eonie Brinkema, appointed by Bill Clinton, works in a kangaroo court; it’s widely notorious for a rubberstamping-like behaviour in a variety of deeply political cases. “No one should have to face criminal charges for publishing truthful information,” said a letter to the editor yesterday, highlighting the nature of what some whistleblowers had done and got punished for. In exchange for them exposing crimes they got treated like criminals and this is more or less the job of Leonie Brinkema, protecting criminals by putting in prison those who spoke about these crimes. I don’t know Leonie Brinkema personally and it’s not even simply to find a simple photo of her face (drawings are out there and she looks a lot more furious in them).

It is expected that if (or when) Julian Assange gets ‘kidnapped’ and ‘shipped’ to the US Leonie Brinkema will be the sociopath who sentences him to death (or prison until death) for merely exposing the crimes of people like those who appointed her. What a crazy world we live in. They call it “justice”, but to those who set this court up it’s “just us”.

EVERAL months ago Gab banned my account which posted GNU/Linux news. It had many followers and said nothing provocative. No explanation was ever given for the ban. Nothing. Not even when asked. Repeatedly. They just zapped the account without warning. Then they pretended nothing happened, hoping nobody would notice that Gab is in fact a censorship platform.

Recently the site was offline for a week after a terror attack. The terrorist maintained a Gab account. Gab kept telling the media that it’s really just standing up for “free speech”, but that’s obviously a lie. It’s a fat lie. Torba is a liar and he knows he’s a liar. He’s just trying to profit from hate.

The site came back online just over a day ago and within a day my personal account got banned. I had many followers (about a thousand) and tens of thousands of gabs (mostly left-leaning and technical stuff). Did I post something obscene or offensive? No. Just some left-leaning news.

One therefore must conclude that the site isn’t just an echo chamber for radicals and sometimes terrorists. It’s a site that actively protects radicals (and sometimes terrorists) from opposing views. And that’s dangerous. Very dangerous. Gab is quickly becoming another Daily Stormer and at one point I received almost a dozen death threats and death wishes in just one day.

Since Gab has proven itself to be a censorship site (even twice in my case alone), it does not have the right to bemoan censorship. If the site is shut down forcibly and permanently, so be it. They cannot complain (calling it “censorship”) because gross censorship is exactly what these people do and we know in whose favour: violent, racist radicals. If you’re not one of them, then that might upset them and sooner or later you might get banned. Permanently.

used to complain that Twitter was shadowbanning and suppressing my account. As an act of protest, even though I wasn’t leaning towards the political worldview of most Gab users, I then opened an account there. I later opened another account, one for TuxMachines, in order to separate my GNU/Linux postings from more political ones (some people just want the technical news, not opinions).

The TuxMachines account has been in Gab for a long time, well over a year, and earned hundreds of followers (almost 500 people last I checked). I didn’t post anything controversial and didn’t do anything abusive.

More than half a day ago the account was terminated along with its 10,000+ posts! No prior warning was given and no reason is being given for this. They’re stonewalling. Even some followers of the accounts have enquired about it, but Gab isn’t answering. Curiously enough, as soon as I spoke out about it other people came out stating that they too had been banned by Gab, citing some truly ridiculous reasons.

Make no mistake; Gab isn’t some politically-correct hyper-sensitive site. The site has many accounts of literal Nazis, people who even call for genocides. For some reason, Gab appears to have no issue with such accounts. They cite “free speech”, but as the above comes to show that’s just a facade for tolerating extremely intolerant views, bordering glorification of violence (e.g. lynching black people) and condoning genocide.

