Maybe they are good at hand-picking players (who aren’t even from England, let alone Manchester, except Phil).

When it comes to tech, they seem to have hired Microsoft flunkies.

This is a longstanding issue with their site. Who on Earth chooses Microsoft for a site in 2024? The 2%?

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.

Summary: Sirius ‘Open Source’ has turned into a virtual company; it’s just some AWS account with a bunch of people working on their personal computers (not company computers) from home; even accounting is missing in action (MIA), failing to correctly pay a salary for about a quarter and sometimes missing pension contributions — an indication of extreme negligence or gross mismanagement

THE potentially frustrating vision of “clown computing” is that all computing is centralised, even more so than in the mainframe era. Back in the golden age of mainframes the companies at least got their own mainframes, which could be maintained by locally-sourced and privately-employed staff.

Sadly, the company I left this month is almost entirely centralised — albeit not within itself but rather the opposite. There are virtually no assets left in the company, not even a server or a chair.

Last night we had several site outages, which are very rare. I think this happens less than once a year.

S per this account, about 7 hours ago JoinDiapora was taken offline. To quote: “As announced in our announcement, the server migration is currently underway. Given the size of JoinDiaspora’s filesystem and database, this might take a couple of hours to complete. We’ll post an update when we’re done!”

The data transfer was far faster than I had anticipated. Only a few hours passed before they posted:

And JoinDiaspora is “back”! As we’ve announced, the pod will be available in a limited mode only from now on. As such, all features are disabled, including the ability to post new content. However, you still can:

Export your data and initiate the account migration as soon as it’s done.
Send and receive private messages.
Delete your account.
Manage your profile and account details.

You can try and request an export of your profile data now. However, if the export fails for you, please hesitate the urge to try it over and over again. If it fails once, it will not work on subsequent tries. If you request an export and it looks like it never completes, that’s also fine. We will look into why the exports are failing for some users, and we have to fix those issues on a case-by-case basis. This will take time.

So what’s expected to happen now, based on this page, which I quote in part:

I am currently not able to export my data. What will happen to my profile?

Some of you are currently unable to export your profile data. You might either see an error message, or it might look like nothing is happening at all. We are aware of this.

After the infrastructure migration is completed, we will start investigating the issues with account exports. Everyone who wants a data export will get one.

If you’re currently facing issues, please do not keep retrying the export over and over again. Please don’t use automated tools like scrapers to manually acquire a copy of your data. Doing so will only cause exessive server load, which only makes our work even harder.

As we don’t know what’s actually causing the export issues and how we can best fix them, this work will take some time. For each export, we have to observe its progress and intervene manually if errors arise.

We don’t know how long it will take, but everyone will get their account data exported.

There’s no ETA.

My plan isn’t to make a real comeback to social control media but to just set up bots that link to posts in Techrights and TuxMachines. No extra overhead that way. I very much doubt there’s an intention to configure the JoinDiaspora domain and change the code to preserve existing connections between accounts. This means that even a diaspora (mind the pun) from JoinDiaspora will be very much lossy.

Many thanks go out to the various people involved in this. It’s understandable that technical debt added up to the point where a ‘lifeboat’ approach is required. At least they try to offer us lifeboats.

“Social Control Media” is a term I coined many years ago; many people, even Wikileaks, have adopted the term since then. When I say “Social Control Media” I don’t limit myself to Twitter and Facebook; it also applies to LinkedIn (Microsoft claiming to ‘own’ your identity), GitHub (Microsoft claiming to ‘own’ your work/code), YouTube (video), and TikTok (crap). More importantly, as I’ve repeatedly pointed out in Techrights, Free software- and freedom-based sites aren’t robust to many of the same issues (volatility, misinformation) and even if they’re self-hosted, decentralised, federated etc. their existence is transient. Some sites or software will cease to be maintained within 5 years or less (in the case of self-hosting, a new version of PHP, for instance, can break the software you self-host).

