‘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).

Crossposted from Techrights

HREE years ago we abandoned WordPress. It was a much-belated success story as for reasons specified a decade earlier we had long planned to abandon WordPress. More and more reasons added up, even before WordPress and especially WordPress.com became slop-ware (LLM integration that users mostly loathed; data was also being passed for training plagiarism).

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