wrote something yesterday and it is something that seems to have attracted attention. My point was, sometimes the court says “you won”, but in reality it’s a bit like poker face (crossposted for emphasis with another title). Sometimes the judge knows upfront no money will be paid, as it simply cannot be paid, but then follows the procedures to set the records right for the court, not for parties. That’s just how the system works.

There’s an anecdote here. Someone cited my article (also from yesterday) that said “life expectancy of a new car is now 7 years”.

He said that “about 20 years ago, a dealer tried to cheat my dad out of a particular lifetime guarantee. He, fortunately, had all the receipts even through they tried to prevent him from that by attempting to “forget” to give him the receipts several times, forcing him to stay and press the issue. However, having all the receipts, there was no way out for the dealer which even tried to buy the car from him, with increasing offers. The dealer eventually took the matter to court. Technically they lost, and had to honor the lifetime guarantee. But in reality it became a major victory for them because the court decided that the lifetime of a car is 7 years from then on. Setting the definition of lifetime of a car at 7 years, established a throwaway culture for the vehicles and rewarded negligence by the dealers…”

So what sort of outcome is this? As an aside, regarding “modern” cars (that physically cannot long): “Proprietary firmware and other forms of technological obsolescence will only worsen that. Proprietary diagnostic APIs being among the worst. Once the last of the independent mechanics are gone, watch out!”

The planet has processes, but not all human processes lead to all parties – if any – being happy. Sometimes only the lawyers win (fees, bills).

ne week ago I wrote about Evri going really rogue, run by bots, and getting very basic things very wrong.

I tried hard to find contact details, I then opened a ticket about it, confirmed to be opened (by receipt).

Now, after a week, not a single person has acted on it.

They have just sent another automated nag to my wife on her birthday.

Yes, their bots bother her on her birthday and nobody there even deals with the ticket!

This is an insensitive and dysfunctional company with no person to speak to.

Avoid.

adopted Gemini Protocol 6 years ago, a year after it was conceived. It has since then worked OK and several of our team nowadays manage capsules. The community has grown and people who read Geminispace have joined IRC (which is also nowadays managed by several of us; it is a neat little project of ours).

Last week Techrights served 305,682 Gemini requests – that’s more than the usual – and I began thinking about having a Gemini capsule for this blog as well. This is still something I’m seriously considering as a project.

At the end it’ll probably boil down to how often I update this blog. I could host the capsule from home on a Raspberry Pi 4.

oday I became aware of a site that goes a long way back and is run by a person I know and follow. It’s “a new age website I started in the late nineties that at one time had about 10,000 articles,” she told me. Along the side, in the sidebar, it says “Now on FOSS Force” (so the connection is not hard to see).

It’s good to see how she separated political writings or personal opinions from her coverage of FOSS.

This past weekend:

he northern part of America (Canada, US and the rest) is really keen on GNU/Linux, maybe for cultural and language reasons.

See above how GNU/Linux usage has grown there, set aside ChromeOS and Android, which also use Linux.

T seems like a perfect day to be out. A cool day with such a sunny start (we come back in the later afternoon anyway) is a good start for a special birthday.

I’ve been productive offline lately. The “nest” is OK and our health is good, we even sleep more than in prior years and we managed to cook more. It’s healthier to have fresh food and it saves money.

After today we’ll have some special anniversary every month, even two next month.

Next year I plan to publish many lengthy series, so focus is necessary. No hurry though.

HREE years ago we kickbanned a number of connected individuals from Techrights IRC because illegal things had been done. 2 years later a judge at the UK High Court acknowledged that bad things had been done; the issue was, there was a burden of proof put on us to show evidence of attribution and Tor was used by the perpetrators (several of them in the mix).

Just because you do not have a Code of Conduct (CoC) does not mean you must tolerate every online vandal in your network.

Freedom of speech does not imply a freedom to vandalise without consequences.