Gab cannot really use the “free speech” card (or excuse) to rationalise having that cesspool among its userbase. They use terms like “free speech”, but they don’t actually believe in free speech. It’s a site for “snowflakes” who can’t stand leftist views and ‘gang up’ on those who express such views. Nazis? OK. GNU/Linux news? Get out!

witter is not a site that I like. Honestly, I don’t! In fact, I think it is getting worse over time. In 2016 it shadowbanned me a lot of times and I receive plenty of abuse there. I now identify as living in the North Pole to avoid messages like “you’re English, so…” (method of shooting the messenger). I only very reluctantly joined Twitter after I had begun participating in identi.ca for the purpose of posting Free software news. Prior to that I preferred just blogging, relying on people who subscribe to RSS feeds to find my writings. At the time there was also Digg.com, which I’m proud to say I was ranked 17^th on (they had millions of users at the time). Having taken a quick look at my Twitter account last night, I noticed that a milestone is approached and will have been reached by weeks’s end. I am nowhere near the most prolific users (like 38 million tweets for this Japanese account; see the out-of-date chart below), but quantity was never my goal and besides, as many people know, I primarily post in Diaspora these days, with posts being exported from there to Twitter. I vastly favour these Freedom/Free software-centric communities (like identi.ca at the time and nowadays GNU Social, Diaspora etc.) and I humbly think that all this social control media phenomenon is a waste of human productivity and a threat to real, in-depth, fact-checked journalism. But no single person can tell the world how to use the Internet and how to communicate; if social control media is what’s “normal” and “necessary” now (adapting to the so-called ‘market’), then so be it.

T IS now pretty much confirmed that GitHub has sold out to help Microsoft cause further damage to Free software (FOSS). In a nutshell, Microsoft’s motivation is shallow enough to see:

1. Microsoft wants to pretend FOSS was never the competition (this causes confusion which serves Microsoft’s bottom line)
2. Microsoft will lie to officials who sign contracts about being an “open source company” (all of Microsoft’s core software remains proprietary with malicious features like surveillance and DRM)
3. Buying out, controlling the competition
4. Patent blackmail, bribery and other attacks on FOSS carry on while Microsoft pretends that all is well (“we come in peace”)

So it’s time to devalue GitHub; it won’t make it any cheaper for Microsoft to buy at this stage (they agreed on the price).

If you have substantial work on the site, migrate away. Here, for example, is how to import your project from GitHub to GitLab.

Then it’s time to delete.

Log in, then enter the following address: https://github.com/settings/admin

Follow these steps:

They then send out an E-mail:

Subject: [GitHub] Account deletion

This email is to confirm that you’ve deleted your account ‘schestowitz’ from GitHub. Your repositories and content have been deleted from the system. If you were on a paid plan, you will not be billed again. We’re sorry to see you go. You can reply directly to this email if you have any questions or feedback, we’d love to hear from you.

Tell others to do the same thing. I will soon urge my wife (when she wakes up) to do the same. Only fools (not her) believe lies like “Microsoft loves Linux”.

am an early adopter of Detexian, a service which I increasingly rely on for security. My wife and I run a small media entity which attracts about 5 million hits a week. The sites are TuxMachines.org and TechRights.org. One of the sites is modest and non-confrontational, whereas the other one (the latter) is more controversial because it is critical of activities such as bribery, illegal surveillance, and all sorts of corruption. There are certainly people and organisations that are willing to spy on and undermine the site. Some of those who get criticised are large technology companies and institutions they work with.

We cannot keep up with logs because we are a small team and we cannot properly analyse these for security threats. It is just infeasible. For analysis of logs we also require a service which is isolated from surveillance-intensive hosts such as Amazon. We moreover operate on a very small budget as the sites are public services rather than for-profit.

We now rely on Detexian to inspect the traffic and generate concise reports. Detexian helps to avert disaster or alert about troubling patterns in activity before disaster strikes or flaws are found/exploited. TuxMachines.org and TechRights.org are not young sites. They have been around for nearly a decade and a half; over the years we have suffered more DDOS attacks than we can remember and there were also intrusion attempts (none were successful). Some attacks managed to cause damage, but it was always repairable. Recently, Detexian alerted us about SQL injection attempts and made recommendations.

We shall continue to rely on Detexian in the foreseeable future and are happy to pay for the service knowing that someone “has got our back” and is providing informed advice on how to guard the sites.

A toxic mix

T is no secret that I have supported Barrett Brown for a number of years. What I underestimated, however, was his temper and willingness to turn against his own supporters. Money from oligarchs does appear to change people.