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esterday we published post/page #14684 in “New Techrights”, 42 days after this year’s first (#13769). That’s 915 new ones in 42 days or almost 22 per day, on average (it would be 7952 for the whole year or 365 days at this pace). That’s in spite of me writing many more original articles in the sister site. Not everyone is happy about this. The hired guns of the Microsofters, who admit third parties pay for their litigation against me and against my wife, are trying to put me in prison, as noted in:

• Matthew J. Garrett Has Just Sent a Threat to Put My Wife and I in
  Prison Because His Own Spouse Says He’s a Rapist
• Threats From ‘Former’ Red Hat (Now IBM) Staff While IBM’s Likely
  Accounting Fraud Attracts Public Scrutiny
• Put Criminals in Prison, Not People Who Report the Crimes

I cannot stress strongly enough how absurd this is. Thankfully we have NGOs and politicians involved.

The hired guns in London are eager to turn the UK into another China. On behalf of despicable Americans and against the locals.

Crossposted from Techrights

Today, the Microsofters’ lawyers dumped on us four (yes, 4) very large boxes full of legal papers. Two were almost literally dumped on our home, cluttering the entrance. They’re about as tall and me and taller by far than Microsoft’s OOXML. By their clients’ own admission, some other party (or parties) funds these lawyers. So it would appear they act as a proxy, or instrumentalised as we explained this morning. To repeat: “A Web site called Gawker published a correct and amicable article about a billionaire, Thiel, being gay. Thiel couldn’t sue Gawker for anything, so instead he bankrolled the lawsuit of Hogan, drowning Gawker in legal bills.”

By their own disclosure to the Court this past January, they’re already north of 500,000 pounds for their own legal bills (including VAT), not counting the bills of the serial strangler from Microsoft.

All in all, one can reasonably estimate they’ve already spent close to a million dollars just trying to remove pages from this site, in vain. Even a million bucks didn’t do that. When asked who’s paying their bills they refused to answer.

They try to overcompensate with sheer volume for a lack of solid, clear arguments (we are the victims here [1, 2]). Judges do not have time to read so many boxes full of papers; these lawyers try to drown out our own arguments with decrees. They’ve also made it abundantly clear that they use Microsoft software to prepare this (as usual); American software, American clients, with an American president who fancies pouring out diarrhoea on the American people. ?

Related: Brett Wilson LLP Spreads Trumpism to the United Kingdom, Looking to Profit From ‘Legal Colonialism’ (Overriding Sovereignty) | Who’s the Mystery Financier of SLAPP Against Techrights and Is That a Millionaire/Billionaire?

Another day has passed, and yet another (almost) 100,000 Brits have been confirmed — with actual tests — as COVID-19 positive (the complete number is a lot higher). Many were hospitalised. Right now the BBC starts issuing headlines with questions in them… not statements of fact. That’s another sign of weakness, resembling COVID denial regarding deaths, belittling the lives of so many people.

AST night I saw a somewhat ‘trollish’ bunch of reports. I saw Slashdot [1], linking to Phoronix [2] with a grammatical mistake in the headline (“Yes, Linux Does Bad In Low RAM / Memory Pressure Situations On The Desktop”).

Let me first clarify that I’m no kernel guru. Far from it. I’m a programmer, but not an OS programmer or kernel developer.

“Is this accurate?”

That’s what I asked people who may know better. They know kernel developers (and development) better than me.

“Is it true or is Phoronix taking the piss?”

I saw comments on it (almost 100 in Phoronix and 400 in Slashdot), but they’re short and vague. How is Linux doing compared to other OSes?

“ZSWAP makes a huge difference (RAM compression),” one person told me. “GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="zswap.enabled=1 zswap.compressor=lz4 zswap.zpool=z3fold"”

“Windows 10 & MacOS & Ubuntu have RAM compression on by default,” he added.

“I’m not sure exactly what they have,” he continued, “but I remember reading about it before. RAM compression isn’t new at all. But it is relatively new (few years) to be on by default.”

