There’s nobody to talk to

ARLIER this week I said I would visit (in person) Manchester City Council to discuss issues with browser compatibility in their Web site.

I finally did so yesterday afternoon. As planned, I brought pen and some papers in order to take notes.

I arrived at about 1PM. Prior to that I went to Heron House (registration office) to ask for directions. As a slight divergence, because Heron House also houses GCHQ, I couldn’t help but notice about 4 people, some with heavy firearms, at the front entrance (I assumed due to high perceived threat from Russian or Islamic terrorists). I don’t think I saw anything like that before in Heron House. Worrying? Maybe.

Back on topic, so the folks in Heron House kindly and politely directed me where to go (another building, just across the road). The person at the entrance was just some useless (unaware of what his job was) contractor, but once at the first floor their staff was very helpful. There was hardly a queue. That’s good!

Heron House was OK, unlike before. The other building was more hostile, as they seem to interpret complaints (about service/disservice) or unhappy customers as a threat and then prematurely escalate in order to intimidate ‘dissenters’. To their credit, they quickly deescalated owing to staff that realised they had over-reacted. I’ll come back to this point at a later point. Also to their credit, there was no queue and quite a few people at the desk (3 ladies).

The “final destination”, Manchester City Council Customer Service, wasn’t technical and that’s fine. I tried to ask where I can speak to technical staff or, if feasible, file a report about the site. They insisted this was not possible and that was obviously a lie. It was either laziness or obstruction.

I explained to them, politely, that both my wife and I didn’t use Chrome or Chromium-based browsers and thus, like “disabled people”, we were excluded or left out. I explained to them that tens of thousands of people in Manchester alone probably find themselves in the same position as us and being technical and willing, I wished to do something to correct this. I moreover explained that what the Manchester City Council does – even if by contracting a rogue or clueless third party – leads many people to frustration and forces many users to abandoned perfectly capable Web browsers. I added that unwittingly the Manchester City Council helped American monopolies cement monoculture on the Web and this was easily fixable (if only I could raise this issue with the correct person/department).

This led nearly nowhere. I told them that those companies were “hiding” from feedback as it would be “costly” to handle it. I said that certainly someone at Manchester City Council (which is where I already was) could handle this but layers or bureaucracy or procedures prevented them from being contacted.

In the next parts I’ll explain two attempts to reach the right department and why it’s anything but assured.

Customer services everywhere have deteriorated. Impersonal authorities and companies would become the ‘norm’ unless challenged.

‘Proof of life’

n a matter of ~2 weeks Wikileaks (not Wikipedia) is turning 20. I used to write a great deal here about Wikileaks and some accounts associated with Wikileaks wished to replicate some of my posts.

Over the years many pro-Wikileaks accounts perished in Twitter (now X) and Wikileaks’ Twitter handle has been dead for months. I wonder if Wikileaks will bother saying anything at all on the day it turns 20.

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.

Based on Falkon and Firefox

‘ve noticed many strange things today in the live pages of Manchester City matches and checked in two very different browsers to ensure it wasn’t browser-specific. The score does not show up, no related information either (minute, assists, goals). No line-up, stats, scores. Only “Commentary” and video show up, the rest is conspicuously broken/missing.

These pages were always bloated and full of DRM (no way to disable videos either, only pause them).

So I’ll be looking for alternatives to the official site. The admins went too far.

To keep an eye on a match should not take up that many resources. Now it’s not even working.

The official PL site is no better. Also horrible bloat.

To each its own

etting a solution to DDoS attacks is not easy because each time the pattern to tackle (without false positives) is a bit different and each incident can be unprecedented in one single site, so there’s no one-size-fits-all solution.

At the moment we combat another wave of nuisance bots and each time it comes there’s risk that everyone will be “away from keyboard” and therefore it won’t be detected.

What AWstat sees

raphs that say “traffic” can be misframed, as there are slop bots (scrapers) and all sorts of non-human activity in today’s Web. In relative terms, however, actively blogging this year has paid off and this domain rose in terms of reach. AWstat claims it can tell apart human from non-human, but its heuristics are outdated.

It says 1,336 people accessed this album this month (it is over a decade old!) and OS breakdown for August is as follows:

T was almost 14 years ago that I created this gallery (using Gallery, the software) for us to upload our photos after the main page mostly contained this dreary long list of photos to be shared. Sharing lots of photos by E-mail is just poor netiquette, E-mail is not a file-sharing protocol.

One point to make was, we “don’t need no stinkin’ Facebook” (or similar). It’ll soon clock over 8 million views.

Yes, on average it’s less than a million a year, but we don’t update that gallery much anymore (got better things to do).