XACTLY one week ago, on Wednesday morning, I sent the papers associated with the lawsuit I’m lodging against the Serial Strangler from Microsoft. Afterwards I went to Superdrug and spent 30 minutes examining the prices of non-edible goods, seeing that packaging got smaller, prices are much higher, and services barely exists anymore.

At the Post Office, there are still human workers, but they’re nowhere near as friendly or useful as decades ago. They act like they do you a favour by actually serving you (which they must). They’re basically a private business now (the tasks got offloaded to local shops) and postage costs have grown about 5-fold in 20 years. What justifies those price increases? The cost of fuel? The sour face of staff?

The world is getting ruder, more expensive, and there’s a moral obligation (I think) to do something about it.

Official numbers (US debt):

N case it’s not obvious, this blog will soon exceed 3,000 posts (after 22 years) because I want to keep personal opinions out of other sites, where authorship should focus on technical matters.

Back in 2004 I was a Ph.D. student and blogging as a term was barely known to anybody. I remember the first time I read that term, seeing the “blog” of someone from Cambridge around 2003, maybe earlier (maybe even 2002).

Seeing what a pile of crap the Web has become (slop, clickbait[*], and TikTok), I am compelled to get back to blogging.

____

[*] From IRC moments ago:

<admfubar> https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/aug/11/canadian-airline-cancels-flight-after-child-refuses-to-wear-seatbelt
28-29TechrightsBot-tr/#techrights28- 0606www.theguardian.com | Canadian airline cancels flight after child refuses to wear seatbelt | Airline industry | The Guardian
<schestowitz[TR2]> probably dramatising something
<schestowitz[TR2]> as it is hard to believe
<schestowitz[TR2]> “The child was standing in their chair as the 6 August Porter Airlines flight taxied towards the runway, the airline said. Repeated attempts by an accompanying parent and crew to secure the child in their seat failed, so the crew elected to return to the terminal and have the two passengers disembark as “the aircraft could not take off in this unsafe condition”, it added.”
<schestowitz[TR2]> cancels flight
<schestowitz[TR2]> for who?
<schestowitz[TR2]> “were able to depart on a flight the following day”
<schestowitz[TR2]> big delay
<schestowitz[TR2]> not cancelled
<schestowitz[TR2]> misleading headline
<schestowitz[TR2]> clickbait
<schestowitz[TR2]> one grumpy kid -> fly delay -> international news?

have now been informed by three Tor users (that’s 3 out of 3) that this domain cannot be accessed by Tor users, with failure occurring at DNS level (cannot even reach the server). The webhost claims Tor is not blocked, so there seems to be no room for resolution or compromise here.

Are we mis-communicating the issue?

While disappointing, and I fail to think of a workaround, I’ll probably have to just leave it at that.

T seems safe to say that very hot weather will impact us today, culminating in about 34 degrees tomorrow (we plan to go to the park again). Will new records be set and old ones broken? Probably. We saw that in May.

This is global warming and climate breakdown. In some parts of China they’ll have a third of the total seasonal (or annual) rain in just one day. It looks like rainfall has been misallocated somewhat.

AM old enough to remember Mars bars being a lot bigger (there’s some online debate about shrinkflation in relation to candy bars this week), chicken not being injected with water (to artificially increase the weight), and drinks – not limited to milk – being sold in glass bottles that could be reused, recycled etc. (Some plastic can be recycled, but glass is vastly easier to recycle).

People’s diets will continue to worsen as long as nutritious meals aren’t a priority. Rather, it’s all about maximising profits by lowering costs.

A lot of the same can be said about the effect on people’s mental health.

Instead of tackling root causes they try to sedate those impacted with “antidepressants”. That too has become a giant for-profit industry, set aside the opioids.

T will soon be part 150 in the series about SLAPPs. I have so many stories to tell that I estimate it’ll take many years to tell them along with all the accompanying evidence, proper debunking etc.

Why do this? To raise public awareness. There needs to be frank and open public discourse about the SLAPP industry. These are some of the biggest enemies of British democracy and they work in the shadows. They use threats and extortion in an attempt to secure their secrecy.

We need to discourage secrecy about these matters.