Linux kernel space is typically ahead of the curve (compared to the competition); Con Kolivas comes to mind when it comes to claims that it’s optimised for servers but not for desktops (the scheduler, not RAM/swap management).

To check compression status on one’s system:

grep -R . /sys/module/zswap/parameters;sudo dmesg|grep zswap; sudo grep -R . /sys/kernel/debug/zswap;f;sudo sh -c 'cd /sys/kernel/debug/zswap;perl -E "say $(cat stored_pages) * 4096 / $(cat pool_total_size)"' # to check if loaded ; used ; ZswapCompressionRatio

How can one argue that GNU/Linux does worse than counterparts? Slashdot promoted this story with about 400 comments and Phoronix even has a grammatical mistake in its headline (Slashdot corrected it, Michael of Phoronix has not.) It’s an eyesore in a sense; both the message and the English. The headline also states that as fact even though it’s to be attributed to just one developer, Artem S Tashkinov. To an outsider (to kernel development) it may smack of clickbait. It’s stigmatising “Linux” as not successful on “desktop” because of “technical” “issues” (not OEM bribes, ISVs etc.), but if it’s based on purely factual bits, then let it be, I’m fine with it.

My gut feeling was, there’s likely more to the story; can Apple and Microsoft handle compression of RAM for instance? If so, how well? I don’t know people running Apple-branded systems and PCs with Windows on just 2 gigabytes of RAM (which is the most I ever had on any of my systems; same with my wife, who is a GNU/Linux user).

Another person, who is proficient at kernel matters, told me: “I have caused Linux to stall in swap hell many times and there are long list of particular causes of it. facebook made oomd to attempt to deal with it in userspace.”

The first person weighed in again: “they should compare to other distros, and to MacOS/Windows. But the complaint is valid, IMO: that Linux (defaults) *should* be ‘smarter’ when OOM; check what is your vm.vfs_cache_pressure. $ cat /proc/sys/vm/vfs_cache_pressure [...] I have mine set to 50, because this article makes sense to. (but I’m not sure what default is nowadays?)”

A third person wrote: “my Orange Pi with 2 GB of RAM running everything mainline is my main desktop, which runs generally fine with a swapfile of also 2 GB…”

That was in the #techrights IRC channel this morning.

The person added, “the bigger question for me is why applications these days are so heavy and slow…”

That last point is what I too have raised many times before. GNU/Linux is handling reasonably well a complete system with 2GB of RAM (or less). Super-bloated applications is where things start getting trickier.

Related/contextual items from the news:

1. Linux Performs Poorly In Low RAM / Memory Pressure Situations On The Desktop

   It’s been a gripe for many running Linux on low RAM systems especially is that when the Linux desktop is under memory pressure the performance can be quite brutal with the system barely being responsive. The discussion over that behavior has been reignited this week.

2. Yes, Linux Does Bad In Low RAM / Memory Pressure Situations On The Desktop

   It’s been a gripe for many running Linux on low RAM systems especially is that when the Linux desktop is under memory pressure the performance can be quite brutal with the system barely being responsive. The discussion over that behavior has been reignited this week.

   Developer Artem S Tashkinov took to the kernel mailing list over the weekend to express his frustration with the kernel’s inability to handle low memory pressure in a graceful manner. If booting a system with just 4GB of RAM available, disabling SWAP to accelerate the impact/behavior, and launching a web browser and opening new web pages / tabs can in a matter of minutes bring the system down to its knees.

Poulsen made a name for himself by burning Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning. How can this conflict in media be overlooked? Unless it is a political apparatus.

What happens when these foreclosures — fraudulent or not — get sent en masse and are potentially signed by machines? Someone from Florida sent me the following documents, serving to demonstrate what’s quite possibly abuse of power in order to confiscate people’s homes.

Watch the following intimidating letter:

Is that a robo-signer:

The following serve to demonstrate the same handwriting used for different people/names:

Look closely:

“Their lawyer sent me this copy-and-paste email foreclosure notices,” told me the source.

Preying on the vulnerable who lack legal advice and cannot afford to challenge these in court, the people named above (in signatures) probably make a good living taking other people’s houses.

