should not be their profit prospect. Because then they have a financial incentive to make you miserable or less productive.

BT “customer services” may fancy saying they don’t intentionally slow down connections, but of course they do. Selling you back the “real” speed is part of the business model. It’s a class system.