Static sites with simple files are generally a good idea if you intend to keep your data, not only through the Web but whatever protocols will exist and get popularised in the future. More importantly, never rely on making “connections” online; make them “in real life” as real friends don’t need the Internet to keep in touch. I’ve hardly used the Internet at all to keep in touch with real friends.

Next Friday JoinDiaspora will go offline after more than a decade. When it comes back online it’ll be “read-only”, available temporarily only for users to be able to export their data and move it elsewhere (to another pod). All the connections will be lost, even if posts and comments are going to be preserved, according to the promises from the project’s core team.

Maybe I’ll fondly remember those 3,000+ “followers” I gained in JoinDiaspora.

What about the 2,000+ “followers” of Linux (TuxMachines)? I hardly ever knew them.

After thinking about it for over a month and having spoken to another person who has posted heavily to JoinDiaspora for over a decade (with many “followers”, too) I am pretty certain I’ll migrate both accounts to another domain, another pod. I’ve not decided which one yet, but it needs to be something that can last and keep alive for at least another decade. As I explained here a few days ago, I’ve already lost more accounts than I can remember. I don’t want to jump from one dying pod to another soon-to-die pod. As for self-hosting, it’s out of the question due to complexity (Diaspora became bloated; I tried installing it almost 8 years ago and it was already very heavy and complicated to manage).

For me, IRC provides a more reliable means of communication and it’s vastly easier — not to mention a lot cheaper — to maintain.

raph theory is essential to the Surveillance Industrial Complex — the privatised branch which maps people and assigns risk levels to them, depending for example on who they meet/met and/or speak/spoke to. Facebook extracts an immeasurable amount of work previously carried out by the Surveillance Industrial Complex. It outsources the effort. The cost is being passed to the public in exchange for games and pseudo-status.

Recently, owing to a friend, I came to realise that Facebook no longer requires anything more than a person adding himself/herself to the site in order for surveillance to commence. Users are now prompted to inform on peers, even those whose accounts (profiles) are vacant or inactive. Family connections, geo-location, face recognition/tagging are all done by one’s peers now. The only thing more worrying than this degradation of privacy is people’s lack of awareness of the ramifications.

The prompting mechanisms add all sorts of relational metadata, adding to prompting for tagging of photos with names, even names of people who are not registered Facebook users.

I often hear arguments that go something along the lines of, “if you don’t like Facebook, then don’t use it.” Well, it’s not as simple as that. You may choose to leave Facebook alone, but Facebook will never — ever — leave you alone. The Surveillance Industrial Complex uses is to gather intelligence on everyone in civilisation. I can almost sympathise with countries that banned Facebook.

While Libre/Open Source software usually costs nothing to acquire, it’s far from impossible to make a living with it; services and skills — requiring manpower — are the real scarcity.

Many problems seem to occur for those who use old versions of Gallery with the latest PHP, which has become notorious for its backward compatibility deficiencies. One bit of software that I use which is not compatible with PHP 5.3 is Gallery 1.x. It’s a version that I hacked a bit to suit my purposes, so upgrading would flush all my customisations away. Whether a sandboxed compatibility mode is available (such that, e.g., PHP 5.2 is run for specified paths) I do not know yet, but based on what people are saying suppressing the warnings and errors should be possible. It’s not a real solution but a cosmetic hack. If your Web host undergoes a PHP upgrade to 5.3 it can lead to lots of issues associated with out-of-date software. “A short time ago,” wrote my host (with which I host about 10 domains), “we emailed you to let you know that we were upgrading all our servers to the latest version of PHP. This is now complete. We therefore recommend you have a quick check of your site and ensure everything is working as it should.”

The bottom line is, from my personal point of view, is that PHP yet again proves that backward compatibility is too much for it to handle and, as such, one oughtn’t rely on long-term usage of programs written in PHP. Other authors pointed this out before. It’s quite the blunder. In Web-based environments in particular, a case of “lose compatibility or get cracked” may become more common if we become dependent on PHP.