For those still not seeing what’s iffy in the above letter, bear in mind that many people (perhaps many thousands) are likely to have received virtually identical letters. Ask around in Florida, dear journalists, and you might have a story worth more than Trump and Clinton puff pieces.

“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…

ERMS like “conspiracy theory” have become increasingly common when describing particular stories that are dubious. These terms (there are variations) have become synonymous with “false story” because more often than not they comprise scare-mongering and misdirection. There have been suggestions that sites promoting those “conspiracy theories” should be banned, but really, such theories have always existed and spread verbally. One of the fun things about the Web is that we can give visibility to such “conspiracy theories” and then bedunk them, helping people acquire or strengthen their critical skills. Like lateral thinking, critical skills equip people with a set of tests to apply in order to assess the validity of an argument, be it about religion, history, or whatever. So I’m all in favour of letting “conspiracy theories” spread. They help show people that not everything they hear is true, not even what they see on their television set. (Credit: image by Cory Barnes)

People’s blogs have become somewhat less active and more people choose to post material under other people’s platform (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and so on). Journalists too failed to evolve (for the most part) and their occupation dying, mostly to be replaced by PR. One has to transition constantly. The world today is inventing and progressing faster than ever before, especially on the Web which is relatively new.

1. Can we start briefly with your background, especially with Digg? How long have you been a user, and when and how did you become an active user? About how many links a day do you submit? How many followers do you have? How often do you get stories to the front page?

I joined Digg back in 2006 when it was still a young Web site that attracted GNU/Linux users. I became an active user about a month after I had signed up and habitually submitted around 5-10 stories per day. I am not sure how many followers I have. Over 2000 people marked me as their friend and some of them regularly vote my stories up (digg them). My performance as a Digger probably peaked in mid-2006 when I made the front page about 3 times a day. These days, I rarely perform quite as well because things changed a lot while I was absent in 2007. The site grew.

2. Can you walk me through step by step of a recent instance where you submitted a link and promoted it to the front page? How did you come across the link, what made you think it was right for the Digg community? And once you submitted the link, how did you promote it? Through IM, shout outs, some other method? In other words, what drove it to the front page?

I read many RSS feeds and I stumble upon stories which I think are important to GNU/Linux users like myself (many of whom happen to follow my submissions by choice, so focus is important). My aim is to share these stories with people. Most of them pertain to adoption of Free software, which I care a lot about personally. I do not promote stories artificially. I let Digg just do its thing. The fact that some people keep track of my submissions out of genuine interest helps a lot, too. I would rarely promote a link because it is dishonest, it is a waste of time, and it is not necessary if the submitted story is an important one.

3. What about stories where you’re not the first to submit it — someone else found it first. How do you usually come across these? Do people send you shout outs? Do they IM you? Do you follow the “upcoming” page or the recommended page? Obviously, your answer might be ‘all of the above,’ but what methods do you use more than others?

I always concede submissions if I find that there is already something similar submitted. I do not communicate in order to coordinate anything. Long-time users are systematic only in their passion for the topic/s that they focus on. I personally disabled shout-outs because I perceive them as comprising lots of noise that’s designed to game the site.

4. What is your opinion of all the stories about “bury brigades,” secret groups of power editors and various other conspiracy theories about why certain stories make it to the front page while others don’t? Do you think the algorithms are sufficient enough so that Digg isn’t easily gamed by marketers?

No, and I would love to see Digg tightening the rules, although I fear it’s virtually impossible. I have come across bury brigades, abuses, stalking, and been a victim of them too. There is also plenty of libel being spread. To me, addressing this issue is equally important. I have left about 14,000 comments in Digg but I hardly comment these days due to rampant abuse that’s slanderous. Policing of behaviour in the site is generally disappointing.

5. If you had to give a person advice for how to consistently get stories to the front page, what would it be?

To be perfectly honest, the democracy in Digg is an illusion at best. Staff ‘elites’ enjoy a status that’s skin to editorial control, whereas some lesser-revered users have few eyes on their submissions, so they receive little attention. This is not to say that’ ‘sensior’ users cheat; however, user status by all means plays a significant role.