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:

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?